A pair of smudged blue lips at the center of Joyce Wieland’s The Kiss (1960) are pursed impasto atop a deep green field. From below, an arrow points up at the bulge, drawing the viewer’s attention to the paint itself. In the 1960s, this and other of Wieland’s buoyant works upended a staid post-war art landscape in her native Canada; she was widely exhibited and collected in Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver, while almost completely ignored in the United States. A current touring retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario—the largest ever mounted—makes the case for the continued relevance not only of the films for which Wieland is best known, but also of a swell of paintings, sculpture, quilts, and works on paper.
The exhibition, “Heart On”, takes its name from a 1962 work made with red electrical tape, chalk, crayon, and ink. Something between a painting, peep show, and curtain, the soiled surfaces, drapes, and hearts convey Wieland’s intentions to show “what it is to love”1 in her work. Balling (1960) expands this libidinous expressionism to a body-sized scale, with six-foot organic blooms and figural arrows that Wieland called “sex poetry.”2 The body and technologies of transport are important subjects in Wieland’s early abstract work, as shown in the simultaneously vegetal and machinic orbs in Time Machine Series (1961) and the paper airplanes collaged onto the surface of Laura Secord Saves Upper Canada (1961).
In late 1962, Wieland and her husband Michael Snow moved from Toronto to New York City, where they fell in with a mix of Pop and Conceptual artists and activists, joining the March on Washington in August 1963 and becoming important members of the New American Cinema Group organized by Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Ken and Flo Jacobs, among others. It was during this period that Wieland made the majority of her films, extending her light-hearted formal play into sound and moving image. Cat Food (1967) observes a tabby cat eating fish in a rigorous sequence of consistent shots, while Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968) represents rodents as American political prisoners who escape feline oppressors to become organic farmers in Canada. Though Wieland did not show any of her paintings or sculptures in New York, critical acclaim for the films came quickly. In 1968, the Museum of Modern Art presented a program of five short films by Wieland, and in 1969, the film scholar P. Adams Sitney coined the term “structural film” in an essay that named Wieland along with Tony Conrad, Ernie Gehr, Jacobs, and Snow as makers of a “cinema of structure wherein the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape that is the primal impression of the film.”3 Sitney cited Wieland’s work as a painter when arguing that structural filmmakers “sought to incorporate the aesthetics of painting and music” into film.4
Works on canvas that Wieland called her “filmic paintings” articulate this tendency in reverse, transposing cinematic logic into painterly signs and symbols. With square and widescreen formats, or as thin vertical strips resembling a length of celluloid film, the paintings animate narratives of rising and falling, drawing from what Wieland considered an “American fascination with disaster and grotesque happenings in the newspaper and on television.”5 Contemporary with serialized works by Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt, and Eva Hesse, Wieland’s approach is the most erotic and most grounded in cinema, emerging from her own filmmaking and her formative years working as a graphic designer and as a cell painter in an animation studio.
Flick Pics No. 4 (1963) and West 4th (1963) both comprise four side-by-side filmstrips, including “reels” of penises, cigarettes, and ships cruising in and out of view. Variations on the nautical filmic painting include Sinking Liner (1963), in which nine pieces of painted canvas in a three-by-three grid reveal at first a ship in calm water, then the boat rolled to its side, and then sinking. Untitled (Sinking Liner) (1963) contains four sinking scenes stacked vertically, and Sailboat Sinking (1965) is a four-by-four grid made wonky by partially elided frames. Each of these are kin with Wieland’s Sailboat (1967), a three-minute color film composed of fixed shots of sailboats making their way one at a time across the frame. The singular noun title is the only steady consistency, superimposed in white lowercase letters as if burnt onto the entirety of the film. Sailboat stumped Sitney, who wrote in the first edition of “Structural Film” that Wieland used looping to create the illusion of continuous movement. Rather, Wieland’s simple if rugged shots captured glimpses of the miraculous: repetition that sustains difference.
Shortly after the filmic paintings, Wieland began making quilts that “Heart On” co-curator Anne Grace describes as “creating a three-way dialogue between craft, visual art, and film.”6 Suspended from a rod like a carpet or a skin, Film Mandala (1966) and The Camera’s Eyes (1966) manifest, in thread, optical experiences on either side of a lens. Beginning in 1966, Wieland also made fifteen extraordinary wall-mounted sculptures that she called “stuffed movies”: colorful and clear PVC plastics filled with batting and miscellaneous found and fabricated objects. As if a vessel or folk cinema altar, soft works like Confedspread (1967) visually recall a crude map or geometric painting, but in material and texture are closer to a many-pocketed backpack or platter of vacuum sealed national-commercial kitsch.
