In my first Native art history class in the mid-1990s, my professor introduced the work of Carl Beam, theretofore unknown to me. She presented Self Portrait in My Christian Dior Bathing Suit (1978–1980), which depicts the artist in a Speedo-style swimsuit, standing legs apart with one hand on his hip and inscribed with a handwritten statement expressing his authority and claim to the work. It conveys humor, irony, incisiveness, and defiance. To my mind, then gripped by postcolonial and feminist cultural critiques, the painting crystallized issues of representation and refusal, and did so in beautifully executed washes of watercolor. I was rapt.

While this self-portrait is one of Beam’s most iconic and widely known (though disappointingly absent from the exhibition Carl Beam: The Poetics of Being), it represents just one aspect of the artist’s varied and abundant thirty-year career. Beam, a member of the M’Chigeeng First Nation, passed away in 2005. Published to accompany the major solo exhibition of fifty works organized by the National Gallery of Canada (NGC), the accompanying catalogue is in equal parts a tribute to the late artist and an attempt to sort out Beam’s legacy. The lavishly illustrated volume, which contains four essays along with a longer, introductory overview by curator Greg A. Hill, handily accomplishes the former and makes valiant, if inconclusive, strides toward the latter.

As a student, the other thing I learned quickly about Beam was his indelible place in the narrative of Canadian museum activity, an especially complex narrative where Native culture is concerned. In 1986, the NGC purchased Beam’s multi-media work, The North American Iceberg (1985), and in so doing, famously acquired its first work of contemporary Native art. This purchase remains a fact well-known and gamely cited by Canadian art history students, res ipsa loquitur: the late date is a telling indicator of just how marginalized Native art remains in official channels of Canadian art. Also familiar is Beam’s own view of this purchase. The artist once testified that while he was initially honored by the sale of The North American Iceberg, he came to believe the NGC had purchased it not “‘from Carl the artist but from Carl the Indian’” (35).

Thus, unsurprisingly, while the touring exhibition honors the late artist, it is not insignificant that this retrospective originates at the NGC, and it follows that the catalogue essays should explore Beam’s relationship with the gallery. And indeed, most of the authors address this history in some fashion, with Gerald McMaster taking The North American Iceberg as the focus of his contribution to the publication. McMaster, the prolific scholar of contemporary Native art and Curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, lends a welcome close reading of The North American Iceberg but largely skirts the institutional and cultural politics that have overshadowed the work’s content. McMaster defends the NGC as color blind, stating that the work “was collected not because it was done by an Aboriginal contemporary artist, but by a very talented contemporary Canadian artist” (35).

As the Audain Curator of Indigenous Art at the NGC, Hill is well-placed to broach the topic of Beam’s relationship to the gallery, given his institutional vantage and his fluency in Native contemporary art. In his essay, Hill situates the purchase of The North American Iceberg within the context of the NGC’s historical relationship with Native art, attempting to flesh out its short history. While Hill struggles to fill the vacuum between the 1927 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern and the watershed exhibition of contemporary Native art, Land, Spirit, Power of 1992, he notes related acquisitions that pre-date The North American Iceberg, such as Inuit art purchased and gifted in the 1950s and 1960s, and the acquisition of works by Robert Markle and Rita Letendre in 1963 and 1974, respectively. Markle is Mohawk and Letendre is Abenaki, yet neither artist publically identified their ethnicity as such. While these mentions do little to compensate for the underrepresentation of Native art in the NGC’s collection and, however well-intended, read as institutional apologia, they do suggest a history more nuanced than one of absolute “firsts.” Mention of Markle and Letendre says something too of just how complex Aboriginal identity and affiliation is and how it manifests in the cultural sphere.

