True Patriot Love: Joyce Wieland’s Canada

Abstract

Joyce Wieland is frequently heralded as Canada's greatest woman artist, her success qualified by the very terms glowingly invoked by Clarke to legitimise her inclusion within the canon. Wieland herself has attained a kind of mythic stature as the mother of Canadian feminist and nationalist art. Wieland's retrospective could not have been more timely. Fears of American economic, technological and cultural penetration had long been a concern of Anglo-Canadians, from the pan-Canadian nationalists of the nineteenth century, to the leftist activist politics of the 1960s that Wieland identified as her own. Over the botanical drawings, maps and entries of the official scientific text, Wieland superimposed black and white photographs documenting her exhibition as a work in process. Wieland devoted much of her book True Patriot Love to photographic sources that reference her allegorical film. Wieland's handwritten annotation of the catalogue in both English and French is juxtaposed with songs in Inuktitut and Gaelic.