Ojibway artist Carl Beam (1943-2005) is considered to have been an influential force in the development of contemporary First Nations art in Canada. Beam’s watercolours, etchings, photographs, photo transfers, installations and ceramics have a painterly, fluid style that – like Rauschenberg’s silkscreens of the early 1960s – combines photo transfers and posterized imagery with fragments of stencilled and handwritten text. The mixed-media collages on canvas, paper or plexiglass integrate multiple photographic images on single picture planes.

This retrospective exhibition at Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology includes a selection of more than fifty artworks from Beam’s thirty-year career. The exhibit was at the National Gallery in Ottawa until January, 2011 and will continue to tour to Winnipeg, Regina, Thunder Bay, and the National Museum of the American Indian, New York.

Carl Beam studied at the Kootenay School of Art (1971) before doing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Victoria (1974) and post-graduate studies at the University of Alberta (1975-76). In 2000, Beam was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 2005, he received the Governor General's Award for Excellence in Visual and Media Arts. His work has been exhibited throughout North America as well as in Italy, Denmark, Germany and China. The impressive exhibition is curated by Greg Hill and organized by the National Gallery of Canada.