This latter point is not a sidebar to Beam’s art, which similarly proves challenging to categorize. Hill seeks to synthesize the astonishing breadth of Beam’s practice—his media, influences, affinities, and motives—and rightly affirms the artist’s broad worldview and appeal. Beam learned ancient Pueblo pottery technique and styles in Arizona and New Mexico, and Raku in Japan. At times, his two-dimensional art evokes Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and where popular culture is concerned, Andy Warhol. Bob Dylan makes an appearance in the exhibited work, as do likenesses of Robert Johnson, Anne Frank, Mother Teresa, and Sitting Bull. Beam’s sequencing of seemingly disparate images is propelled by his identification with koan, a Buddhist concept of some complexity that Hill takes pains to characterize. Clearly Beam drew from a generous set of cultural resources and references. Yet in the Beam discourse there remains, implicitly, an unwillingness to relinquish the “foot-in-two-worlds” rhetoric that too often accompanies the work of Native artists whose expression seemingly challenges the locality of heritage. Even Hill’s opening claim that the artist’s “powerful narratives explore the space between Indigenous and other cultural views of our place within the universe-cosmos” lacks both precision and rigor, especially when he goes on to state of Beam that global concerns “were also his concerns” (13; emphasis in original). Ascribing a position of liminality to this artist feels tired and not particularly accurate as Beam’s art suggests an immersion in the world around him and a profound commitment to creativity and knowledge writ-large.

Perplexingly, Hill rehearses a nature-versus-nurture argument to explain Beam’s aesthetics and worldview, stating: “there is no biological imperative that dictates that a multi-racial heredity results in an innate understanding of varying cultural tenets. To a great extent, culture and worldview are learned. . . . Carl Beam did not create his art out of any biological drive. Rather it was informed by his social and cultural learning environment—his family, his community, his education, and most importantly his analysis and synthesis of his experiences (18). While Hill may be trying to steer readers away from naturalizing Beam’s mixed heritage (his father, who died when Beam was very young, was non-Native), it is disappointing that he does not offer readers a more challenging characterization of the artist’s work. He acknowledges that Beam thought of himself as a citizen of the world and quotes Beam’s stirring remark that, “‘world art is related to my art. I am the world, I am part of the world. I am an equal part to any part of the world’” (31), but stops short of describing the artist as cosmopolitan and exploring the artist’s contributions in this regard. Given Beam’s peripatetic artistic sensibility, testified to by the exhibition’s assembly of a diverse body of work, the opportunity to challenge readers accustomed to a stricter culture-region approach to Native art history is sadly lost with Hill’s too subtle tactics.

Given the seemingly unyielding tension between Beam, citizen of the world, and Beam, M’Chigeeng artist, it is worth mentioning that the most absorbing essay in the volume comes from community members Alan Corbiere and Crystal Migwans of the Ojibwe Cultural Centre on Manitoulin Island. In “Foundations: Carl Beam’s Work and Continuing Influence Among Manitoulin’s Anishnaabek,” Corbiere and Migwans are forthright about the apocrypha that often hems in great artists, with Beam being no exception. They celebrate local stories as a formative part of Beam’s art history by noting, “if some puzzle pieces start to resemble the stuff of legends, we’ll defer to Beam’s own advice and not try to dispel it” (58). While they acknowledge his work’s obvious discordance with the Woodland School style popular on Manitoulin Island, they situate Beam within the artistic community by talking to family members and area artists who knew him, consulting local archival materials and looking to Beam’s own testimony as it relates to his home community. The result reads as honest and insightful, and provides some sense of the belonging and exclusion Beam must have experienced; Corbiere and Migwans seem less concerned with justifying Beam’s place in a larger art-historical narrative than describing the individual and the artist through the eyes of those with whom he interacted, both personally and professionally.

Virginia Eichhorn concentrates on Beam’s ceramics, and in so doing aptly fills a gap in the scholarly work about him, scholarship that tends to focus on his photomontages. Ann Beam, the artist’s widow and artistic collaborator, contributes a timeline of the significant events that shaped Beam’s family life and career. Wishful thinking, but one cannot help but lament that the exhibition did not come to pass during Beam’s lifetime. His presence is keenly felt in these texts, and for this the writers deserve great credit. However, given how much of the publication’s tone is marked by the controversy over The North American Iceberg, it is regrettable that Beam did not have the opportunity to respond, as the National Gallery of Canada does, a quarter century after the fact.