Goes to Show

Canada Day, 1971: The National Gallery of Canada opens a new exhibition, True Patriot Love. It is the museum’s first major show by a living female artist, and it boasts drawings, sculptures, quilted hangings, film screenings, and dozens of ducks cordoned off by knee-high acrylic walls.

As the biographer Jane Lind once put it, traditionalists at the time did not consider art “a site for an irreverent sense of humour, and they did not want their concept of art shattered, especially not by live ducks being cared for by gallery staff in rubber boots.” Birds aside, the exhibition revealed Joyce Wieland as a visionary whose gifts of colour were considered too ethereal by some and too out of sync by others. Yet her imagination conjured images that Canadians needed to see. “As a young woman, she set out to create a mythology for herself and to write the script for her own life,” Lind said of the artist. “From the beginning of her career, Joyce did not try to paint...