Joyce Wieland: Pucker Up

There is a special exhibition at the national gallery of Canada this month about Joyce Wieland’s lipstick prints.  

Joyce Wieland (1930 - 1998) lived in New York between 1962 and 1971.  Living in the States heightened her awareness of her own Canadian identity and she became inspired her to create artwork about her love for Canada.  She said that she thought of Canada as female.  

Wieland made a series of lipstick (lip-synch) prints between 1970 and 1974  

One of her most famous is her lipstick print of Canada’s national anthem, Oh Canada.  

O Canada by Joyce Wieland, lipstick lithography on paper 1970

Wieland made the print in 1970 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in the new lithography workshop.  She substituted lipstick for the oil-based ink and mouthed the words to the national anthem of Canada directly onto the printing stone.  

Photos of the 40 year old artist making the O Canada print are part of the current exhibition.  

Also on display in glass cases are her working drawings.  

Joyce Wieland then created an embroidery of red lips and white teeth singing O Canada.  I wrote about it in 2008 on modernist aesthetic.  here 

She continued this series with an animated film of her embroidered lips and our national anthem.  

Image of Joyce Wieland with her embroidered O Canada
lip-synch animation (York university digital library) 

Read more about Joyce and this original work at the  Art Canada Institute.

Also on display this month at the National Gallery of Canada is the lithograph The Arctic Belongs To Itself  made in 1973. 

It is activist art, made to create awareness in the viewer of resource exploitation and indigenous rights.  Joyce Wieland used a wide variety of media including quilts and film, before the time when such a multi disciplinary practice was common.  

The Arctic Belongs to Itself
lithograph, silkscreen and etching on wove paper by Joyce Wieland, 1973 

Wieland was also ahead of her time in recognizing indigenous sovereignty.  

Fifty years after these prints were made, the president of the large and powerful country next door to Canada, the United States, is casually saying  that Canada should be the 51st state.  Our country’s most important art institution has put together this feminist’s work about national pride at this time in history and I am proud and pleased to share it here. 

To quote Joyce Wieland, “I LOVE CANADA 🇨🇦 ❤️”