New book explores the art and activism of pioneering Indigenous artist Carl Beam

A new book explores the life and legacy of pioneering Indigenous artist, Carl Beam, from M'Chigeeng First Nation, on Manitoulin Island, from the unique viewpoint of his daughter.

Anong Migwans Beam, herself a curator, paintmaker and artist, sheds some light on her famous father's origins and later the years of abuse he endured at the Jesuit-run Garnier Residential School in Spanish that informed his ground-breaking contemporary art.

Anong Beam details how her father created works that confronted colonial violence and residential school abuse in the 1980s long before those issues were acknowledged in public.  

The elder Beam's style of using mixed media, photo transfer and historical and political references, she said, allowed him more freedom to address contemporary issues in a way that he felt traditional painting could not.

Carl Beam was the first Indigenous artist to have a piece of work, The North American Iceberg, purchased by the National Gallery of Canada in 1985.

In her book, Anong describes it as "a defiant statement of the artist's disgust with the ubiquitous celebrations of European "everything" across North America," and a catalogue of themes in Beam's art: the genocide of Indigenous nations, the annihilation of Indigenous culture and his personal sense of loss.

While Anong said her father valued the recognition of the purchase by the National Gallery, she said it did not satisfy him.

"He was kind of a lone voice at the time about residential schools," she said.

She described how his work continued to be met with anger, confusion or even dismissed.

"Remember, this is like 1980, the mid-80s, and nobody was talking about residential schools and no one was talking about the abuse or responsibility of those who ran, or who sponsored their running, the government's part in that," she said in an interview.

Anong said when her father brought up those themes in his work, many viewers would go silent.

"It was like something heretical was being talked about," she said. "And gradually he just wouldn't let it go. He persisted confidently with his viewpoint that it should be talked about."

Carl Beam died of complications of Type 2 diabetes in 2005 at the age of 62 at his home in M'Chigeeng.

That is where his daughter lives and works and wrote the book.

She noted that the conversation her father started as an artist, that so few were ready for in the 80s and 90s, has grown.

Three years after Carl Beam's passing, in 2008, then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued an apology to survivors of Indian residential schools.

In June 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held its closing event in Ottawa and presented a multi-volume final report, including 94 calls to action to further reconciliation between Canadians and Indigenous people.

Beam said the issues brought forward in her father's art continue to be relevant and still spark conversation and debate today in a thoroughly modern way. 

"I think it just really underscores how ahead of his time he was to be generating these works and these conversations in the mid 80s," she said.

"And you know, 30-40 years later, these conversations are completely current, completely on point. And the sign posts that he left behind are really, really guiding excellent conversations."

The director and curator of the Art Gallery of Sudbury, Demetra Christakos, said Anong Beam's writing is valuable because she is not only the artist's daughter, but was his studio assistant.

Book described as both 'intimate and scholarly'

In addition, said Christakos, Anong was part of a family in which her father and her mother, Ann, also an artist, had a unique working relationship, providing a viewpoint that is both "intimate and scholarly."

While Anong Beam writes that her father's work was slow to be recognized and accepted early on, Christakos said that in northern Ontario, it was valued at an early stage.

Christakos said Beam and his family were certainly known, especially in Sudbury, and she met him as a young girl.

"My mother used to own an art gallery called The Artisan, and Carl and Ann Bean came into the store," she said. 

"She purchased work from him. The ceramic work that he produced was purchased by people locally and I think that those works exist in the domestic settings of people who loved art at the time. So there's a number of ways of appreciating that work."

The book, Carl Beam: Life and Work, is published by the Art Canada Institute and can be downloaded for free from their website.