Carl Beam: Image Transfers

Born on Manitoulin Island, Ojibwe artist Carl Beam (1943-2005) frequently employed photo-transfer techniques juxtaposed with expressive brushwork in paintings that addressed racial disharmony. A great admirer of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, Beam placed the liberatory promise of artistic autonomy embodied in the painterly gesture in tension with a proliferation of media and documentary reproductions that referred directly or indirectly to the history of oppression of Indigenous peoples. This selection of Beam’s work from the Gallery’s permanent collection includes almost two dozen collage-based paintings from the early 2000s donated by Toronto collector Milton Winberg.

-Pan Wendt, Curator