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)  

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 🇨🇦 ❤️”

I Love Canada

I Love Canada -- J'Aime Canada 1970, quilted cloth assemblage by Joyce Wieland, collection of Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina

The newest Canadian Art magazine has an article by Sara Angel about True Patriot Love, the landmark show that opened in 1971 at the National Gallery of Canada. Reason Over Passion 1968, Joyce Wieland, quilted Cloth assemblage, collection of the National Gallery of Canada

Joyce Wieland threw a cocktail party for Pierre Trudeau in 1968, just before he ran for the Liberal Party leadership. She gave him the above quilt with his motto, "reason over passion" made from stuffed fabric. So feminine, so feminist.
So missionary position. The Water Quilt 1970-71 Embroidered cloth and printed cloth assemblage by Joyce Wieland, collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario

One of the pieces in that exhibition was The Water Quilt, made from 64 cushions, each with an embroidered arctic flower. detail of The Water Quilt

When the embroidery was lifted, one could read the text from The Energy Poker Game by James Laxer, a book that outlined the danger of selling Canada's water and other natural resources. installation of True Patriot Love in 1971, National Gallery of Ontario. That gallery's first solo exhibition of a living female artist.

She organized a 100 piece marching band for the opening that played "the maple leaf forever: in the lobby of the gallery. Joyce Wieland in 1964. Filmmaker, quilt maker, painter, ecologist, passionate lover of Canada. She died too young at age 66. (1932-1998).

I've written more about Joyce Wieland, an art heroine for us all, in the modernist aesthetic blog. Click here.

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  

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

The Water Quilt by Joyce Wieland 1970-1971

 fabric, thread, grommets, rope and book pages

Joyce Wieland worked with her sister, Joan Stewert, and some others to make this powerful piece when she was 40 years old.  The delicacy of the hand embroidered cloth draws poignant attention to the vulnerability of Canada's arctic environment and protests the idea that the government might sell Canadian water.

 Each square is hand embroidered with an arctic flower.

 Under the hand stitched fabric, startling excerpts from James Laxer's The Energy Poker Game (1970) outline a scheme by an American corporation to seize control of northern waterways in Canada.

"I felt a sense of responsibility. .. It infuriated me to think that someone outside could be drawing up plans for stuff like that"  Joyce Wieland

above:  Wieland 2006 made by Brian Jungen (born 1970) from red leather gloves.
The title refers to Joyce Wieland, who was passionate about Canada, and was activelly engaged with Pierre Trudeau's nation-building project in the 1980's.  Brian Jungen is a first nations artist and the gallery wall text states "while feminism and sexual rights formed an important part of the discussion in the 70's and 80's, indigenous rights were not addressed" and that is why this maple leaf is upside down.

I have long admired The Water Quilt and was thrilled to see it during my visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario last weekend.  Joyce Wieland did love Canada and is one of our art heroines.  I've written about her before on this blog, collected here and on modernist aesthetic blog here.  

Joyce Wieland

In my November 29 post, I complained that it was near to impossible to find any images of Canadian artists in art history books. This coment was in reference to Linda Nochlin's famous question "Why have there been no great women artists?" Let it be known that there are Canadian artists, and one of the great ones is Joyce Wieland. Joyce was one of three jurors for an Ontario Craft exhibition I entered in the early 90's with Redbook (pictured). Joyce Wieland (1931-1998)continues to inspire me because the subject matter and choice of media in her artwork celebrates being female. Very importantly, Joyce Wieland made quilts that hang in the national gallery of Canada.

Joyce Wieland

O Canada animation by Joyce Wieland (1970)
71 embroidered lips sing Canada's national anthem

The problem is to go into oneself. Go to the darkest parts and the brightest parts and find out what you like and want, and validate that. It's not just a question of art and finding out who you are and making this wonderful thing happen out of yourself, but it's the responsibility to society and caring about other people. A lot of people think art is to be separate, but art is to embrace others - whether to convey something difficult or to talk about light. Work that comes from the spirit, journeys into the spirit are what we need now. Spirit has always been in art. Joyce Wieland

Joyce Wieland remains one of my very favourite artists, there's more about her on my modernist aesthetic blog.

Interview question

Mary Cassatt, Breakfast in Bed

World of Threads question: Are there any specific historic artists that have influenced your work? Please explain.

Judy Martin answer: I have been fascinated with art all my life and am humbled by my ongoing studies. I got my first fine art degree in the early 90's and was influenced at that time by the work of feminist artist Miriam Schapiro and by the ideas of Judy Chicago.

It's hard for me to say if one or two specific artists influenced my work. I have been inspired by so many artists and types of artwork. I like very early Greek statues, I also like Giotto's simple figures from pre renaissance Italy. I like the humanness of Velasquez's faces and the passion of Goya's narratives. I like Picasso, the flaunting of his masculinity and the immensity of his vision, I like Matisse, such simplicity in his lines and shapes, I like Van Gogh, the energy and inner passion in his wonderful brush strokes. I like how DuChamp made us notice the mysterious in the every-day and how David Hockney realized time passing with photography. Whoops, those were all men I just mentioned. But that was the art history I studied. Joyce Wieland, Reason over Passion

My work is influenced by Joyce Wieland's use of feminine imagery and domestic technique, Louise Bourgeois's grand idea that art is therapy, Emily Carr's connection with the spirit of nature and Mary Pratt and Mary Cassatt, who painted women, children and the domestic.


