Punk rock and art don’t always go hand-in-hand, but Niagara’s past as singer for Destroy All Monsters helped mold her into one of today’s top Lowbrow artists. Ditching the mic for a brush, this queen of Detroit rock is taking over the pop art world. Life In A Bungalo got the rare opportunity to chat with Niagara as she was gearing up for a June show at The Orbit Gallery Space in Edgewater, NJ.

The Music
A relic of the early Detroit punk rock scene, Niagara worshipped The Stooges as gods. She moved to Ann Harbor with her boyfriend while attending the University of Michigan. The move was more to be closer to her punk rock hero Iggy Pop, who called the town home. Soon after arriving, Niagara met up with local artist Mike Kelley who came up to her on a bus because she looked like a “freaky Warhol-type weirdo.”

Were you a freaky Warhol-like weirdo?

“I guess so,” Niagara ponders. “We were really into Warhol—How could you not be?”
Kelley hooked up with Niagara and her boyfriend at the time Cary Loren to make random super-8 movies and eventually formed the band Destroy All Monsters with Jim Shaw. “My boyfriend was a guitarist, but the rest of us weren’t musicians at all,” Niagara says. “We put together this fantastic shitty noise band, which was the beginning of noise music.”

Later incarnations of the group featured Stooges member Ron Asheton and Mike Davis of MC5 fame on bass. With Niagara’s cutesy yet ballsy vocals, Destroy All Monsters tore up the local scene for almost a decade before teetering apart as members strayed in and out of other bands.

“We accomplished pretty much starving and working ourselves to death, and not making money, but after a while you have to take a break and regroup,” Niagara says of the band’s break-up.

Though the group never pressed a proper album during their tenure, Sonic Youth singer Thurston Moore released a three-CD set years later, proclaiming Destroy All Monsters to be the first noise rock group.

While Niagara was rocking and rolling, her art career was limited to designing album covers and posters for local shows. “There weren’t even any galleries that would understand what I was doing,” Niagara says. So she did the next best thing—Niagara took her art to the rock clubs, painting murals anywhere she could find a blank wall. From there, her style of powerful cartoon-ish women took shape, and the murals moved to canvas, but the high flatulent art scene still didn’t take notice. “Galleries were all upper-crust,” Niagara explains. “There were no galleries except in the very rich neighborhoods where people wouldn’t even talk to you let alone look at your work.”

Like Warhol before her, Niagara started putting up her paintings in the window displays of local shops in Detroit’s hipster suburb of Royal Oak. “To everyone’s surprise, the paintings started selling out of the windows,” Niagara says. “It was like a show without the opening. For the first month, I made more money then my whole career in music.”

A pre-arranged meeting with “Outsider Art” luminary Robert Williams (she wormed her way into driving him from the airport to a gallery opening) led to a strong friendship and a feature article in Juxtapoz magazine, boosting the artist’s name to the national level. “Juxtapoz has been such a great supporter, and they’ve just helped so many people have careers,” Niagara says. “I was just at their anniversary party and there were so many artists there. All these artists are like Robert’s bastard children.”

The Art
“This year has been a busy year for me. Someone must have written my number on a bathroom wall somewhere, because everyone is calling.”

Indeed, Niagara just flew back from San Francisco after celebrating Juxtapoz Magazine’s 10th anniversary with fellow lowbrow denizens like Shag and Mark Ryden. She just finished a show at the Shooting Gallery and has a regular spot at the C-Pop gallery in Detroit.

Niagara’s art is easily comparable to Roy Liechtenstein’s; both artists paint a single panel of a comic strip—A piece of art that seems so simple in nature, yet captures so much energy in one frame. Unlike Liechtenstein, Niagara focuses her work on the portrayal of the powerful woman. Her characters are usually tough, sexy ladies who are either kicking ass or just looking cool. The lines are sleek, never dripping or running; they look like they were created with a pen and paper, not acrylic on canvas.

“While I was painting murals, I was saving these comic book squares that I thought were funny,” Niagara says. “Ronnie told me to try going with them, because I loved the style. My paintings were of a woman that looked nothing like they did in the comics. She’s snotty, or drugged out.”

Niagara’s latest work stays true to her traditional empowered woman design, but adds collage and layering of colors in the backdrop. “My paintings use to be the figure in front of one solid color, but now I’m doing a lot more clear colors and sheer layers all mashed together,” she says. “You would still recognize it as my work, but the color backgrounds have changed.”

While her name is almost synonymous with the ’70s Detroit punk scene, Niagara’s artwork has caught fire nationwide in the last few years. Thanks to mainstream popularity of other lowbrow pop artists like Gary Baseman and joSH AGle, Niagara has latched onto this new wave of disposable art. “I’ve been doing art a lot longer than some of these newer guys on the block,” Niagara explains. “I’ve been around the longest, but I think I fit in—I’m the first woman of Juxtapoz.”

“But I know that women in the art world aren’t really looked upon in the same way as men,” Niagara says about being one of the few women in the lowbrow scene. “If Mark Ryden was a woman, I don’t think he would be where he is at all.”

That said, Niagara claims her paintings are not meant to be a banner for “down with men.” Instead she says her work is there to raise the spirits of people living in a downtrodden world. “People work these long hours at these horrible jobs, and I would hope that if they had something like one of my prints or paintings to look at as they go out the door, they wouldn’t take any shit where they shouldn’t have to. It’s not a sexist thing at all.”

Do you feel your fans are getting that point? Do you think the masses “get” your work?

“I think they always got it, it just seems that all across the board people get such a kick out of my paintings and it is shocking that I could hit on something that so many people can relate to,” Niagara explains. “I always hated the art shows where everyone was very quiet and everyone thinks it’s serious and religious. People that come to my shows are drinking and laughing, because the paintings make you laugh. Everyone reads the thought balloons out loud. No matter where in the country I have a show, it’s always the same response—It’s more like a rock show.”