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Joyce Wieland fonds:
Finding Aid
Collection Summary |
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| Title: | Joyce Wieland fonds. | |
| Dates: | – 1952-1989. | |
| Quantity: | – 349 drawings and other material. | |
Biographical Sketch
Joyce Wieland, a filmmaker, painter, quilter, printmaker, and sculptor, was born in Toronto in 1930. She studied commercial art at Central Technical School in Toronto with Elizabeth Wyn Wood, Doris McCarthy, and Robert Ross. After graduating in 1948, Wieland worked as a package designer and, from 1952 to 1955, as an educational and commercial film animator at Graphics Film, where she met the artist and filmmaker Michael Snow. Wieland and Snow were married in 1956. During the early part of her career, Wieland mainly produced paintings influenced by abstract expressionism, culminating in her first solo exhibition at Toronto's Isaacs Gallery in 1960. After 1960 her work increasingly reflected the influence of pop art. In 1963 Wieland and Snow moved to New York, and two years later she stopped making paintings in favour of mixed media works, in which domestic materials and techniques such as embroidery and quilting were featured. Wieland created several works using non-traditional materials during the 1970s, including Defend the Earth/Défendez la terre, a quilted wall mural for the National Science Library, Ottawa (1972-1973), and Barren Ground Caribou, a quilted cloth assemblage for the Spadina Subway, Toronto (1977-1978). During the 1960s and 1970s, Wieland was also active in the area of experimental filmmaking, producing, most notably, Reason Over Passion/La raison avant la passion (1967-1972), a non-narrative film about Canada that explored nationalist and ecological themes; Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968), a satire on the Vietnam War; and The Far Shore (1976), a romantic fable set in the Canadian wilderness. In 1992, a year after becoming the first living Canadian woman artist to be given a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada (True Patriot Love, 1971), Wieland returned permanently to Canada, where she continued to create work with feminist and nationalist themes. She resumed painting in 1980, producing numerous works with figures set in visionary landscapes. A retrospective of Wieland's work was held at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1987. Wieland completed one of her last works in 1990, a mural entitled The Ocean of Love for Via Rail's transcontinental train.
Joyce Wieland's work is represented in several public collections in Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. American museums that own her work include the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. She has received numerous awards, including the Award for Exceptional Merit, Philadelphia International Festival of Short Films (1971); the Victor M. Lynch-Staunton Award (Canada Council, 1972); the Order of Canada, Officer (1983); and the Visual Arts Award, Toronto Arts Foundation (1987). Wieland stopped producing art in the early 1990s, after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. She died in Toronto in 1998.
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Scope and Content
The fonds consists of drawings and prints produced by Wieland throughout her career as an artist; three oil paintings believed to date from the 1950s; photographs, including personal photographs, photographs of Wieland's art, and photographs related to her film The Far Shore; posters and reproductions; and miscellaneous graphic items. Many of the drawings in the fonds are preparatory sketches for Wieland projects. There are also six completed signed prints, including one of Soroseelutu Cape Dorset (c. 1977), two of The Hind (1984), and three of For Jeanne Moreau (1984), and eleven drawings by Ann Pritchard, who served as art director of The Far Shore. Approximately one-third of the works in the fonds are signed by Wieland.
Source of title proper: Title based on contents of fonds.
Physical description: Other material includes 33 prints, 3 oil paintings, 289 photographs, 26 posters and reproductions, and 9 graphic items.
Immediate source of acquisition: Donated to the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives by Doug MacPherson in 2009.
Terms governing use and reproduction: Permission to reproduce or publish material from the Joyce Wieland fonds must be obtained from the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives.
Finding aids: Series level descriptions are available within the current document; an item level description in the form of a FileMaker Pro database is available upon request.
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Index Terms |
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| Names: | ||
| Wieland, Joyce, 1930-1998 | ||
| Organizations: | ||
| Montreal Museum of Fine Arts | ||
| Montreal Print Collectors Society | ||
| Document Types: | ||
| Correspondence. | ||
| Newsletters. | ||
| Photographs. | ||
| Posters. | ||
| Prints. | ||
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Administrative Information
Processing Information
Collection arranged and described by Philip Dombowsky in 2010.
Preferred Citation
[Title of item], Joyce Wieland fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives.
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Contact Information
Reference Services
Library and Archives
National Gallery of Canada
380 Sussex Drive
Ottawa, Ontario
K1N 9N4
T 613-714-6000 ext. 6323
[email protected]
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Series Level Descriptions
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