Joyce Wieland: I Love Canada ~ J'Aime Le Canada

 Joyce Wieland :  I Love Canada ~ J'Aime Le Canada

Joyce Wieland  (1930-1998) is considered to be one of Canada's most prominent and prolific artists. 

The youngest of three children, she was born in Toronto, Canada to English emigrants who died when Joyce was quite young.  Brought up by her siblings, she attended high school at Central Tech in Toronto and was mentored by artist Doris McCarthy, who taught there.  She began her work career in film animation and met artist Michael Snow, marrying him when she was 26.  In 1960, (age 30) and then again in 1962, she had solo shows in two separate Toronto commercial galleries.  1962 is also the year that she and Michael moved to New York and lived there for nine years.  While in the USA, she became more aware of politics and of her deep love for  her home country, Canada.  When Pierre Elliot Trudeau became prime minister in 1968, she celebrated that by giving him a bed sized quilt, inspired by his mantra, Reason Over Passion.  Read more information about this two part piece that mixes the personal and the political at this link.   Wieland and Snow moved back to Canada in 1971 in time for her to mount her solo exhibition, "True Patriot Love" at the National Gallery of Canada. The exhibition included quilts and paintings, most about the fragile arctic and expressing a deep love for Canada.  Joyce's older sister Joan Stewart along with friends and volunteers joined with Joyce to sew the quilts she designed for this ground-breaking exhibition.  

I Love Canada ~ J'Aime Le Canada    cloth, thread, batting, metal.  Joan Stewart did the quilting and the embroidery.        1970   collection of Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada. 

"Wieland believed that Canada had to extricate itself from US encroachment.  Subverting the myth of a peaceful, tolerant, caring, and just Canada, the small embroidered letters in the middle read:  "Death to U.S. Technological Imperialism" in both official languages.   Wieland's progressive vision of Canadian society saw anglophones and francophones reconciled.  she declared in a 1971 New York Times article "I'm a Canadian.  I believe in Canada.  We should work for Canadian unity - English and French - as Canadians, not as anti-Americans.  We should be more positive about ourselves."

Joyce Wieland is being honoured by a full career retrospective in 2025.  It showed in Montreal in the first half of the year and in Toronto at the art gallery of Ontario in the second half.  There is a catalogue available entitled Heart On.  

Number 4 of Canadian Artists Who Work With Textiles  

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 🇨🇦 ❤️”

Joyce Wieland

Balling  1961  oil on canvas by Joyce Wieland

I visited the National Gallery of Canada a few weeks ago.  I looked around for my favourite artist, Joyce Wieland and found four of her pieces in a quiet area and photographed them for this post.  The National Gallery of Canada has a large collection of Wieland's work in their permanent collection.  (listed here).  In 1987 Wieland had a retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario and art critic Geoffrey James covered it for Maclean's magazine.  His article as well as Johanne Sloan's most excellent online book about Joyce Wieland are sources for this post.    

Joyce Wieland was born in 1930 in Toronto.  Her parents died before Joyce turned 9.  She went to Toronto Central Technical school to study dress making, but the art teacher, Doris McCarthy, encouraged her to switch to art.  Wieland became a commercial artist for four years and designed packaging and animated films.  In 1956, age 26, she met and married artist Michael Snow.  The couple went to New York in in the early 60's and returned home in 1971.  The painting at the top of this post is from that time in her life, when New York was bursting with abstract expressionism.  Balling is one of Wieland's  Time Machine series of paintings.  Joyce called them 'sex poetry'.  A significant painting from this time is Heart On,  which you can view in this link.  

Joyce Wieland used a wide variety of media.  Film.  Quilts.  Paintings.  Assemblage.  She was what we would call now, a multi-disciplinary artist.  Geoffrey James wrote:  "Hers is not a body of work that offers a clear progression of a single, recognizable style.  Instead, the viewer is confronted by what appears to be sudden, impulsive leaps."

Spring Blues  1960 oil, paper collage, mirror on canvas by Joyce Wieland

Wieland experimented with media.  Spring Blues is an example of how she broke away from the dominant New York art style.  The mirrors are there because she wanted to include the viewer's reflection.  She would be pleased by how the National Gallery is protecting this fragile piece with a plexiglass frame which clearly shows my reflection looking and photographing this bright painting, now a bit damaged from age.  For a better view of this painting, have a look at this article from the Globe and Mail - you will need to scroll down to find Joyce's piece.  

spring blues detail

While many of her art works had to do with male-female relationships, Wieland is also known for art that communicates a great love for Canada.  In 1971, at the age of 41, she was given a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada entitled True Patriot Love, the first ever living female artist to have such a thing, a truly remarkable achievement.  In her National Gallery exhibition, she showcased the work of women who embroidered, knitted,  and made quilts.  A celebration of sisterhood and domestic art a few years before Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (1974-79).  A photo of a rarely seen  set of knitted flags from this exhibition is here.   The best thing about the True Patriot Love exhibition for me is the catalogue for it, a government publication on Arctic Flora that Wieland altered with photos and sketches.  With this simple subversive act, she highlighted another overlooked domestic art, The Scrapbook.