I also love Mark Rothko and Paul Klee, those guys who painted empty contemplative space and who attempted to make visible the invisible.


Agnes Martin's committment to solitude and work and Frida Kahlo's confrontational look at her own life story through painting. Those ideas inform my work.

Recent Australian acrylic painting is very inspirational right now. The empty spaces, the human gesture of line and shape. Wow.


Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison
Indian embroidered tunic

I am in awe of those anonymous early quilt makers who were able to really see their surroundings and create beautiful and meaningful repeated patterns. I have respect and admiration for early Amish quilt makers, as their placement of colour is fantastic. For a long time I have admired the earthy minimalism in Dorothy Caldwell's resist dyed work. She remains a huge inspiration as does the passion of quilt artist Nancy Crow.

World textiles knock me over. African, Indian, Japanese cloth. Embroidery, dye methods, meaning.

MAKING OTHERWISE / FOLK LORE AND OTHER PANICS

passion over reason  by Mark Clintberg and members of Winds and Waves guild , Fogo Island Newfoundland

I have chosen a quilt made with wrong side out fabrics to begin this post about Folk Lore and Other Panics, a 12-artist exhibition curated by Mireille Eagan that was up at The Rooms in St. John's Newfoundand until April 26 2015.

The quilt flips the text from Reason over Passion , the quilt that beloved Canadian artist Joyce Wieland made for prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau in 1968.  We learn from the wall label that artist Mark Clintberg designed this quilt because he is interested in women's intervention in politics and had ten similar quilts made by the Wind and Waves artisan group of Fogo Island Newfoundland.

Clintberg is one in a growing trend of young Canadian artists who are employing traditional craft, folk art, and commonplace materials to help us understand our panic-ridden contemporary world.

I like that the sixteen women's names from the Wind and Waves collective are listed on the wall label.  I like that the ten quilts in this edition are placed randomly on beds in the Fogo Island Inn.  I like that the story of the Wieland/Trudeau gift is held up for contemplation.  I like that artists as cool as Mark Clintberg are speaking the language of the quilt.

1970 stomped globe  by Kay Burns  2003 and ongoing

These interesting circular shapes are also from the Folk Lore and Other Panics exhibition.  The text on the wall label reveals that the artist, Kay Burns, impersonated Iris Taylor, the fictional founder of the Flat Earth Society and that these discs are the results of stomping on globes, an initiation act that new members do in order to express their common sense.

Like so much conceptual art, it helps to read about the intent of the artist, and then something goes bong in the mind and new insight (and laughing out loud) happens.

Two interesting and more comprehensive reviews of Folklore and other Panics are here and also here.

Road Trip  2012  by Janet Morton knitted wool man's outfit, video approximately  60 minutes

In Cambridge Ontario's Idea Exchange gallery, there is a second exhibition, Making Otherwise that features two videos about knitting.  In the first, Robert Kingsbury unravels an odd suit knitted by Janet Morton. Entitled Road Trip, the sixty minute video explores the dimension of time, and Morton connects ephemeral with repetitive, walking with thinking, and real time with embedded time for the viewer.

That suit took at least a month for Morton to knit but Kingsbury easily unravels it into a single ball in an hour as he walks through the outskirts of a town - past gas stations, alongside ditches, rhythmically lifting his legs to undo her labour,  not losing a step.  (Video was recorded by Nick Montgomery).

The second video, Shiny Heart, reminds us that while making things by hand is a slow and meditative quiet act for the maker, the result can be seen (and heard in this case) by others in mere minutes. Janet Morton's use of time based art forms such as music and video in combination with her slow textile production confounds us.  All the time that is spent making.  It's invisible.

 

The tuba that Colin Couch performs Bach's Goldberg variation #25 is muffled with knitted yarn over the 13 minutes that it takes to play it, beginning at the mouth piece and going around and around each and every tube large and small while he determinately makes his music.  It makes us think about all the time he spent learning and practicing the difficult piece.  It's invisible.

Janet Morton spent weeks covering the tuba with knitting, a complicated and fiddly thing to do and then in 13 minutes, it was undone.  The video of the undoing was shot by Morton's collaborator, Robert Kingsbury, and then played in reverse so that the instrument is magically covered up.  What is mind boggling is that the sound of the Bach variation is unaffected by the reverse video.  The hours spent by Andrew McPherson editing and fiddling with the video and sound looks effortless, but it's not.  It's invisible.
This Canadian Art review gives more information and a photo of the silent tuba.  Click  here.

The final artist I will mention is Sarah Maloney from Nova Scotia who uses embroidery and sculpture to address art history and women's  place in society.

A mother of three, the non toxic and portable art of embroidery allowed her to maintain her art practice (MFA Windsor) while raising the girls.   She also made the heavy oak frames for her large pieces herself as well as a fainting sofa with bronze tulips that is also part of the installation but not shown here.

The beauty of the curves and patterns are compelling.  There is intensity in this careful art.  The botanically correct and much enlarged couples of fertile tulips are bursting with life.

Making and otherwise: Craft and Material fluency in Contemporary Art includes six Canadian artists and was curated by Heather Anderson and organized by Carlton University Art Gallery.  It will be in Cambridge until June 27 2015.