Joyce WielandLife & Work

In the 1950s Canadian artists’ creation of an iconography celebrating the nation’s history was lagging behind. With True Patriot Love, the first retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada dedicated to a living Canadian female artist, Joyce Wieland (1930–1998) set out to correct this situation with a new vision of the country’s symbolism that combined the environment, women’s issues, and art. “I think of Canada as female,” Wieland told the press before the exhibition’s opening. In his book A Survey (1970), artist Michael Snow described his then-wife as a “filmmaker, collagist, painter, and pioneer lay ecologist.”

Joyce Wieland: Life & Work documents one of Canada’s pivotal and most internationally renowned artists of the 1960s and 1970s. By 1971 her canvases could be found in museums across Canada and her pioneering experimental films were included in such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, the Royal Belgium Film Archives, and the Austrian Film Archives. This book traces her career, which began as a painter but expanded to incorporate a range of media and materials, including sculpture, textile-based art, and experimental film.