Joyce Wieland. Young Woman's Blues, 1964. Wood, paint, found objects, plastic, 53.3 x 30.5 x 22.2 cm. The University of Lethbridge Art Collections; purchased with funds provided by Canada © National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

PAST

EXHIBITION

Joyce Wieland: Heart On

June 21, 2025 - January 4, 2026

EXHIBITION OVERVIEW

Radical. Playful. Iconic. During the 60s, 70s and 80s, Joyce Wieland’s humorous and biting artistry helped give shape to this country’s changing ideas about gender, nationhood and ecology. An artist of great influence, whose work included textiles, collage, print, drawing and film, her legacy lives in the works of subsequent generations.

In this ambitious retrospective, the first since 1987, more than five decades of artistic output come together to highlight the breadth and originality of her practice and to position her as a key figure in 20th century art and film. In addition to situating Wieland’s work in its artistic, social and political context, the exhibition will highlight the many ways she anticipated current debates about feminism, social equity and ecology.

The exhibition is curated by Georgiana Uhlyarik, Fredrik S. Eaton Curator of Canadian Art, AGO and Anne Grace, Curator of Modern Art, MMFA.

Joyce Wieland: Heart On is organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born and raised in Toronto, Joyce Wieland (1930–1998) was one of Canada’s most prominent and prolific twentieth-century artists. Her career in the arts started in the mid-1950s at Graphic Films in Toronto. She spent the late 1950s and early 1960s drawing and painting, and was increasingly included in exhibitions across the country. By 1960, Wieland was represented by The Isaacs Gallery, with whom she continued to exhibit until the late 1980s. Beginning in 1962, she spent a decade in New York City, making assemblages, quilts and experimental films while continuing to show her work. In her filmmaking, Wieland explored a wide array of cinematic modes of expression, from short political films to a full-length feature and documentaries.

Her 1971 exhibition True Patriot Love Véritable amour patriotique was the first by a living woman artist ever held at the National Gallery of Canada. This groundbreaking presentation explored Canadian identity, the North and included a number of textile works, thereby inserting women’s traditional culture and craft into the previously male-dominated realms of the National Gallery and the contemporary artworld. The early 1980s signaled Wieland’s return to figurative drawing and painting. In 1987, the AGO organized her major retrospective, the first such exhibition to be dedicated to a living woman artist in the institution’s history. In addition to creating art in multiple disciplines, Wieland also engaged in social activism, voicing her feminist concerns in a deeply personal and compelling manner. She used humour as a powerful tool of critique, embedding disruptive and unexpected elements and imagery into her work. Throughout her forty-year career, she fiercely defied gender discrimination with a practice that expressed feminist concerns, breaking down boundaries for subsequent artists. Through her work, she also engaged boldly with Canadian politics, environmentalism, American imperialism and Arctic sovereignty.

JIGS AND REELS: THE FILMS OF JOYCE WIELAND

Explore the films of Joyce Wieland in Jigs and Reels: The Complete Films of Joyce Wieland, screening October through November 2025 at Innis Town Hall and the TIFF Lightbox

After moving to New York in 1962, Joyce Wieland was introduced to a coterie of underground filmmakers. Her earliest films were performance-based films, but with 1965’s Water Sark, she had a breakthrough, turning the camera on her body and her domestic setting.

The films that followed proved that Wieland was not tethered to a single style or approach. Sailboat (1967) shares traits with other filmmakers who some critics identified as “structural filmmakers,” but there is also a lyrical quality to Wieland’s approach. Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968), while showing Wieland’s humour, is also a tragic take on the American corporatization of Canada.

Wieland’s cinematic pièce de résistance, La raison avant la passion/Reason over Passion (1969), is a reflection on then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s ideology—which Wieland saw as similar to American technocratic thinking, and in opposition to her own. Her following three films were even more explicitly political, including The Far Shore (1976), a feature narrative film loosely based on the life of Tom Thomson.

This series is curated by Jim Shedden, Curator, Special Projects & Director, Publishing, AGO, and Georgiana Uhlyarik, Fredrik S. Eaton Curator of Canadian Art, AGO.

Co-presented by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), TIFF Cinematheque, and AD HOC.

SCHEDULE

All films in 16mm unless otherwise noted

The Camera and the Body: Early short films (1963-1967) • Oct 20, 7 pm • Innis Town Hall
Varieties of Film Form (1967-1969) • Oct 22, 6:30 pm • TIFF Bell Lightbox
Camaraderie • Oct 29, 6:30 pm • TIFF Bell Lightbox
Reason Over Passion • Nov 5, 6:30 pm • TIFF Bell Lightbox
Artist on Fire • Nov 10, 7 pm • Innis Town Hall
The Far Shore • Nov 19, 6:30 pm • TIFF Bell Lightbox

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ARTWORKS FROM THE EXHIBITION

Joyce Wieland, Artist on Fire, 1983. Oil on canvas, 107.2 x 130 cm. Collection of The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Purchase, 1984 © National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.