Anong Beam

Bio

Anong Migwans Beam is an artist, mother and paint maker who lives and works in her home community of M’chigeeng First Nation.

In 2018, she founded Beam Paints, makers of plastic-free paints and watercolours inspired by her culture and the pigment gathering of her youth. Through Indigenous paint traditions, the company celebrates the colours of the natural world with the intimacy of the northern forest, creating paints that make both artist and artwork feel vibrantly human. Beam Paints produces plastic-free, non-toxic art supplies made in Canada from the ground up.

As an artist, she primarily paints large-format oil works. Raised by artist parents Ann and Carl Beam, she was homeschooled and apprenticed with her father in ceramics, pigment and clay gathering, as well as in his painting and photography studio.

She studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Ontario College of Art and Design; and the Institute of American Indian Arts.

She has been active in language and community work and is the founder of Gimaa Radio 88.9 CHYF-FM, an Ojibwe-language radio station. She also worked as executive director and curator of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation from 2016 to 2018.