Confed Spread 1967  plastic and cloth by Joyce Wieland

In 1967, when Wieland still lived in New York she made many pieces about her love for Canada.  Confed Spread, shown above, was first shown in Canada at Expo 67 to celebrate Canada's 100th birthday. 

Cooling Room II  1964  metal toy airplane, cloth, metal wire, plastic boat, paper collage, ceramic cups with lipstick spoon, mounted in painted wooden case by Joyce Wieland 

Also from the 60's are the many boxed and plastic wrapped assemblages, one of which was on display in Ottawa.  They seem like film strips and tell stories.  Planes plummet, sailboats sink, and elements of disaster, travel, love, and time passing are the plot.  Joanne Sloan has written about these and also Joyce's quilts here.  

If you google Joyce Wieland now,  Joyce Wieland Canadian Filmmaker comes up first, because film making was a primary medium for her.  Her work in film culminated in the full length feature film, The Far Shore in 1976, a love story loosely inspired by one of Canada's star artists, Tom Thomson.  The MacLean's article implies that this film, a five year project, took a toll on Wieland and she almost stopped making films, and turned to painting and drawing with coloured pencil in the 80's.  Then in 1990, Wieland was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. 

Cooling Room  II detail by Joyce Wieland.  This sculpture is named for the words printed on the box that Wieland used to make the assemblage.  

When she died at the age of 68 in 1998, women artists across Canada mourned her.

Two biographies came out 3 years later in 2001.  Jane Lind's Joyce Wieland:  Artist on Fire and Iris Nowell's Joyce Wieland:  A Life in Art.

I've written about Joyce Wieland on modernist aesthetic.  I'm a fan.  Her name comes up in eleven different posts on this blog.   Here's one from 2009.   

The National Gallery in Ottawa,  Ontario,  Canada is a beautiful place to visit for humans of all ages.  It has the feeling of a grand, clean, cool palace of culture.  (My companion here is 18 months)  

The Mother The Child and Joyce Wieland

In 1988 I was part of a group exhibition in Thunder Bay Ontario at the Definitely Superior Gallery that was entitled See Jane Sew Strontium.  The gallery had invited Joyce Wieland to attend the opening and give an artist talk and also a workshop the following day.  

I lived in Kenora at the time (6 hours by winter highway from Thunder Bay) and after a lot of deliberation, decided that I couldn't justify leaving my young family to attend the events.  I can't remember the exact reason, it may have been weather.

My friend Barbara Sprague was also included in this exhibition, and she was making the trip from Kenora to Thunder Bay and I asked her to deliver a letter to Joyce Wieland for me.   The other day, I came across the draft of my letter in a 1988 journal and that prompted me to find the artwork from that exhibition and re-photograph it for this blog post. The title of the piece is The Mother The Child.  

Dear Ms Wieland

First of all, let me say that I feel very connected to you through your work.  I saw your quilt, Reason Over Passion, at the National Gallery and it made such an impression.  I remember standing in front of it in awe.  Your femaleness comes through and it is such a rich, womanly, femaleness.  There is so much about being a woman that I can feel in your work, be it quilt or painting.  And you have a wonderful wit.

Anyway, I'm very sorry that I cannot attend the workshop and meet you.  I had planned ot attending until last week.  There are a lot of reasons I guess, but the main ones are distance, winter, and the fact that I have four children, two of whom are under three years.  I know I'm not the only woman who has very little actual control of how her life is spent.   I would like to have seen the exhibition.  I've only seen Barbara's quilt.  I'd really like to know your reaction to my piece.  Please, if you do have any time that you could spare, I would very much appreciate a written note.

I've used some photos that my father took and developed.  They are of my brother, my sister and me.  There are several of me at age 15.  There are also photos of the farm where I grew up in Northwestern Ontario.  I feel that our childhood and childhood landscape are remain within us always.  I think that these things are our inner core, the 'batting' layer inside us.  The painted tree symbolizes both growth and woman's connection to nature while the self-portrait is the 'outer self''  that I present to the world today, that of the good mother.  The baby is looking outward, the mother in this drawing is hiding behind her child.  

Anyway, with this letter I feel that I've made some sort of contact with you.  I'm just sorry it's not in person.  I'll see you next time.  Sincerely, Judy Martin

Joyce Wieland answered me and I've saved the letter....but I can't remember where.  I think I should find it and frame it.  Joyce Wieland  1930 - 1998

intimate cloth

 I have come to drag you out of yourself and take you in my heart.

For a while now, I've been wanting to embroider love poems onto old wool blankets.
Love poems that also reference dreaming, or stars, or the sky.
This week, I started.

In the mornings, first thing, I go on my stationary bike.
The bike is in my studio, and gives me an opportunity to look at my pin wall.
I can prop a book on the bike too and these days I am reading about Joyce Wieland.
Joyce is one of my heroines and influences.
She made no division between paintings, quilts and films and firmly believed that the domestic and the intimate deserved a place in art.

I have come to drag you out of yourself and take you in my heart.
I have come to bring out the beauty you never knew you had and lift you like a prayer to the sky.
Rumi