Beyond "the Artist's Wife:" Women, Artist-Couple Marriage and the Exhibition Experience in Postwar Canada

Abstract

When art critic Lucy Lippard named “the artist’s wife” to be a socially-assigned identity for female artists in the early 1970s, she understood some of the significance of women’s companionship status. This dissertation considers how “the artist’s wife” was a diverse and hierarchical problem for six female artists during their efforts to access Canada’s postwar exhibition market. Joyce Wieland of Toronto, Ontario, Marion Nicoll of Calgary, Alberta, Mary Pratt of St. John’s, Newfoundland, and Kenojuak Ashevak of Cape Dorset, Nunavut all experienced this social phenomenon differently. Because the two studios of Wieland and Pratt were combined with domestic life they were also dubbed “kitchen artists.” As Marion Nicoll learned, it took much conviction to pursue an art practice focused on abstract painting in traditional institutional and marital contexts. The category “Eskimo” added racial difference to Kenojuak’s creative and marital identities. Frances Loring and Florence Wyle of Toronto were persistently called “the Girls,” an identity that underscored their non-compliance with heterosexual marriage. Using feminist theories of sexual difference and representation, and intersecting the traditionally distinct fields of history and art history, this study illuminates that the female artist’s companionship status mattered much more than has been historically understood. These artists’ experiences provide opportunity to reflect on curatorial practice and subject representation and expose that the solo exhibition cannot be fully separated from the artist-couple exhibition when studying the female artist’s exhibition history. Their experiences also make visible that gender and female artist identities, including the category “woman artist,” are important when studying the female artist in postwar North American art and marriage histories if the social conditions of women’s art production are to be fully understood.