Like many a late, great artist, Joyce Wieland is more appreciated now — and better understood — than when she was alive. During her heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, the Toronto artist largely hovered around the fringes of the male-dominated art world. The men often didn’t “get” her. She was not part of the club.
But her art persisted. Nowadays, 26 years after her death, she is treated as a trailblazing icon who opened the door for women artists to be accepted in the art world on their own terms.
The story is told in the excellent new book, Joyce Wieland: Heart On, available in both English and French. The two main authors are Anne Grace of Montreal and Georgiana Uhlyarik of Toronto, who also curated a travelling retrospective of Wieland’s work. In both the book and exhibition, we follow the artist in great detail from her early abstract paintings to her more political work involving quilts, films, wall hangings and then the return to painting in her latter years. We learn how and why she made art.
Wieland deliberately created “art” from quilts and embroidery. Art, she reasoned, did not just have to be men’s oil paintings and sculptures. Wieland wanted to elevate traditional women’s crafts into art — art worthy enough to be included in her 1971 exhibition True Patriot Love at the National Gallery of Canada. This was the first solo show by a living woman artist at the gallery. The exhibition was organized by Pierre Théberge, a young curator at the time who compared Wieland to Vincent Van Gogh and was one of the few men at the top of the art world back then who saw Wieland as a true artist, rather than a novelty act.
Wieland loved to mix politics, patriotism and humour. Thus, she decorated some of her art with representations of penises. This was her way of telling the male art pooh-bahs that she knew how to invade their territory. And invade she did.
So, read the book and, if possible, visit the exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until May 4 and at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from June 21, 2025 to Jan. 4, 2026. ■
OTHER ART BOOK REVIEWS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED
- Bookmark: Memorable Murals
- Bookmark: Outsider Art of Canada
- Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné
- Bookmark: New Book about Bertram Brooker
- Bookmark: All the Beauty in the World
- The Role of Textiles in Relation to Art
- The Quest for the Meaning of Art
- Quick Pick - J.E.H. MacDonald: Up Close
- Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision
- The Role of Textiles in Relation to Art
- Surreal Spaces: The Art and Life of Leonora Carrington
- Early Days: Indigenous Art from the McMichael
- Bianca Bosker: The Quest for the Meaning of Art
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