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Joyce Wieland (June 30, 1930 – June 27, 1998) was a groundbreaking artist and cultural activist who used diverse media to explore feminism and Canadian identity. Wieland found success as a Painting when she began her career in Toronto in the 1950s. In 1962, Wieland moved to New York City and expanded her career as an artist by including new materials and mixed media work. During that time, she also rose to prominence as an experimental filmmaker and soon, institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York were showing her films. In 1971, Wieland's True Patriot Love exhibition was the first solo exhibition by a living Canadian female artist at the National Gallery of Canada. In 1982, Wieland received the honour of an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 1987, she was awarded the Toronto Arts Foundation's Visual Arts Award. She was also a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
As a teenager, she attended Central Technical School, where she studied commercial art and graphic design. Wieland first enrolled in dress design and hoped it would help her land a job since she thought art would not be financially rewarding. However, at Central Tech, she met Doris McCarthy who taught at the school. McCarthy's artistic identity inspired Wieland to pursue her own.Sloan, Johanne. Joyce Wieland: Life & Work. Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2014. She saw potential in Wieland and convinced her to transfer into the art department.Nowell, Iris (2001). Joyce Wieland: A Life in Art, Toronto, ON: ECW Press, pp. 56-57
In the early 1950s, Wieland's interest in grew and she started attending the Toronto Film Society screenings where she was introduced to the works of filmmakers such as Maya Deren, who later influenced her own films.Nowell, Iris (2001). Joyce Wieland: A Life in Art. Toronto, ON: ECW Press, pg. 78. In 1953, Wieland joined Graphic Associates, an animation studio where she learned techniques she would later apply in her own films. "Joyce Wieland", The Collections at the National Gallery of Canada; retrieved April 12, 2013.
She had her first solo exhibition in 1960 at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto, making her the only woman that the prestigious gallery represented and earning her greater recognition for her work. "Joyce Wieland", Celebrating Women's Achievements. Library and Archives Canada; retrieved April 12, 2013. She moved to New York in 1962 and throughout the decade produced most of her experimental films. One of these films is Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968), which presents animals as its main characters. The film is a metaphor for revolution and escape, where cats are the oppressors and the gerbils are the oppressed. The gerbils represent political prisoners in the United States who make their way to freedom in Canada. Rat Life and Diet in North America is an example of how Wieland's concern with political issues, nationalism, symbols, and myths was represented aesthetically through her works.Holmes-Moss, Kristy A. 2006. Negotiating the nation: "expanding" the work of joyce wieland. Canadian Journal of Film Studies XV (2): 20.
Wieland's self-identification as a Feminism in an era of second wave of feminism also manifested itself through aesthetic means and played an important part in her career as an artist.Holmes-Moss, Kristy A. 2006. Negotiating the nation: "expanding" the work of joyce wieland. Canadian Journal of Film Studies XV (2): 21. However, her visual-art practice's popularity remained confined within Canada.
Wieland returned to Toronto in 1971. She said she could not make art anymore in America due to its ideological orientation. Her 1976 film, The Far Shore, had had "devastating appraisals and dismal box office receipts". Following this, her next project—a dramatization of Margaret Laurence's iconic 1974 novel The Diviners — did not get off the ground. In 1987 a retrospective of her work at the Art Gallery of Ontario presented a critical overview of both her visual art practice and her experimental films.
Internationally, Wieland is best known as an experimental feminist filmmaker. Her works introduced physical manipulation of the filmstrip that inscribed an explicitly female craft tradition into her films while also playing with the facticity of photographed images. Wieland's output was small but received considerable attention in comparison to other female avant-garde filmmakers of her time. In the 1980s, Wieland focused again on painting, though her representation of the natural environment became less identifiably Canadian and her themes simply ones of nature, love and life.
After she moved back to Toronto in 1971, Wieland maintained a studio practice there until her death on June 27, 1998, from Alzheimer's disease, aged 67. Her funeral was held at St. George by the Grange Anglican Church in Toronto on July 8, 1998. Her ashes are interred in the wall of the church's memorial garden.
She was the aunt of filmmaker and video artist Su Rynard.Jay Stone, "Director brings her vision to town". Ottawa Citizen, March 10000, 2000.
| 1956 | Tea in the Garden |
| 1958 | A Salt in the Park |
| 1963 | Larry's Recent Behaviour |
| 1964 | Patriotism |
| 1964 | Patriotism, Part II |
| 1965 | Water Sark |
| 1965 | Barbara's Blindness (co-directed with Betty Ferguson) |
| 1964-66 | Peggy's Blue Skylight |
| 1967-68 | Handtinting |
| 1967-68 | 1933 |
| 1967-68 | Sailboat |
| 1968 | Rat Life and Diet in North America |
| 1969 | Dripping Water (co-directed with Michael Snow) |
| 1969 | Cat Food |
| 1969 | Reason Over Passion |
| 1972 | Pierre Vallières |
| 1973 | Solidarity |
| 1976 | The Far Shore |
| 1984 | A and B in Ontario (co-directed with Hollis Frampton) |
| 1972-86 | Birds at Sunrise |
Clintberg's response, sewn in collaboration with the Wind and Waves Artisans' Guild, turns Wieland's work on its head, formally and literally as each piece of the quilt is stitched "wrong"-side up exposing its soft-coloured underbelly. Moreover in the figurative sense, his re-imagining renewed the need for passion instead of reason that Margaret pleaded in her rage. Unlike Wieland's quilts, which hung on the wall, Clintberg's quilts are placed on a random bed each night at the Fogo Island Inn.
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