Ideas - Joyce Wieland's art of nationhood embodied Canadian pride

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

In 1971, artist Joyce Wieland said: "Canada can either now lose complete control — which it almost has, economically, spiritually and a few other things — or it can get itself together." In the 60s and 70s, the artist painted, sculpted and stitched the Canadian flag and our sense of national identity. Her art called on the need to preserve its distinctness from the United States. Now, a quarter century after her death, the artist's work and words form a clarion call. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 12, 2022.

How are Canadians bracing for a full-on trade war? Without U.S. buy-in, can Canada really help Ukraine? And is Canadian patriotism messing with conservative strategy? We explore questions like these on Power and Politics, CBC's only political daily. I'm David Cochran. I speak to the key players in the political stories everyone is talking about. You'll hear from those who've got the power, those who want it, and those affected most by it. You can find Power in Politics wherever you get your podcasts,

including YouTube. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. In 1971, Canadian artist Joyce Wieland became the first woman to have a solo exhibition during her lifetime at the National Gallery of Canada. Her exhibition was called True Patriot Love. I think it's up to every individual, in a sense, to try to determine what it is that they are standing up for when they salute the flag or when they sing the anthem. And Wieland was calling that into question. The theme of the exhibition was Canada itself. She made art that really addressed the question in a serious way of what is it to be Canadian

and what is Canada really? What makes us different from the United States and how does gender factor into that? Half a century after Joyce Whelan's historic exhibition, and a quarter century after her death, Canadians are once again wrestling with questions of who and what we are as a nation. This documentary explores Joyce Whelan's iconic lithograph, Oh Canada, and the artist's provocative ideas about Canadian nationhood then and now. I think Joyce Willand is one of the most powerful forces

that this country has produced in the 20th century. My name is Georgiana Ulyaric and I am the curator of Canadian art and the co-lead of the Indigenous and Canadian art department at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. She created in some way the most joyful, hilarious, powerful, biting, difficult works of art. She did this in painting, she did this in film, she did this in print, she did this in textile.

She just did it in every way she could because whatever was at hand for her to express her incredibly deep and complicated emotions that she had about life, about womanhood, about sometimes motherhood, that again was a very difficult subject matter for her, and I think the love for her country. My subject really was Canada. Canada can either now lose complete control, which it almost has economically, spiritually and a few other things, or it can get itself together. The National Gallery, for a very long time, when it did solo shows, they were of male

artists including of Canadians. If women did get a solo show, the criterion was they had to be dead. I'm Brian Foss. I'm a professor of art history at Carleton University in Ottawa. Joyce Whelan's 1971 exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada is extraordinary because she was the first living woman to have that solo show. My name is Joanne Sloan. I'm a professor of art history at Concordia University in Montreal. It opened on Canada Day, July 1st, 1971. I'm on the front steps now of the National Gallery of Canada and a cadet band is marching by to open

the exhibition. Dominion Day, it was the great celebration of July the 1st in Ottawa. Who is the band, Janine? It's the La Salle Cadets, from 10 to 21 years old. Have you ever had a band open a National Gallery show before? I don't think so, no. It was a wonderful sunny day and there was a brass band that was having just a whale of a time marching down Elgin Street to the National Gallery of Canada building. My name is Mayo Graham. I'm a retired art curator. People gathered around

wondering what the heck was going on. The National Gallery? A brass band? And then the word passed. Hey there's ducks! Oh there's a giant cake! Oh look there's quilts! And then the doors opened and the band went in and then went through the front doors leading a parade into the opening of Joyce Whelan's True Patriot Love exhibition. It was happening, it was a very performative event that took place on that day. Michael Snow is here, Michael Snow is married to Joyce Whelan among other things. What do you think of this occasion Mike, it's fantastic.

It's a wonderful occasion, it's really fantastic, it's very, very beautiful. One of the most extraordinary objects on display was something called the Arctic Passion Cake, which was this enormous cake that looked like a snowy landscape and that had little plants and animals on it. So somehow this idea that nationalism could be consumed physically in this way is quite extraordinary. The perfume that Joyce Whelan created, especially for the exhibition, was called Sweet Beaver, the perfume of liberation. The show smelled. There were things in it that smelled and you weren't supposed to have scent or smell or wild ducks in an art gallery.