Betsy Ross, Look What They’ve Done with the Flag You Made with Such Care (1966) should be known in the canon of anti-war American art from the Vietnam period alongside Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, and Peter Saul. A brightly lipsticked mouth chewing an American flag like a crumpled body, this new media work is contemporary and also somehow preserved, as if repelling dust in an antique store. When Wieland and Snow returned to Canada in 1971, Wieland reflected that she “couldn’t make aesthetic statements in New York any more. [She] didn’t want to be part of the corporate structure which makes Vietnam.”7
In the early 1970s, Wieland became aware of Cree and Nunavik protests against a planned hydroelectric dam that would devastate the caribou and Indigenous communities along James Bay. In support of these protests, Wieland made the poster for a March 1972 fundraising event featuring a speech by Waskaganish Cree chief Billy Diamond. On the poster, a goose flies above the head of Chief Diamond and two sections of orangish tree branches bracket typewritten language calling Quebec’s plans a “plot of cultural genocide.”8
Environmentalism became a prevailing preoccupation for Wieland, with the urgency of political and ecological crises inspiring her to blend care into her work, always elevating domestic work and craft. At the same time, “Heart On” co-curator Georgiana Uhlyarik acknowledges that Wieland’s “ideas are circumscribed by her inherited settler colonial notions of land and the North,”9 which sometimes highlighted blind spots. For the quilt The Great Sea (1970–71), Wieland commissioned wool hooking artisans to spell out a translation of a First Nations story. Intended to be a triptych in English, Inuktitut, and French, only the English and Inuktitut panels were ultimately fabricated. The English is hazy but legible, while the Inuktitut panel, is, according to the wall text, “regrettably” in jumbled syllabics, amounting “to an appropriative use of Inuktitut, as is Wieland's adaptation of the Inuit legend itself.” 10
It was a time of immense transformation: First Nations people did not gain the right to vote in Canada without being stripped of tribal affiliation until 1960, and the Maple Leaf flag replaced the Union Jack as the Canadian national flag in 1965. “O Canada” was proposed as the national anthem in 1967 (though it wasn’t officially adopted until 1980). In 1971, Wieland’s “True Patriot Love” directly addressed these events as the first solo exhibition by a living woman at the National Gallery of Canada. Wieland’s multi-part knitted wool work Flag Arrangement (1970–71) stretched the new, malleable flag into unconventional proportions, while the print O Canada (1970) was achieved through Wieland kissing a lithograph stone while singing the national anthem, each syllable a mark of red lips speaking.
Wieland’s work takes on a particular resonance in a time of ascendant fascism, when some cultural institutions cave outright to reactionary pressures. In 2016, the Art Gallery of Ontario hired their first ever curator of Indigenous Art, Wanda Nanibush, whose work was widely celebrated. Not long after October 7, 2023, Nanibush was pushed out of her position after some donors took issue with the curator’s social media posts opposing Israel’s occupation and genocide in Palestine.11 The AGO—which has not fully recovered from the fallout over its handling of Nanibush’s free speech—currently hosts Wieland’s show. For some in management, “Heart On” may be a comfortable way to engage with activism from a safe remove. Instead, we should be thinking about censorship and artwashing during wartime, and the successes and failures of formal experiments shot through with sex and politics.
Joyce Wieland’s “Heart On” is on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario until January 4, 2026.
Anne Grace and Georgiana Uhlyarik, eds., Joyce Wieland: Heart On (Goose Lane Editions; Art Gallery of Ontario; and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2025), 45.
Grace and Uhlyarik, Joyce Wieland: Heart On, 76.
P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film,” Film Culture no. 47 (1969).
Sitney, “Structural Film.”
Quoted in Jonathan Holstein, “New York’s Vitality Tonic for Canadian Artists,” Canadian Art 21, no. 5 (September/ October 1964): 278.
Anne Grace, “Activiste Culturelle,” in Joyce Wieland: Heart On, 18.
Johanne Sloan, Joyce Wieland: Life & Work (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2014), 8, https://www.aci-iac.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/art-canada-institute-art-book-joyce-wieland.pdf.
Georgiana Uhlyarik, “Facing North,” in Joyce Wieland: Heart On, 29.
Uhlyarik, “Facing North,” 33.
Wall text for The Great Sea (1970-71) in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts iteration of “Heart On”.
Maya Pontone, “Questions Arise as Indigenous Curator Suddenly Departs Toronto Museum,” Hyperallergic, November 21, 2023, https://hyperallergic.com/857994/questions-arise-as-indigenous-curator-wanda-nanibush-suddenly-departs-toronto-art-gallery-of-ontario/.
