Ideas Folgen

"Canada can either now lose complete control — which it almost has, economically, spiritually and a few other things — or it can get itself together," said artist Joyce Wieland in 1971. 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.

During the Communist era in Bulgaria, anyone who opposed the government could be arrested, sent to the Gulag. For 20 years, Lilia Topouzova has been collecting the stories of those who survived. She recreated a Bulgarian room where her conversations with survivors can be heard, a space about the absence of memory and what that does to a people.

"We come from the sea. It's not a memory. It's a feeling. It's in our DNA," Joan Jonas told IDEAS producer Mary Lynk at her home in Nova Scotia. The arts icon, now 88, has been celebrated for her work since the late 1960s. She splits her time between a Soho loft in NYC, and the "magical landscape" of Cape Breton, where she can be by her muse: the ocean. In 2024, she received her crowning recognition in the U.S., when New York's Museum of Modern Art organized a major retrospective of her work. Part of Jonas' MoMA retrospective called Moving Off the Land II has been acquired by the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. The exhibit will tour across Canada this summer, beginning in Cape Breton.