That's not what was considered to be art. And indeed, if you looked at the National Gallery at the time the exhibition was on, the overwhelming majority of things on display in the gallery then, as now for that matter, were what people would regard as real art. Paintings hanging on walls, sculptures. But when you see a gigantic birthday cake sitting in the middle of a national gallery, many people thought it's a children's party. Some critics thought that it was a wonderful celebration of Canadian nationhood, whereas some thought it was a complete takedown and mockery of everything that Canada stood for. Some of the newspaper critics were quite vicious and misogynist. So one of the Ottawa papers had a headline that was something like,

Joyce the housewife brings her cushions and blankets into the gallery. So people who like that, who were just not willing to understand that Whelan was doing something radically new and also that yes it was a challenge to the old boys club in a very profound way. A lot of the work in that show consisted of materials traditionally associated with women and craft. Whelan's appropriation or reappropriation of craft practices was absolutely revolutionary. In the long history of Western art, craft and its values have been usually put into the second rank because they're not real art. They don't require great intelligence, supposedly. They don't require genius. All

they require is a kitchen table and a bit of yarn, and off you go. So that dismissal of women's art, I think, was a major factor in the view of many that her 1971 National Gallery exhibition was frivolous because it seemed to highlight just not only women's concerns, but women's media. It was very easy for many people to say, oh, this is silly. It's not real art. It's going to have no afterlife. It's just her being a woman. And obviously from the vantage point a few years later, that sounds like an absolutely insane argument to make. Whelan was indeed redefining what constitutes art in general and Canadian art in particular.

LESLIE She brought these craft traditions into a conversation, into a dialogue with avant-garde ideas, with pop art, with conceptual art. In 1970, Joyce Whelan made a print, a lithograph, which she called Oh Canada. And what it is that you're looking at is a grid of lips. She put on bright red lipstick and then sang Oh Canada to herself. And each time she switched syllables or mouth shape she kissed the lithographic stone. She would press her mouth to the lithographic stone leaving a lipstick imprint so that by the time she finished singing it she had a multi-line visual representation of what the mouth looks like when it sings, Oh Canada. And you can see that

when you look at the lithograph, you can sing along with it because you recognize the shape of the mouth for each syllable. So then she simply took the lithographic stone and pressed paper to it and turned out a series of lithographs. It is an introduction to the messiness of politics, the messiness of being alive, the messiness of being a woman. And so it is all those things for me all in one. And I like to believe that she exists in each one of these prints because her own lips touched this stone and the paper lifted the lipstick off of the stone. And here we are being able to basically watch this almost a filmic print. It's like an animation of lips singing, Oh Canada. The National Anthem, not to be sound unpatriotic or anything, but the National Anthem gets

dragged out at the start of hockey games and baseball games and the whole bit and it becomes just background music. And here was somebody treating it not as sound, but as visual art. She really turned a somewhat hackneyed piece of music into a compelling visual object that made me rethink the power behind the national anthem. By pressing her lips to the lithographic stone, she is quite literally stressing the physicality of nationalism, that it's not some abstract concept, but that it affects real bodies in real time. And more specifically, I think what she does is insist upon viewers realizing that here is Canada presented through a distinctly feminist and feminine lens. Singing the national anthem by pressing your lipsticked lips onto a piece of paper is a strongly feminist statement.

So she made Canada female. There is something about singing, obviously, but really when you look at the print and you just see mouths moving, I think there's also something about the power of speaking and to have voice and how you find your voice and how you express your voice. In a way, it's ironic, right?

Because this print, it cannot speak. So I wonder also if it is about the way in which often women work so hard to speak, and yet they're not heard. She was the first woman I ever encountered who had such a strong drive and a sense of self and creativity and being someone. My name is Judy Steed and I was a journalist for many years at the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. I was lucky enough to meet Joyce Whelan in the early 1970s,

and she became really the most important teacher in my life. Joyce Whelan lost her parents when she was very young, so it was really her and her siblings struggling. And so she had to survive going from boarding house to boarding house just with her sister, who was a few years older. And she was very, very poor and no security and really suffered and struggled at that time. And so her marriage to Michael Snow became very important to her as a source of security. But then that marriage was

