
Shelley Niro: ONGNIAAHRA/Niagara
At Boarding House Gallery
Tuesday – Friday, 12-5 pm
Shelley Niro’s exhibition at the Boarding House Gallery marks the beginning of the artist’s creative residency with the Art Gallery of Guelph and Musagetes Foundation in 2018. Emerging from Niro’s engagement with the AGG’s extensive collection of historic Haudenosaunee beadwork donated by William Reid, the installation features Niro’s 2015 video Niagara in dialogue with selections from the collection that are associated with Niagara Falls, a landscape that enticed some of the earliest European and American tourists with entertainment spectacles and souvenirs.
These finely crafted and detailed artworks were produced by women primarily for the souvenir trade. Many of these items were sold at Niagara Falls in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the beginning of a period when Indigenous cultural practices were banned in Canada under The Indian Act and systematically suppressed through the residential school system. Producing and selling souvenir beadwork was a means to support family and community while maintaining craft traditions. “These works,” according to Niro, “are about poverty.”
About the artist
Shelley Niro
Shelley Niro is a Brantford-based multi-disciplinary artist whose work focuses on Indigenous identity, history and rights imbued with a deeply feminist perspective and rich humour. Niro is a member of the Six Nations Reserve, Turtle Clan, Bay of Quinte Mohawk. Her work encompasses filmmaking, photography, painting, sculpture, beadwork, and new media. Shelley Niro: ONGNIAAHRA/Niagara is presented in conjunction with 150 Acts: Art, Activism, Impact.
View More Exhibitions

exhibition
May 22.2025 / August 29.2025
Call for Artists: Art Gallery of Guelph’s 2025 Summer Exhibition

exhibition
May 3.2025 / May 8.2025

exhibition
April 24.2025 / April 29.2025
Through photography, Bahar Enshaeian unravels the intricate layers of memory, identity, and belonging. Rooted in personal experience, her work speaks to the complexities of migration, displacement, and the search for home.

exhibition
April 10.2025 / April 15.2025
What utility can we find in vestiges of the past? This question shapes Hal Fortin’s interdisciplinary practice and its distinct sculptural language, punctuated by humour, dream logic, and the rhythms of domestic labour.

exhibition
April 2.2025 / April 6.2025
At the heart of Stephanie Fortin’s practice is an ethical inquiry: is it necessary—or responsible—to aestheticize waste in the context of global exploitation and climate change?

exhibition
Contemporary Indigenous Artists at AGG
January 16.2025 / May 4.2025

exhibition
September 12.2024 / January 5.2025
Eternal Transcendent highlights a selection of photographic works by Robert Flack that convey his reverence for the more-than-corporeal and a yearning for healing in light of the AIDS epidemic.

exhibition
September 12.2024 / May 4.2025
Juxtaposing Susan Mogul’s 1997 video with a collection of quillboxes, this exhibition unifies both forms of expression through themes of women’s identity, family, relationships, and the quest for home.