Carl Beam

Carl Beam?s iconic work The North American Iceberg, 1985, was the first piece by an Indigenous artist to be purchased by the National Gallery of Canada as contemporary art. This book, written by the artist?s daughter, offers a mesmerizing portrait of Carl Beam?s pioneering art and a chronicle of his extraordinary multimedia practice. Born in 1943 on Manitoulin Island to an Anishinaabe mother and American father, Beam was raised by his maternal grandparents and attended a residential school from age ten to eighteen.

Beam?s career took a unique and groundbreaking course in the 1970s, when the art of Norval Morrisseau (1931?2007) and others who followed in his Woodlands School style dominated conversations about Indigenous art. Forging his own style, Beam was inspired by American artists including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns to develop an innovative mixed-media technique and a new platform to speak out about colonial violence and the resilience of Indigenous Peoples.

Although Beam?s life was tragically cut short in 2005 at the age of sixty-two, it was not before his reputation was cemented as one of the most important artists in the nation?s history and a prominent advocate for Indigenous rights. Above all, he was an advocate for artistic agency irrespective of limiting categories based on race. At the vanguard of contemporary Indigenous art, Beam?s work broke from a racist paradigm by insisting upon new modes of representation expressing urgent contemporary themes and issues facing Indigenous Peoples.