Instead, he borrowed methods from American pop artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, including the use of photo-transfers and other print techniques to layer and juxtapose found imagery, sometimes in combination with actual objects. It was a style Beam rejected as being too limiting, incapable of delivering his complexly interwoven themes and ideas. As curator Greg Hill writes in the exhibition catalogue, Beam launched his career in the 1970s, when Norval Morrisseau’s brand of highly stylized, myth-based paintings and prints dominated thinking about what “Eastern Woodlands” art should look like. One of those barriers concerned that very categorization: Beam disliked being pigeonholed as a “native” or “aboriginal” artist. This work is a history painting in which we are all implicated.Ĭarl Beam: The Poetics of Being commemorates an influential individual who dismantled many of the barriers surrounding contemporary First Nations art. Without dictating any single reading, Beam presents us with different styles and systems of representation and the violence inherent in them. In his groundbreaking 1985 painting on Plexiglas, The North American Iceberg, for instance, Beam has juxtaposed 19th-century photos of bare-breasted aboriginal women with mugshot-like self-portraits, media images of space exploration and the assassination of Anwar Sadat, a thumbnail biography of Geronimo, stencilled passages of poetic or enigmatic text, and splashes, swipes, and drips of acrylic paint.

Ancient Egyptian guardian figures, medieval Crucifixion scenes, ethnographic photographs, stream-of-consciousness text, and Zen Buddhist koans all contend for our attention in his art. His layered imagery, realized in paintings, prints, large-scale constructions, installations, and hand-built ceramics, draws references from art and science, pop culture and politics, history and contemporary life. He attended a residential school for a few years during the 1950s before busting out into the wider world, finding his way to an immensely creative life, and then returning to the place of his birth.Īs is evident in this retrospective exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Canada, Beam’s work speaks to both the particular and the universal. Born in 1943 in West Bay (M’Chigeeng) on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, to an Anishinabe mother and an American father, Beam was raised mostly by his maternal grandparents. At the UBC Museum of Anthropology until May 29Ĭarl Beam’s Anishinabe family name, Migwans, derives from a word meaning “bird” or “feather”-and birds, wings, and feathers are recurring symbols in the often soaring work of this late artist.

History iceberg sweater