Joyce Wieland

Joyce Wieland was born in Toronto in 1931. Upon completion of high school, she worked as a commercial artist, eventually securing a position with Graphic Films, a Toronto-based animation company. There she met various artists including Graham Coughtry and Michael Snow. She married the latter in 1956. Once she focused her energies on creating visual art, success came early - she began showing with the Isaacs Gallery in 1960, and the Vancouver Art Gallery (1968), the Glendon College Art Gallery, York University (1969), and the National Gallery of Canada (1971) all hosted retrospectives early in her career. The AGO was later responsible for two major exhibtions of her work, in 1983 and then in 1988.

Like Snow, Wieland worked across many media, handling paint, print, collage, mixed media constructino, quilt-making and film with equal skill. No matter the materials, two issues recur in her work - female sexuality and Canadian nationalism. Another factor that unites much of her work int he 1960s was Wieland's interest in film, evident in the sequential presentation of narratives in her painting, drawing and quilt-making of the period. Wikipedia