In Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch, beading becomes a form of empowerment
Over a wide array of media, Vancouver Art Gallery’s expansive survey defies stereotypes as it explores matriarchy, displacement, and memory
Shelley Niro’s My Stone Cold Heart Needs a Bed Too, 2018, stones, beadwork on velvet, courtesy of the artist. Photo by Robert McNair
Shelley Niro’s Weapon, 2021, oil on canvas, courtesy of the artist. Photo by Robert McNair
Vancouver Art Gallery presents Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch to February 17, 2025
BEADING POPS UP throughout Shelley Niro’s impressive new retrospective, 500 Year Itch, at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
In the multimedia sculpture 1779, white beads cascade down from the tops of two glitzy blue high-heeled boots, gathering in swirls over video of the Niagara Falls rapids—a statement on the forgotten Indigenous displacement on the site, and the kitschy showgirl it’s become.
In Time Travels through Us, delicate beadwork frames an inkjet print of Niro’s mother and daughters, paying tribute to Haudenosaunee matriarchal relationships, but also to shared handiwork traditions.
And it trims the series of Thinking Caps, intricately sewn aviator hats that pay tribute to the stages of women in Haudenosaunee life—each lined up in front of a framed photo-text piece, images of beadwork emblazoned with words in Kanyen’kéha and English.
As co-curator David Penney, formerly of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, put it on a tour of the show, one of the main themes of this exhibit is “women’s work passing through generations”—and it’s only recently that beadwork has been fully given its due as “art” in a gallery setting.
“I try to include as much craft as I can in my work. And it’s not just ‘whimsy’ or ‘craft’,” the artist explains matter-of-factly. Instead, in Niro’s hands, the tradition becomes contemporary and rife with meaning and empowerment.
There is, of course, much more than beadwork to 500 Year Itch. Walking past large-scale paintings, multimedia sculptures, fabric installations, films, photo art, and big wood-cut prints, one is struck by not only the prolific output of the Brantford, Ontario-based artist, but her aptitude in such a wide range of disciplines.
Curated by Penney with Melissa Bennett, Art Gallery of Hamilton’s senior curator of contemporary art, and independent curator Greg Hill, formerly Audain senior curator of Indigenous art at the National Gallery of Canada, the exhibition spans about 40 years and 70 works in total. Throughout, there are images of girls and women, and the handiwork that has been passed between them, always emphasizing female empowerment. Often, Niro features herself or her friends and family, giving the show an intimate, personal feel. And watch for references throughout to Sky Woman, a matriarchal figure in the Kanyen’kehà:ka creation story.
Stylistically varied, intricate, and deeply layered in meaning and memory, this fascinating exhibition is also full of humour—sometimes biting, other times playful. Take the show’s title, a reference to the antagonistic relationship between colonizers and Indigenous peoples since first contact. It borrows from Niro’s comedic 1992 silver-gelatin-print self-portrait 500 Year Itch, in which she parodies the classic movie The Seven Year Itch’s famous scene of Marilyn Monroe’s skirt being blown up over a subway grate: the grinning artist is wearing glasses and a cartoonishly fake blonde wig, her white halter dress flouncing over an everyday house fan.
Shelley Niro’s 500 Year Itch, 1992, gelatin silver print heightened with applied colour, mounted on Masonite, National Gallery of Canada. Gift of Victoria Henry
Shelley Niro’s The Rebel, 1987/2022, hand-tinted gelatin silver print. Photo courtesy of the artist
Elsewhere, in The Shirt, amid a sequential series of photographs of an Indigenous woman, she wears a white tee with “My ancestors were annihalated [sic] exterminated murdered and massacred” across the front in black letters, and then another that reads “And all’s I get is this shirt”. In The Rebel, Niro’s mother, Chiquita, reclines, faux-beauty-queen-like, on the trunk of the dirt-road-dusted titular car.
“I asked my mom for a photograph and she jumped on the back of a car,” Niro relates in a tour through the exhibit at the VAG. “It was just one of those magical moments. My mom passed away 20 years ago and I think she’d be really happy that her photograph was seen by the world.”
Richard Hill, the VAG’s Smith Jarislowsky senior curator of Canadian art, describes what Niro does as a “paradigm shift in contemporary Indigenous art”.
“I had experienced a good deal of humour in Indigenous communities, but I hadn’t seen an artist treat identity as a space of riotous and inventive role-playing like Shelley did,” he states. “It was liberating, opening a space for a rich, complex, and often hilarious view of contemporary Indigenous experience. Any stereotype that got in her way was not so much overthrown as deftly pierced by laughter and left to deflate under the weight of its own absurdity.”
Possibly new to Vancouver gallery-goers who are more acquainted with Coastal artists, Niro was born near Niagara Falls, hails from the Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, and is a member of the Turtle Clan, Bay of Quinte Mohawk. The septuagenarian has shown extensively—including at the Venice Biennale—and she won a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2017. And yet we are still getting to know her eclectic practice here, with 500 Year Itch marking an instant, engrossing introduction.
This survey has already shown at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Art Gallery of Hamilton near her hometown, and the National Gallery of Canada, travelling to the Remai Modern after it closes here next February.
Shelley Niro’s 1779, 2017, mixed-media sculpture with video, velvet, beads, stiletto heels, Art Gallery of Hamilton. Gift of the Women’s Art Association of Hamilton. Photo by Joseph Hartman
Though women often take the foreground in Niro’s imagery, so does nature. Her landscapes are haunted by the displacement of her ancestors, the Kanyen’kehá:ka, or Mohawk, from the Mohawk River after America’s Revolutionary War. Gaze at her stunning, wall-covering oil-painting triptych The Grand Behind Glenhyrst, and you’ll see a brilliant-turquoise view of Southern Ontario’s Grand River, through stylized foliage, where Joseph Brant led the Six Nations Iroquois from newly formed America to Canada. But this image, bursting with life and emotion, is an act of reclamation. The half a million acres of land along the Grand River, once promised to Niro’s ancestors, is today reduced to the 4,500-odd acres of the Six Nations reserve.
“I still like to walk along the Grand River and feel a sense of possessiveness,” Niro says at the VAG. “It’s important to remember little pieces of history that aren’t necessarily written down.”
And so as playful as much of Niro’s work is here, you always have the sense of an acute historical and political savvy. Even the show’s jaunty, delicate beadwork that pops up so frequently throughout often has a serious edge. Look no further than Weapon, an oil painting in which a woman’s hand hoists a beading needle in front of a dark background that features the haunting faces of missing and murdered Indigenous women. It’s a powerful image, asserting women’s cultural traditions as a force for change.
But it’s also important to note that 500 Year Itch is full of love—love for sisters, aunties, and mothers; love for ancestors and stories; and love for the natural world. Hearts are an ongoing motif: in My Stone Cold Heart Needs a Bed Too, a little heart-shaped rock sits upon a lovingly beaded red-velvet oval.
Why? “It was mostly done for enjoyment,” the artist says with a smile. “I wanted to create a platform for the rock to be seen.”
For all of its complexity and strength, sometimes Niro’s work just comes straight and simply from the heart. 
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