very difficult. It was amazing to me how given all the struggles she had that this resilience and this courage kept driving her through her life. The way in which she created herself, the way in which she had such confidence in herself to believe in herself at a time that so much was working against her. You know, everywhere she went, women really felt drawn to her because she was a friend to women and she wasn't putting down women. And you had a real sense that she wanted to lead us somewhere. Like, I do feel that she was a real leader in many ways

at a time when women were trying to find a path forward. I am woman, hear me roar In numbers too big to ignore And I know too much to go back and pretend Cause I've heard it all before and I've been down there on the floor No one's ever gonna keep me down again In the 1960s and 70s, and we have to remember that, yes, this is, we're in the middle of second wave feminism, but it's not every woman artist who at that point feels comfortable

expressing her feminism. And Joyce Whelan was, and it was also a very idiosyncratic feminism it was a very what's the one could say lusty and erotic feminism that she embraced as well and so i think the lips are also very erotic and so there's that dimension if she's feminizing the anthem she's also a rock a sizing it in a way that is quite remarkable. To take the same material technology and to kiss it gives it a sense of romance, a sense of eroticism, a sense even of devotion that changes the parameters of how lithography is usually done.

I'm Louis Jacob and I'm an artist living in Toronto. It no longer becomes an act of drawing and inscribing an image into a stone, but rather of kissing it and even singing to it. That has the effect of changing the stone into a kind of, not so much a passive surface, like a kind of blank passive surface that receives a drawing, but rather someone who's engaged in a kind of romance with the artist. Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, Canada, was doing when she started to make artwork based on the national anthem or the flag, we really do have to understand that historical period. What we now

regard as the national anthem was only officially designated as such right around 1967, which was the centenary of Canada and was being celebrated in a really spectacular way, not least by Expo 67, the World's Fair being held in Montreal, but really across the country. There were all kinds of celebrations. And the flag was also new in the mid-60s. And so the government itself, but many other people as well, were taking this opportunity to think about Canada as a modern nation. Canada, we love you. Canada, we love you.

Canada, we love you. One little thing, Canadians, we love you. Canada, we love you. This is the point at which Pierre Trudeau was prime minister, seen as a very unusual prime minister in the fact that he emphasized youth and vigor and adventurousness. But it was this incredible bringing together of all of these factors, right? The flag, the national anthem, the centennial, Expo 67, Trudeau Mania. Suddenly Canada felt like the grooviest place on the planet.

And it was a nationalism that everybody could be proud of because it wasn't an old stodgy nationalism. It was a forward-looking, adventurous nationalism. With a country led by somebody who was seen as this incredibly hip guy. And so the Canada in which O Canada was made, the Wheeland lithograph, was a Canada in which from the top down it was being repurposed or re-conceptualized in a much more groovy 60s way. And so although O Canada was made in 1970, I think to a large degree it embodies that kind of 60s mentality, the belief that emotion is important, that the body is important, that things aren't just rational and abstract but they're physical and immediate and have really pressing contemporary concerns. FNC! FNC! FNC!

I think the question of Québécois nationalism, which is surging up around this time, is also very important because lefties like Wieland were looking at what was happening in Quebec with a great deal of interest, with a certain kind of admiration at this sort of wellspring of nationalist sentiment that was really coming from below. We want to... The flying ointment was the FLQ, the Front de Liberation de Quebec, which had been active since 1963 at least, and had waged a very militant campaign for Quebec liberation and independence. And that campaign had included 200 bombings, mailboxes in various facilities.

It's believed that FLQ terrorists have been stockpiling explosives in recent months, posing a threat of renewed bombing. But when innocent people were killed or injured in a terrorist attack, the cry for police action became shrill. It all came to a head in October 1970. The FLQ kidnapped first the British Trade Commissioner James

Cross and then two weeks later Quebec's Minister of Immigration and Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte was kidnapped. This led Pierre Trudeau to proclaim the War Measures Act. For that reason, the government decided to proclaim the War Measures Act. It did so at 4 a.m. this morning in order to permit the full weight of government to be brought quickly to bear. The only time the Act has ever been used in peacetime in Canada. He did that at the request of Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau and Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa. Mr Pierre Laporte was assassinated this evening at 18 minutes past six.

