Joyce Wieland

Canadian, 1931 - 1998

Active LocationToronto, Ontario, Canada

BiographyJoyce Wieland, OC (Toronto 1930 – 1998). Wieland was a central figure in Canadian art during the 1960s
and 1970s. Though, she began her career as a painter, her work came to explore a wide range of
materials and media, including film. The 1960s were an incredibly productive time for Wieland, as she
responded to the contemporary artistic trends of Pop art and Conceptual art. Her art was often infused
with humour, even as it engaged with issues of war, gender, ecology, and nationalism.

Internationally, Wieland is best known as an experimental filmmaker whose work challenged and
bridged boundaries among avant-garde film factions of her time. Her works introduced physical
manipulation of the filmstrip that inscribed an explicitly female craft tradition into her films while also
playing with the facticity of photographed images. Wieland's output was small but received considerable
attention in comparison to other female avant-garde filmmakers of her time. As both a gallery artist and
a filmmaker, Wieland was able to cross over between those realms and to garner attention and support
in both worlds. In the 1980s, Joyce Wieland focused again on painting, though her representations of
natural environments became less identifiably Canadian. With their intense colours and near
psychedelic effects, Wieland’s later landscapes seem almost outside of time and place. In 1956, Wieland
married filmmaker Michael Snow, whom she had met through her job at an animation studio. They
remained married for over twenty years until their divorce in 1976. In 1962, Wieland and Snow moved
to New York where they lived until 1971. After she moved back to Toronto in 1971, Wieland maintained
a studio practice there until her death on June 27, 1998 from Alzheimer's disease. We have one minor
work in the collection, almost 400 in other Canadian collections.

Person TypeIndividual