Joyce Wieland: Artist on Fire

Kathy E. Zimon is a fine arts librarian (emerita) at the University of
Calgary. She is the author of Alberta Society of Artists: The First 70
Years and co-editor of Art Documentation Bulletin of the Art Libraries
Society of North America.

Jane Lind has published profiles of Mary Pratt and Gathie Falk, but in
this substantial biography of Joyce Wieland she has attempted a portrait
of her most complex subject to date. Born in 1930, Wieland was the
pre-eminent woman artist of her generation, whose major work coincided
with an exciting period in Canada’s history: the celebration of the
nation’s centennial in 1967 and the election of Pierre Trudeau as
Liberal leader and prime minister. Her 1971 exhibition, “True Patriot
Love,” was the first devoted to a living Canadian woman artist at the
National Gallery of Canada, and its centrepiece—the quilt, “Reason
Over Passion”—embodied the political and artistic contradictions of
the time. Wieland’s work encompassed nationalism, history, ecology,
and sexuality from a woman’s perspective, in alternative media like
film and traditional women’s materials and techniques like quilting,
and in the process pioneered trends and styles that others would explore
for years to come.

In this densely detailed examination of Wieland’s life, the author
has relied on archival documents at York University, as well as numerous
interviews with Wieland’s relatives and friends; others in the Toronto
art world; her ex-husband and artist Michael Snow; and with Wieland
herself, before her memory was affected by the Alzheimer’s disease
that claimed her in 1998. The result is an intimate portrait of an
artist whose personality was shaped by early poverty and the death of
her parents, resulting in a lifelong need for love, family, and
approval. Lind suggests that in spite of Wieland’s intelligence,
talent, and success, her happiness, and even self-esteem, was largely
dependent on her relationship with husband Michael Snow. When that long
and troubled marriage failed, she was devastated, although by then she
was a celebrated icon for women artists in Canada.

The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs and 50 works
reproduced in color. It is a carefully documented study that helps us to
understand Wieland’s personality and art, as well as the artistic
concerns of the turbulent decades that her major works reflect.