Joyce Wieland (1930-1998), Time Machine Series, 1961, oil on canvas, 65/25. Art Gallery of Ontario, gift from the McLean Foundation, 1966. © National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo AGO
Joyce Wieland (1930-1998), Time Machine Series, 1961, oil on canvas, 65/25. Art Gallery of Ontario, gift from the McLean Foundation, 1966. © National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo AGO
Joyce Wieland
The year 2025 will begin with a celebration of the radical art-making of one of the most influential Canadian artists of her time, Joyce Wieland (1930-1998).
Encompassing the full arc of her over 30-year career, this ambitious exhibition will present Wieland’s art in a chronological narrative. It will highlight themes of major importance to the artist – feminism, social justice, politics, ecology – as they emerged in her practice and were woven into her films, assemblages, textiles, prints and later paintings and drawings.
Born and raised in Toronto, Joyce Wieland was one of Canada’s most prominent and prolific 20th-century artists. By 1960, Wieland was represented by the celebrated Isaacs Gallery (Toronto), with whom she continued to exhibit until the late 1980s. Beginning in 1962, she spent a decade in New York City where she became an active member of the burgeoning experimental film scene. New York heightened the artist’s ecological, political and feminist consciousness.
Her practice expanded to textile works, film and plastic assemblages in 1966 and 1967, challenging the notion that art functions apart from politics and daily life. Wieland began making her signature quilts, collaborating with crafts women from across Canada, as a celebration of their artistic heritage.
She was the first living woman artist to have a retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario. In the 1980s, her films were shown in the United States, Japan and throughout Europe. In the early 1990s, Wieland was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and died in Toronto in 1998. Her work has been collected by MoMA, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Canada, among other institutions.
Michel Thomas Henry Lambeth, Joyce Wieland in Her Studio, Toronto, 1962, gelatin silver print, 33.7 x 25.5 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, gift of Av Isaacs, Toronto, 1994, 94/445. © Estate of Michel Lambeth
Credits and curatorial team
An exhibition organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
The exhibition is curated by Anne Grace, Curator of Modern Art, MMFA, and Georgiana Uhlyarik, Fredrik S. Eaton Curator of Canadian Art, Art Gallery of Ontario.
