Online book about legendary artist Carl Beam is released

An open-access online art book about trailblazer artist Carl Beam has been released.

The book, which became available on Sept. 18, is part of a series titled The Canadian Online Art Book Project and was released by the Art Institute Canada and Beam’s daughter Anong Migwans Beam.

The project is an online digital library by original authors commissioned by the Art Canada Institute highlighting artists who have made a significant contribution to Canada’s art history.

“I wanted the chance to share a bit more about how he came to do the work that he did and what it meant to Canada and Canadian art in general,” said Beam about why she wrote the book about her father. “We live in a richer artistic world in a large part because of the challenges that he faced and persevered through.”

Carl Beam was the first Indigenous artist to sell his work to the National Gallery of Canada as contemporary art.

The Ojibwe artist worked in many different mediums including oil paint, acrylic, photography, stone, handmade ceramic pottery but is best known for his mixed medium art.

Beam was born in 1943 in M’Chigeeng First Nation in Ontario. He died in 2005.

Beam’s childhood was one commonly weaved throughout Indigenous families of that time period.

His father died as a prisoner of war, leading his grandparents to raise him. At about 10 years old he was sent to Garnier Residential School where he stayed until he was in Grade 10.

He had five children with his first wife and one daughter with his second wife.

During much of his early years Beam worked at various construction jobs, but his heart wanted to create and at the age of 28 he entered the Kootenay School of Art and eventually received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria in 1974.

Anong Migwans Beam, his only daughter from his second marriage, recently contributed to her father’s legacy by capturing his work, his family, and his story. She is also an artist.

“It was a really neat experience to get to reflect on him,” she said. “It was pretty emotional actually, to go over a loved ones’ life from the beginning to the end, and I think I probably couldn’t have done it any earlier.”

The 44-year-old explained she needed time to digest everything that had happened to her father and reflect on the meaning of his life before she could fulfill the request from the Art Canada Institute to write Carl Beam: Life & Work.

“It was a really, really incredible experience to do that and I really enjoyed the process,” she said. “This is more just kind of bringing together and sharing a lot of what I knew and his own work with people… It’s sharing a family history, a history of an artist.”

Many of the stories she recalled in the book were from the years she spent in her father’s art studio.

“I had just kind of held on to all of his stories for so long, and then it was really great to be able to recount it all after hearing it so much all those years,” she said. “That’s really what the book is, my own narrative.”

As his assistant in his art studio, she would work in his darkroom mixing chemicals to develop his photos, doing the “nitty gritty” processes associated with photography.

“He had different darkrooms and I had gone to art school for photographic processes, so I helped him a lot when I was a kid and then I went to school for that,” she said. “When I came back, I was his studio assistant until he passed.”

He nurtured her passion for art and taught her techniques, while also teaching her the history of her family.

Beam’s daughter attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Ontario College of Art and Design, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and York University. In addition to her art, Beam has been actively involved in curatorial work and teachings.

She has served as the art director and executive director of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation from 2016 to 2018 and was a guest instructor in painting at Harvard Art Museums in June 2023.

She launched BEAM Paints, her own line of watercolour and oil paints, in 2017.

Her father was a contemporary artist which “means he didn’t paint portraits or flowers. He did contemporary work. A lot of it was photo-based.”

Carl Beam would incorporate various elements into a final product including photographs, historical photos, and other materials.

“They weren’t collages, but he would make photographs that juxtapose different images and they would be old historical photos, photos from his family life, photos of people and figures from history,” she said. “He was kind of making little visual puzzles to kind of ask people about what they thought about.”

Basically, Beam was investigating colonialism and the ways different cultures impose their viewpoints on other cultures.

“Those pieces became like visual signposts that encourage people in our communities to ask questions,” she said.

Being a survivor and one of 150,000 children forced into residential schools across Canada, Beam endured abuse and was forced to leave his culture and practices.

“Generally, if it’s a work by Carl Beam there will be photographic images of two separate things and then there will be text talking about the images,” his daughter said.

His unique perspective and creations helped to bring national attention to not only the thousands of children who experienced abuses behind the doors of residential schools but also to give significance and respect to Indigenous art.

“He was really amazing because when he was doing artwork, you have to imagine right now as Indigenous people, we could have the ability to be any kind of artist we want, but back then we didn’t,” said his daughter, adding Woodland Style was deemed the only type of art that was acceptable for Indigenous people to create.  

“So that’s the world he was in, and he was the first person to challenge that and actually crack through and be exhibited and purchased in the National Gallery of Canada as contemporary art,” she said. “So that’s what he’s famous and really well known for, is kind of breaking through that glass ceiling for our people.”

She recounts his leadership as something she admired and she continues to be proud of all that he taught her about never feeling penned into expectations.

Prior to his death, Beam received the Governor General’s Award for Excellence in Visual Arts.

“Beam’s entire creative output developed in step with his resolve to make contemporary Indigenous art a critical part of the national conversation,” said Sara Angel, founder and executive director of the Art Canada Institute. “Shedding light on Beam’s singular vision, Carl Beam: Life & Work joins the ranks of Art Canada Institute books that offer insight into how art has been embraced by many Indigenous creators as a platform for speaking out against colonialism and affirming the resilience of Indigenous peoples.”

Read Carl Beam:Life & Work and other significant artists at The Canadian Online Art Book Project | Art Canada Institute (aci-iac.ca)