Joyce Wieland’s Beating Heart in a Revelatory Retrospective in Montreal

In 1960, the Canadian artist Joyce Wieland painted War Memories, inspired by her year-long study of Joan Miró. War Memories takes the Battle of Monte Cassino—a World War II Allied attack in which her brother fought—as its subject. In the tumultuous image, Wieland clearly references Miró through overlapping shapes and highly saturated colors, metabolizing his influence into something chaotic and cryptic. She had studied Miró because she loved his work, but there was one other inspiration behind her research. As she would recall in an interview later in life, she had made a “conscious decision to be influenced by someone other than the milieu that I was associated with, [most of whom] were men.”

Joyce Wieland Forged Her Own Path

In other words, Wieland refused to live in her peers’ shadows, decisively forging her own path. She sought her own artistic lineage, even as she participated in contemporary conversations. She moved to New York, when it was dominated by Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, and Jasper Johns, then she relocated to Toronto. She did not want to be known as an artist’s wife, even when she married the director, Michael Snow. She balked at becoming a mascot for women artists, even as she embraced an increasingly feminist approach to modern art. Yet the historiography has betrayed Wieland—her name remains unfamiliar outside her home country.  

In Canada, Wieland has been consistently and widely hailed as one of the most significant artists of her time. It is appropriate, then, that a collaboration between Canadian institutions is repositioning Wieland as a critical figure of 20th-century art more broadly. “Joyce Wieland: Heart On (à cœur battant),” co-organized by the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario, showcases her radical output, finally placing Wieland on an international stage. Co-curated by Anne Grace and Georgiana Uhlyarik, “Heart On” provides a comprehensive view of Wieland’s drawings, paintings, collages, films, and textiles, from her forty-year career.

Joyce Wieland’s “Heart On” at Montréal Museum of Fine Arts

“Heart On” (and yes, there is a pun in there) foregrounds Wieland’s own voice as it evolved over time. Her earliest works—mostly drawings—focus on her own image. One of the opening works in the exhibition is a self-portrait from 1958, in which her general shape emerges from swathes of color and expressive brushstrokes. Her likeness is set against a dynamic grey and blue background that slightly resembles a mirror—are we looking at Wieland looking at herself? For a self-portrait, she reveals very little, allowing the formal qualities of the paint to act as a cipher for who she is.

As Wieland moved away from the self-portrait, she still embraced life’s ephemera, visualizing what mattered to her. In the 1960s, following her devoted study of Miró, Wieland went digging through the history books for female role models, seeking to find a “female line” to help her claim her own place in art history.

Her 1961 collage, Laura Secord Saves Upper Canada, reflects on the Canadian heroine, about whom Wieland had learned when she was a child. As the story goes, Laura Secord trekked 20 miles to warn British soldiers of an American attack during the war of 1812, thereby enabling a British victory. Wieland’s work in part hails Secord and, in part, contemplates how a child puzzles out history, learning who to look up to. The canvas assembles a paper airplane, a tiny Union Jack, chalkboard drawings, and a swirl of green and orange, as if we were seeing the battle from above the earth’s atmosphere. As Wieland reflected, “It’s a whole theme about being taught in those years when I was in grade four and five and six hearing about this.”

In her 1960s and 70s works, Wieland took a playful approach to the language of modernism. In particular, Wieland played with the grid (famously employed by figures like Piet Mondrian and Agnes Martin). During the 1960s, Wieland, who also directed films, produced several works depicting sinking boats. Ocean liners, sailboats, tugboats all bob and gradually plumet over several frames. The frames evoke a film’s storyboard, as Wieland uses the grid to reflect on duration, narration, and the different media in which she worked.

Even as Wieland grappled with darker themes, she maintained a sense of humor, never becoming overly serious or esoteric. In Cooling Room I and Cooling Room II, she transposed her interest in film onto mounted boxes that she had collected from a neighborhood cheese shop. In Cooling Room II, the shelves have been filled with three-dimensional vignettes: a fallen toy plane, a heart hanging on a clothesline, a plastic boat, a sugar cube, and a series of coffee cups.

From left to right, the coffee cups acquire more pink lipstick imprints, while depleting in coffee volume. The coffee cups capture time’s passage, a day spent fueled by caffeine, heading towards eventual expiration. But the used coffee cups also pile up as dirty dishes, asking to be cleaned. Cooling Room II is a feminist memento mori grounded in the materials that make up reality.

“I wasn’t going to check my sense of humor, my idea of color, at the door for a bunch of people who lived by theory alone,”

—Joyce Wieland

What makes Wieland’s modernism so unique is the way she asks what theory can do for her, what it can do for the viewer. Or, as she put it: “I wasn’t going to check my sense of humor, my idea of color, at the door for a bunch of people who lived by theory alone.” For Wieland, woman could not live on theory alone; she needed coffee.

Joyce Wieland’s Beloved Textile Works

Wieland’s best known, most beloved works come a bit later, from her experimentations with textiles. As Anne Grace explains in the catalogue, Wieland moved towards quilting based on an aesthetic impulse and out of care. Her sister, Joan Stewart, was looking for work, and Wieland asked to collaborate, to support her sister—and explore a medium that had yet to be accepted by the art world.

Wieland’s large-scale textiles were a canvas to tackle her concerns around the environment, social justice, and national identity, becoming some of her most overtly political statements. Many were destined for public spaces: a mural-sized quilt featuring caribou was installed in a Toronto subway station. Another enormous wall hanging, Defend the Earth (Défendez la terre) was commissioned by the Department of Public Works to display in the National Science Library in Ottawa.

“I think one can have all the thrill of doing art as well as embedding the political thing in it—inside it.”

—Joyce Wieland

More so than her earlier works, the textiles foreground softness, pastels, and natural motifs, often using pillowy appliqués that highlight use value and the process of sewing. Aesthetically, clouds of lavender-colored flowers may seem discordant to its destination in a science library—and that was the point.

“I have been very aware of the fact that there is Art and there is Politics, and I have been working on putting them together in aesthetic terms for years,” explained Wieland. “I think I am getting somewhere. I think one can have all the thrill of doing art as well as embedding the political thing in it—inside it.”

“Joyce Wieland: Heart On” is on view at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts Until May 4, 2025.