Niagara (artist)
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Niagara (born August 24, 1956) is a musician and a painter. She was the lead vocalist of the punk rock band Destroy All Monsters and Dark Carnival.
Some of the musicians who made music with Niagara and Destroy All Monsters:
- Mike Kelley
- Cary Loren
- Jim Shaw
- Ron Asheton -- from Iggy and the Stooges
- Mike Davis --- from the MC5
[edit] Biography
Sonic Youth singer Thurston Moore released a three compact disc compilation of DAM's music, although Destroy All Monsters never recorded an actual album. The band is often described as the first Noise Rock band.
While attending the University of Michigan for art, Niagara met Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw and Cary Loren,and they formed the seminal art/noise band, Destroy All Monsters, named after the Japanese film starring Godzilla and a host of other Toho studio creatures. DAM would assemble all manner of media into a post-pop goulash of wild and sometimes "difficult" music, film and art. As Kelley and Shaw went on to continue the rigors of academia, Niagara continued DAM with Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton and was soon a focal point of the New Wave punk scene in the late 70's and early 80's. It was during this time when Niagara utilized her art school experience in creating album and promotional art for DAM's performances. Combining an illustrator's hand with some collage and pop iconography, Niagara's style began to take shape, and by the early 90's she was beginning to show in small exhibits and cafes around the Detroit area.
It was during this time that Niagara teamed up with the Detroit gallery CPop in 1996. Her first exhibits "All Men Are Cremated Equal" (1996) and "Faster Niagara, Kill...Kill" (1997) were breakout shows which garnered her regional praise . Soon art periodicals such as Juxtapoz were heralding her as "The Queen Of Detroit" and many successful exhibits would follow in other cities like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Sydney and Tokyo to name but a few. "The Niagara Girl," who appears in many female guises, would come to represent feminist swagger with drop dead gorgeous looks and an equally dangerous demeanor. Hard-boiled, tough talking gals who would rather dispatch a man than put up with any of his guff. Her bold and colorful post-pulp comic strip countenances of femme fatales in various depictions of malfeasence was culturally soldified by Callie Khoury's Thelma and Louise, which shares a kindred spirit with Niagara's subjects, along with the bad side of 40's and 50's film icons such as Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall and Jane Greer.
In 2002, Niagara's work began to stray away from the gun-toting, booze swilling Femme fatale to a more intricate "Opium Series". Still decidedly feminine, but the violence was turned inward, as world-weary, flapper-esque beauties are depicted in druggy repose amidst swirling opium fumes, full of Chinese patterns and applique make the series her most detailed and introspective work to date.
In 2006, a career retrospective of her art and music was chronicled in her coffee table tome "Beyond The Pale" (9mm Books).
Niagara currently lives and works in the Detroit area.
- Hill, Christina (11/23/2005). "Falling for Niagara". Detroit Metro Times [1]
- Niagara; Giarla, Justin, Ed. (2005) Niagara: Beyond the Pale. Cotati: 9mm Books. ISBN 0-9766325-8-6.
