An extraordinary retrospective of her career is a study in humour, generosity and the power of female-led societies.
The Tyee: It’s a bit of an unusual experience to laugh out loud in the hushed environs of an art gallery. But 500 Year Itch, the retrospective of artist Shelley Niro’s work at the Vancouver Art Gallery, is filled with puckish humour, pointed irony and good belly laughs.
Strengthening its global presence, the event empowers local designers, artisans and youth.
Niro’s work contends with 500 years of colonization and its attendant ravages. Humour might seem an unlikely tool in such a situation, but it is surprisingly effective.
Born in Niagara Falls, New York, Niro grew up on the Six Nations territory (close to what’s known as Brantford, Ontario). A member of the Turtle Clan of the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) Nation, she works in a wide variety of disciplines including painting, photography, film, performance and sculpture.
In keeping with the breadth of her creative output, 500 Year Itch is expansive. During the introduction to the show, the co-curators explained the process of choosing from over 400 of the artist’s works. This alone is something of a mammoth undertaking, and the result is a show that spans more than four decades of Niro’s career with wit, intelligence and crackling amounts of beauty.
After a stint at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York, the show toured to the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the National Art Gallery before its current incarnation at the Vancouver Art Gallery. If you plan to partake of the VAG’s exhibition, give yourself plenty of time: there’s a lot to take in, including a number of Niro’s short films.
In the more than 70 works in the show, elements of craft like beadwork take as much space and importance as more conventional modes of making art, such as oil painting. Organized thematically by the artist’s areas of interest, sections entitled “Matriarchy,” “Actors,” “Family Relations” and “Past Is Present” encompass the power of Indigenous women and girls, family relations, history, land and the very stuff of creation itself.
This might sound weighty. But Niro’s good humour finds its way into almost everything that she makes. This approach, while accessible, often lends a subversive edge that cuts close to the bone. Even as you’re laughing, something catches in your throat.
Stolen land
No work is more emblematic of Niro’s approach than The Shirt. In a series of large-scale images, the artist’s friend Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie stands against a generic background. There is nothing remarkable about the landscape, other than that it appears to be parcelled out into subdivisions.
The work was prompted by a plane trip that Niro took to Texas to attend a photography conference. Looking down at the countryside, gridded and divided into neat and tidy packets, Niro was struck by how the land was carved into easily commodified sections, the better to be bought and sold. The traditional territories of Indigenous people were almost entirely erased in this process.
In a visual riposte to this form of obliteration and erasure, The Shirt presents a series of images consisting of Tsinhnahjinnie standing alone. Dressed in a bandana patterned with the American flag, her eyes hidden by aviator sunglasses, she fixes the camera with a flat, unaffected stare. In each successive photograph, her pose changes little, but the words on her plain white T-shirt tell a different story.
In one image, the emblazoned text reads: “My ancestors were annihalated [sic], exterminated, murdered, and massacred.”
The full extent of the genocide perpetrated against Indigenous people is faithfully delineated in blocks of black text on the white background of a souvenir T-shirt, until that too is snatched from her back, leaving her half-naked, her arms folded across her breasts, an expression of startled surprise on her face.
The visual joke of getting your shirt stolen right off your back is readily apparent, but the crowning photo isn’t one of bitterness and aggrievement, but something quite different.
The final photograph features Tsinhnahjinnie’s wife Veronica Passalacqua grinning at the camera, one hand tucked saucily on her hip. A certain kind of defiant humour is at work. Or maybe more correctly, a form of flinty optimism, along the lines of “Never let the bastards get you down.”
It’s a sentiment that is foundational to the artist’s ancestry.
The memory of lost homeland
Initiated in 2017 at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the idea for 500 Year Itch as a touring exhibition was prompted in part by Niro’s installation 1779. The title was derived from the infamous date of the Sullivan Expedition, a particularly nasty moment in the American Revolution when the Indigenous people from what is now upstate New York (Mohawk Valley) were forced from their traditional territory.
The stated intent of the American forces under the command of George Washington was “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements.” With their villages burned and crops destroyed, the Haudenosaunee people fled north, finding a new home near Ontario’s Grand River. The memory of this lost homeland was handed down through the generations. Niro’s grandmother and her father talked about the beauty of the Mohawk Valley, the irony being that neither had actually lived there.
From historic horror, Niro fashions another way to see and understand the past.
In a self-portrait entitled Seeing with My Memory, the artist depicts herself along the Grand River, near Tutela Heights. It was a place that her father took the family when Niro was a child.
As a site of story, familial history and comfort, a warmth and deep affection is embedded in the landscape. This abiding connection is embodied in the smile on Niro’s face as she leans against a tree, the staggering beauty of the place blazing in its full glory just over her shoulder.