Pierre Laporte was soon thereafter found dead in the trunk of a car. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation brings you coverage of the National Memorial Service for the late, honorable Pierre Leporte, who was the victim of a political assassination last Saturday night. And this comes the same year as Joyce Whelan's big show at the National Gallery. And what it demonstrated to Canadians more than anything else was longstanding fears about a basic rift between English and French Canada were real and they were dangerous. And so all of the signs of unity and hope that had been built up in the late 60s suddenly hit this FLQ wall.

And it was a point of major concern to Joyce Weeland because Canadian unity was a big concern of hers. But also she was very interested in Quebec nationalism. And one of her heroes was Pierre Vallaire, an important Quebec author in this regard. So all of this played into her art, both the optimism, the forward-lookingness, the hopefulness of Canadian nationalism and unity in the 60s, but also real concern that if this nationalism wasn't protected and nurtured in a healthy way, it could lead to consequences that really terrified her and terrified a lot of people. As far as Canada is concerned right now, I think that it could win or lose. It could really fall under or it could go and become something like a country, you know, that

does its own thing and has control over its future. But the sheer serendipity-ness of all these things happening within like three years of each other, it's amazing and certainly goes a long way towards explaining the fascination she had with stereotypical symbols of Canada, like the new flag. These were symbols that she wasn't taking lightly, and they were hot topics. The flag debate had really created dissension between the liberal and conservative parties, and John Diefenbaker made it his hill to die on, saying that he would never countenance the abandonment of the Red Ensign. Of course, a lot of the things that we thought were so optimistic and hopeful

in the 60s were pretty naive about, right? The idea that the Canadian flag only needed to deal with the two so-called founding nations, English Canada and French Canada, is not a sentiment that most Canadians would agree with today. There were an awful lot of people who for all the optimism and good intentions were marginalized in 1960s Canada. Despite the progressiveness of those years, the events of the last two or three years have really demonstrated for all of us that there are many citizens and residents in this country who in the 1960s probably wouldn't by many Canadians have been considered really part

of the citizenship. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4, I'm back with a brand new series of history's secret heroes. And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent. She will work undercover.

And if she's caught, she's going to be shot. Join me for more stories of unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage from World War II. Subscribe to history's secret heroes wherever you get your podcasts. I don't care about internationalism. I really feel about nationalism now as not a goose-stepping thing, but as a very necessary thing. In the 1960s and 70s, artist Joyce Wheeland offered Canadians a vision of what the country could be, and of the need to preserve its distinctness from the United States. Her works were at once celebratory and a warning,

a gesture for Canadians to embrace a nationalism that was neither chauvinistic nor militaristic, but inclusive and beautiful. Like her seminal work, Oh Canada, a lithograph of the artist's lipsticked lips repeatedly pressed against the page as she sang the national anthem. Wheelan's O Canada is part of a larger body of work made in the late 1960s and early 1970s made in the late 1960s and early 1970s that confronted Canadian nationalism. Wheeland had been living in New York City since the early 1960s.

And it was while she was outside of the country that she became a kind of born again Canadian in a sense. People say there's no history of art here. There's no great art in this country or whatever. And I've really done a lot of research in the last year and I really am knocked out. I really think that there is a line and I want to be part of that line. I don't want to be part of the American line. I don't care about internationalism. I really feel about nationalism now as not a goose-stepping thing, but as a very necessary thing. She was becoming extremely critical of the toxic militarism of the U.S. government. And,

of course, we have to remember that the Americans were fighting a brutal war in Vietnam at the time. So, Whelan's sense that Canada could be a different place is very much a part of her nationalism. There is definitely a utopian dimension to her nationalism. Geoffrey a colony of rats. They're actually gerbils, but they're called rats. They live in the United States where they are terrorized by prison guards who are cats. And so they escape this militarized society. It's very hard to miss the Vietnam references here. They escape this militarized society to Canada where they take up organic farming and they organize cherry festivals. And it's almost that it is a caricature of you of Canada. And they're safe in Canada. I've made other films, but I think Rat, Life and Diet in North America really achieved something. I don't want to be a social realist, but I think that Canada needs this kind of film.

