Anong Migwans Beam announced as guest curator of Up Here 8
Up Here is absolutely thrilled to announce our guest curator for this year’s festival, Anong Migwans Beam.
Anong will guide us through the good times this year by curating a selection of this year's murals and installations.
Anong is a painter, mother, paintmaker, and curator, living and working in her home community of M'Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island.
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 the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Ontario College of Art and Design, and the Institute of American Indian Art.
Deeply involved with her local community of M’Chigeeng, Anong co-founded Gimaa Radio Communications, an English and Ojibwe language radio station, and served as the Executive Director and Curator for the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation from 2016 to 2018.
In 2017, Anong also launched her own line of plastic free watercolour and oil paints known as Beam Paints, inspired by her culture and pigment gathering of her youth.
Beam Paints paintstones wrapped in beeswaxed cloth.
Beam Paints draws on Anong’s early education collecting pigment with her father in the La Cloche mountain range close to home. He taught her how their ancestors made paint to make “mizzins,” designs on rock faces with hematite, to share their histories, proud moments, and cautions. These days, she drives around in the summer with her boys with rock hammers and buckets, jumping out at rock cuts, exploring gravel pits, and the edges of construction.
Despite dabbling across and beyond the rainbow in her pigment creation, Anong has a particular fondness for green and pink (hint, hint, artists looking to gain favour, just kidding).
Artist submissions extended until midnight, Sunday, April 3, 2022.
They say time flies. If we’re being honest, it seems to do a lot of things for an inanimate, and possibly not even real, concept. All this to say, we are extending artist submissions to midnight on Sunday, April 3, 2022. Artists interested in submitting are invited to discover this year’s theme at uphere.com/oftime.
The 2022 edition of the festival will put a spotlight on Indigenous art. First Nations, Inuit, and Métis artists are particularly encouraged to apply.
All submissions are reviewed by artistic discipline by the Up Here Programming Committee. The evaluation process is based on artistic merit, the timing of latest releases, the pertinence of the project with this year's theme (slightly less relevant for musical projects), and pairing with other artists in the lineup.
We receive hundreds of artist submissions every year. All submissions will be reviewed thoroughly but due to the high volume of submissions, only successful applicants will be contacted.