UBC Public Humanities Hub and VAG: Art as Indigenous Pedagogy

Join the UBC Public Humanities Hub (PHH) and Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) on January 30th, 2025 for “Art as Indigenous Pedagogy”, featuring artist and filmmaker Shelley Niro and Indigenous Art Education expert and UBC faculty member, Dr. Shannon Leddy. This program coincides with the exhibition, Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch, the first major retrospective of Shelley Niro’s work (on view at the VAG until February 17th, 2025).  

Dr. Shannon Leddy will guide participants through an interactive process that engages with Shelley Niro’s artwork. This will be followed by an artist talk by Shelley Niro on her body of work exploring themes from her four-decade career, including, Matriarchy, Past is Present, Actors and Family Relations. 

This exciting event is free. Registration is required to hold your seat. Refreshments will be provided. 

Bios:

Shelley Niro is a member of the Turtle Clan of the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) Nation, from the Six Nations of the Grand River territory. Her visual art and film works have been featured across Canada and internationally. In 2009, her first feature film, Kissed by Lightning, premiered at Toronto’s imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and won the Santa Fe Film Festival’s 2009 Milagro Award for Best Indigenous Film. Her short film The Shirt was presented at the 2003 Venice Biennale and the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Films include: Honey Moccasin, It Starts with a Whisper, The Incredible 25th Year of Mitzi Bearclaw and Café Daughter. In 2019, Niro received an honorary doctorate from the Ontario College of Art and Design, where she completed her undergraduate studies; she was also the 2019 Laureate of the Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award for Photography. In 2017, Niro received both the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the Scotiabank Photography Award, two preeminent contemporary art awards in Canada. In 2017, Niro also received the Hnatyshyn Foundation REVEAL Indigenous Artist Award, and the Arts and Culture Award from the Dreamcatcher Charitable Foundation. She was the inaugural recipient of the Aboriginal Arts Award presented through the Ontario Arts Council in 2012. She completed her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Western Ontario.

Dr. Shannon Leddy (Métis) is Associate Professor, Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy, University of British Columbia. She is a Vancouver based teacher and writer whose practice focuses on decolonizing education and Indigenous education within teacher education. She holds degrees in Art History and Anthropology from the University of Saskatchewan (1994), an MA in Art History (1997), and a BEd (2005) from the University of British Columbia. Her PhD research at Simon Fraser University focused on inviting pre-service teachers into dialogue with contemporary Indigenous art as a mechanism of decolonizing education and in order to help them become adept at delivering Indigenous education without reproducing colonial stereotypes. She is the Co-Chair of the Institute for Environmental Learning, and a Research Fellow with the Institute for Public Education/BC. Her book, Teaching Where You Are: Weaving Indigenous and Slow Principles and Pedagogies, written with Dr. Lorrie Miller, is now available from the University of Toronto Press. She is also a mother and a Nehiyaw/Cree language learner as well as a Danish language learner.

This event is taking place at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is situated on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəyəm (Musqueam), Sḵwxwú7mesh (Squamish)and səlilwətaɬ(Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.