And I want to do something about Canada. At one point in this film, the rats are invaded by the US and the US is symbolized by a rolled up American flag, which is physically piercing a Canadian flag. And there's a couple of really interesting things in this that are so typical of Whelan's work. One is the use of flags to symbolize different kinds of patriotism, right? A chauvinistic patriotism, a militaristic patriotism versus what she saw as a much more inclusive participatory patriotism. But also the piercing of the Canadian flag by a rolled up American flag is inescapably phallic in its symbolism.

And that also feeds into Whelan's view of Canadian patriotism as being ideally more gendered female than the very male gendering of the American flag, so that the American flag for her symbolizes aggression, intolerance, taking over, whereas the Canadian flag symbolizes something that needs to guard against being violated. We have a sense that that national anthem enters into her body. And that's what happens for all of us, in fact, when we sing the national anthem, any national anthem, is that it does become personal and embodied. But then I think it's up to every individual in a sense to try to determine what it is that they are standing up for when they salute the flag or when they sing the anthem.

And Whelan was calling that into question. She was not taking it for granted that if you make those sounds with your mouth, that you're necessarily buying into the officially sanctioned governmental version of nationalism. She wanted to ensure that people could seize hold of the national symbols that belong to all of us and question what they mean. She's using that flag in a way to express this sense of hope. And it's a genuinely utopian idea that by citizens seizing hold of the flag themselves, that they can be part of that process of building a new Canadian nation. So it's not a way of encouraging, in a sense, other Canadians too, to not be passive in their citizenship or in their nationalism.

And 50 years later, we see that this kind of critical thinking about nationhood is as necessary as ever. Waving an upside down Canadian flag. Tonight, demonstrators in Ottawa dig in for another weekend of protest. Walking one of the main streets leading to Parliament Hill. I think that Whelan's meaning and importance in the wake of the so-called freedom convoy, her lessons are really germane. Freedom! No mandates, no passports, no lockdowns.

For one thing, the convoy appropriated the Canadian flag as a symbol of chauvinism. So it wasn't a symbol of inclusiveness. For many in the convoy, the Canadian flag was a symbol of the Canada that they wanted it to be, a reactionary, a deeply conservative, exclusive, intolerant Canada. This is the exact opposite of what Joyce Whelan's vision of Canada was. Her insistence on inclusivity as a core element of Canadian citizenship or Canadian-ness

was at odds with this convoy idea. And Joyce Whelan wanted a Canada in which everyone was valued, where difference was a good thing, not a bad thing. Almost the only sign used in these convoy protests is the Canadian flag. They adopt a ready-made symbol, such as the Canadian flag, and accept it wholesale, as if it already indicated the things that they want to express. And this is where Joyce Wheelans' work, I think, becomes so interesting because she takes a ready-made symbol, such as the flag or the national anthem,

and she plays with it. She turns it over to see what it looks like from another side, and another side, and another angle, and another angle. She stretches it almost as if it was made out of putty, as if it's made out of an extremely pliable material, and that she has full authority to stretch it and see what it's capable of doing. And in that process of stretching the symbol,

she's able to adopt the symbol for her purposes, rather than adopt her purposes to the existing symbol. In that relation, when I think about the convoy protesters is how little sense of imagination and potential they have in relation to the symbols that they use. So I think Joyce Whelan allows us today to think about the flexibility of inherited thoughts, the lack of rigidity of existing symbols that circulate around us. I like the flag because it's innocent and it has no really hardcore nationalistic history in it.

It's not the Union Jack, it's not the American flag. It's innocent and I really love it. It's not the Union Jack, it's not the American flag. It's innocent and I really love it. Joyce Whelan incorporated the Canadian flag into a number of her works. For instance, Confedspread, which she created in 1967, where the flag is one of many images in what is essentially an updated patchwork quilt. So there again, patchwork quilts women's work or so-called women's work. But by taking in confed spread, incorporating the flag into a bedspread, she makes it both ordinary, something you use every day, and therefore something you should be thinking about every day that should permeate your life, but not in a

rah rah rah Canada way, but rather in a much quieter, this is something we need to be constantly aware of, but eliminate from it the potentially chauvinist but eliminate from it the potentially chauvinist associations that flags often have. But I think by not making the flag the sole object in any of her work, but instead incorporating it into larger compositions, she's avoiding that tendency that always exists that when you see a flag all by itself, you know, you put your hand on your heart and you have patriotic feelings

