Description
Anong Migwans Beam is an artist, mother, and paint maker who lives and works in her home community of M’chigeeng First Nation. She paints primarily large format oil paintings. Raised by artist parents Ann and Carl Beam, she was homeschooled and apprenticed with her father in his ceramic, pigment and clay gathering, and his painting/photography studio. She studied at School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Ontario College of Art and Design, and Institute of American Indian Art. She has been active in Language and community and is the founder of Gimaa Radio 88.9CHYF fm Ojibwe Language Radio station and has also worked as the Executive Director/Curator for the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation from 2016-18. Since 2018, she has been the founder of Beam Paints, makers of plastic free paints and watercolors inspired by her culture and the pigment gathering of her youth. With Beam Paint’s Indigenous paint tradition, they seek to celebrate the colours of the wide world with the intimacy of the northern forest, and in this fusion, create paint that makes you and your paintings feel vibrantly human. Plastic free.
Maria Hupfield (b.1975) she/her, is a Toronto based artist and transdisciplinary artist and maker working with Industrial felt at the intersection of performance art, design, and sculpture. Hupfield is the inaugural ArtworxTO Legacy Artist in Residency with the City of Toronto, Ravines, a Distinguished Scholar, Center for the Imagination in the Borderlands, Arizona State University, USA, 2022-3, and the Stonecroft Lecturer, National Gallery of Canada 2023. A recipient of the Hnatyshyn Mid-career Award for Outstanding Achievement in Canada (2018) she has exhibited extensively including recent projects at: the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; and in New York at CARA (Center for Art Research and Alliance), Abrons Art Center, the New York Museum of Art and Design; amongst others. An Assistant Professor and Canadian Research Chair, Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts at the University of Toronto in Mississauga, upcoming projects include the Toronto Biennale of Art 2024, solo projects with the Wexner Center for Art, Columbus Ohio USA, and a traveling show with the Remai Modern 2025-6. Hupfield is Martin clan and an urban off-rez member of the Anishinaabe Nation belonging to Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Canada. Hupfield co-owns Native Art Department International a collaborative art project with her husband, artist Jason Lujan. Her work is represented by Hugues Charbonneau in Montreal and Patel Brown in Toronto.
Virginia M. Eichhorn has worked in the visual arts field for over thirty years. A professor at Georgian College (Barrie Campus), she focuses on post-graduate advanced museum and gallery studies, fine arts, and cultural studies. With an emphasis on ecological, environmental, non-traditional exhibition spaces and community outreach and collaborations, her work as an independent curator has seen her presenting exhibitions at numerous prestigious venues including the XII Biennale of Art at Villa Nova Cerveira in Portugal. She has worked extensively with artists from across Canada and abroad, including Carl Beam, Judy Chicago, Maria Hupfield, Vessna Perunovich, Jane Ash Poitras, Jack Sures, Peter Von Tiesenhausen, and Tim Whiten, developing exhibitions for high profile Canadian galleries and museums such as the Royal Ontario Museum. In addition to curating, she has written numerous catalogue essays and has contributed articles to prominent Canadian magazines including Artichoke, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, ESPACE Sculpture and international magazines such as Ceramics Monthly and for institutions including the National Gallery of Canada, the MacKenzie Art Gallery and others. In 2009 she won the Jean Johnson/Melanie Egan Award for Curatorial Excellence awarded by the Ontario Crafts Council.