Iconic women
Niro often photographs her family members, including her aunties, sisters and herself. Her images offer gentle pokes at pop culture, from Marilyn Monroe’s iconic white dress, cheekily recreated by the artist to refer to the uneasy marriage between Indigenous people and colonizers, to a photo series that features Niro and her sisters donning red heels and sunglasses in Mohawks and Beehives (1991), having a riot posing for the camera.
It is Niro’s mother, June Chiquita Doxtater, who gives the show a kick in the pants in a work entitled The Rebel. Emblazoned on the exterior of the Vancouver Art Gallery, it is iconic in a few different ways.
As Niro explained, the genesis of the photo was her mother hopping onto the back of a muscle car (an AMC Rebel, to be exact) and stretching out in a pin-up pose.
It is not only a charming image, rippling with humour and generosity, but also an invitation into the relationship between mother and daughter, and, most critically, an upending of the narratives of suffering and horror that often mark the stories of Indigenous women. Fun, silliness, affection overflow.
A similar convergence of emotions occurs in a series featuring the artist’s sister Bunny. In large-scale photos, Bunny grapples with an existential crisis about the history of Indigenous people and the complexity of the world, all before emerging with a sense of buoyancy and determined optimism.
As Niro explained in the preview, the emotional movement contained in the series is akin to the tide: it comes in and then goes back out.
Skywoman and the beginnings of the world
The resiliency of women is foundational not only to the show but to the Haudenosaunee people. In this aspect, another narrative motif that figures large, extremely large, is the story of Skywoman. It is a creation myth from a decidedly matrilineal perspective.
In M: Stories of Women, Niro recreates the story of Skywoman and the creation of the world in a series of photo collages. The origins of the work, described by Niro in an earlier incarnation, situates the story of Skywoman as both mythic and contemporary.
The set-up is this: A young beautiful pregnant woman lives in the night sky constellation known as Pleiades…. Skywoman’s dying husband asks her to get him a drink of water from the forbidden Tree of Life. She doesn’t want to see him suffer anymore and makes the trip to the tree hoping it will heal him. As she arrives, a big gust of wind blows the tree over leaving a hole in the ground where it once stood. The wind knocks her into the hole making her try to grab the roots. In an attempt to grab onto something she grabs strawberry and tobacco plants instead. She begins her long lonely journey through darkness…. Our legacy starts in the skyworld. Through an act of accident, we are now inhabiting a world where we faced those everyday challenges and have found ways to thrive and survive.
Speaking for Ourselves
As a female-led society, Haudenosaunee culture takes its shape and form from this foundational story. The characters in the M series are played by Niro’s friends, family and the artist herself.
Niro’s then-pregnant daughter Naoga takes on the role of Skywoman, complete with stiletto heels and a swollen belly. More oblique references to this mythic female figure pop up in unexpected fashion in the form of aviator caps, and other images that recall flying and falling women.
The layers of personal and cultural history, embroidered and embellished with beadwork, quills, painting and collage, are so densely and lovingly assembled that you almost don’t want to pick them apart. So don’t.
Let the generous amounts of humour, intimacy and something even more profound, equanimity and peace with the universe, spill over you in waves of joy and beauty. Scratch that itch with extraordinary art.
‘Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch’ runs until Feb. 17, 2025, at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Dorothy Woodend, The Tyee
Dorothy Woodend is the culture editor for The Tyee.
Are you part of The Tyee’s critical 1%?
Thanks for reading this article from The Tyee. I hope it added something to your day. If we haven’t met yet, The Tyee is an independent, non-profit news outlet based in Vancouver, B.C. We’ve been around since 2003 and our team publishes original in-depth articles every single weekday.
You are able to access all of The Tyee’s articles — free of charge — because our non-profit newsroom is supported by thousands of supporters of independent journalism. We call them Tyee Builders, and they contribute an amount that works for them.
Why do we call them “Tyee Builders”? Because they literally help build The Tyee. As our reader contributions grow, we invest all of it back into more original journalism, and adding more talented researchers, writers and editors to our team.
Only about 1 per cent of people who regularly read The Tyee contribute financially, but amazingly, that’s enough to cover half of our total budget. Just 1 per cent of people chipping in means that the other 99 per cent get to enjoy open access to fact-based journalism published by a trusted, independent news organization.
Public interest journalism is vital for our democracy, but the sad truth is that newsrooms across Canada are struggling, and laying off more and more journalists each year. Support from our readers means that we can keep our newsroom staffed, resourced, and showing up every day with new original stories that you won’t read anywhere else. It also means that we are accountable to you first, not shareholders (we don’t have any) or corporate backers (we don’t have any of those, either).
— Jeanette Ageson, publisher