and you think about tradition. So by putting the flag into unusual contexts, by making it part of larger works, she steps around that awkwardness of the reaction you have when you see just a flag. I think the flag is so often used by people with reactionary causes rather than what gets termed progressive causes, is that more than anything else in any country, that's the symbol everybody recognizes. especially in a country like Canada, where we're divided into 10 provinces and three territories, two founding languages, a large group of indigenous

languages, a very large refugee and immigrant population. It's hard to find anything that everyone would recognize as a symbol of the country. Whether you're all for Canada or you are a member of a separatist movement, the Canadian flag has that kind of national significance. And for that reason, it gets appropriated by all kinds of groups. I think it gets appropriated by reactionary groups because it stands for the kind of country they want to quote go back to, right? The kind of place Canada used to be. The right race was in charge, the right gender was in charge, people who didn't have the right to talk didn't talk. So it's very easy to adopt it as a reactionary symbol. I think progressive movements are somewhat more reluctant to adopt it simply because

it's been so often adopted as a symbol of reactionaryism. And the convoy protest of 2022 is the classic symbol, right? All of these people going up and down streets with flags draped over their shoulders as if breaking the law for three weeks in a major Canadian city and bringing the city to a halt was some sort of patriotic act. So in view of that, it's not hard to understand why someone who is into more progressive causes would think the Canadian flag has been too compromised by these associations. So it's not that people in more progressive causes are against the flag. It's just that it's become freighted.

In Washington, more than 50,000 demonstrators protest against American action in Vietnam. Please clear the street. Please. People, move. We have come in tens of thousands to march and rally at the United Nations in New York and at the birthplace of the World Organization in San Francisco on this, the 15th day of April 1967. Now, D! Now, D! Now, D! Now, D! 1967. The burning of the American flag during the Vietnam War was an incredibly powerful symbol because at that point people who burned the flag were associating the flag with the prosecution of an unjust war, with the drafting of unwilling or in many cases people who simply couldn't afford not to be drafted into the army to go and fight a war in which they did not believe. And so burning the flag was a powerful

symbol for anti-draft movement, protesters especially. The reaction it provoked amongst much of the population speaks for itself, right? This absolute outrage that people would burn the symbol of what they persistently described as the greatest country on earth. It's the same thing that the official rules for how to fold a flag when you take it down from the flagpole. The American rules on how to do that are really revealing. At no point must any part of the flag touch the ground, as if touching the ground, which for Joyce Wieland was really important, right? The Canadian landscape, the Canadian ecosystem was really important. In 2005, I made an artwork titled Mighty Real for Sylvester, which explicitly references Joyce Whelan's own O Canada print.

I directly kissed sheets of paper mouthing the words of the disco song, Mighty Real by the artist Sylvester. And so the finished works are traces of lipstick on paper mouthing the words of the song, much like Joyce Whelan mouthed the words of the anthem. You make me feel mighty real. You make me feel mighty real. I think for me the idea that Canadian national identity is that thing that brings people

together is something to fight against. I think that the way we are sometimes induced into seeing ourselves in term of the identity formations that the state presents to us as Canadians, as citizens of a nation state, that inculcation is something to actively resist and question and problematize. I believe that Joyce Whelan's work problematizes nationhood as much as it inquires into it. It sees some validity to national identity, but I think it also contains the grains to think of the problems that I've done that are political, I have to find a new form for them so that

they're not just propaganda, like something standing there that doesn't excite your imagination or do anything for your soul. I have to find a way to give positive things with the negatives. These works are very beautiful, but some of them contain very ugly truths, like under the flaps and the water quilt is the truth about the resources. Water quilt is one of the artworks that was included in Whelan's 1971 exhibition at the National Gallery. On the surface, water quilt looks like this very beautiful, delicate quilt that has embroidered flowers and they are botanically specific flowers that are native to the Arctic environment. It's 1970-71. It's a very large fabric piece consisting of little pillows about that big.

Each one has a muslin flap over it. It is embroidered with Arctic flowers and grasses. Each one of those squares can be lifted up and then underneath it can be seen that there is printed text. And when you lift up each flap, you read a passage from James Laxer's book, You read a passage from James Laxer's book, The Energy Poker Game, in which Laxer discusses America's plans to take control of Canadian energy resources for use by American corporate and military interests. The natural gas industry in Canada is 82.6% American owned. So most of the benefits in terms of profit will go to American corporations. And we know from past experience that that means that these profits go back to the United States.

James Laxer was a member of the New Democratic Party. He was one of the signatories of what was called the Waffle Manifesto, which was a manifesto from some of the more left-leaning members of the NDP. So Laxer had written this book that was very critical of foreign investment in Canada, and in particular, the way that Canada's resources, such as energy, of of course but also water was potentially going to be sold off to the highest bidder and the passages in the book that we land shows were passages that speak to the possible sale of what was called bulk water to the USA. And what that means is essentially selling off an entire river or lake somewhere in Canada

to a foreign power that needs that water. And so this is a very political but also ecological question that arose at that time, and that is of course very significant for us today as well. On one hand, it's a beautiful, almost decorative, if you like, patchwork of flowers. You can just look at it as that, as just saying, oh, here are these small, beautiful, exquisite embroidered flowers on this quilt. And yet underneath it is such an urgent, critical message about water. to evoke the fragility of the Arctic environment. And it's also a real appreciation for the beauty of these wonderful little botanical organisms that are growing in the North. So the North is a place of beauty, but it's also a fragile environment that needs to be protected. And

that's what she is committed to as a Canadian. So she's exhibiting her own commitment to Canadian nationhood, but it has to be a vigilant kind of nationhood that is not going to allow the natural environment to be destroyed. So she's actually connecting for us visually, meaningfully, how we are all connected through water, and how in fact, without water, none of us can be alive. So all of these things are embedded in this quilt

that you can't actually use as a quilt. But when you think about the size of it, actually it's almost a perfect size for a child's bed. So I think that she's thinking about our youth and saying to us that as we mature, as we grow up, we must take care. We must take care of the flowers and we must take care of the water that make it all possible for us to be alive. So it takes a number of boxes, ecological feminism, women's concerns because it is an

embroidered and fabric piece and her deep wariness of the American empire. She was sort of on the ramparts about protecting the soul and the almost physical integrity of the country from American takeover. And I think we can see now that it's been so important that we have preserved our sense of identity. That artwork is very much about we are not American. Whelan's art is largely about warning Canada about the dangers of becoming too Americanized.

And again, this isn't as if she's against everything American. A lot of Whelan's paintings from the 60s are deeply indebted to American culture. She just sees the dangerous side of it. She recognizes when rationalism and stereotypical male aggression become a danger, not just to oneself, but to one's neighbors?

I think in this moment when so many things are under attack, things that I think women, and not just women, but everyone in general felt that we had moved past, you know, understanding how to be human to one another, to care for one another, to trust one another and respect one another. These things seem to be under truly violent attack and I think that Weyland fought this on her body. She fought this in the world. She fought this in New York, in Toronto, and across Canada and not even 50 years to go by and everything to come tumbling down. To me, what she has to say to us from within this moment of fighting for rights and fighting really for love,

you know, I think she really, at the core of Joyce Willand is love, and I think that is what her force is all about. Dealing with nationalism or anything without humor or beauty is useless. I deal with ecological themes, nationalistic themes. I wanted to make certain artworks and I didn't want to make propaganda. I wanted to make something beautiful. And I wanted to give everything I could to these things. Every time I look at her work or every time I return to her, there is something that she is communicating to us, something that she already knew that we are only beginning to

know. And she was able to express all of this in her work. So whether she is pressing her lips on a litho stone to make this unbelievable print to express her love, her womanly love to this country, the rights of sovereignty in the Arctic, just simply women being in the world in charge of their own bodies. So for me I almost feel like we are to inherit all these things from Weyland that she fought for, that she knew that we must continue to push for, that haven't quite emerged as the truly critical things

that they are. She talked to me about that, that we should be sending out to the world this pride in what it is to be Canadian. And I think where she would have been now in terms of the environment and developing the country with all the renewable energy because she was so interested in energy production. So I think the environmental realities we face and how to launch Canada into a new version of ourselves would have been her preoccupation now. You are listening to a documentary about Joyce Wheelans Canada, produced by Aliza Siegel.

Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of Ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nikola Lukcic. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. Right? For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.