The profusion of images surrounding Carl Beam’s The Columbus Boat, 1992, collapsed and consumed historical stereotypes, creating an ahistorical rhetoric of image production through intensely personal and condensed references. A Canadian artist of Ojibway descent, Beam’s ongoing “Columbus Project,” 1989-92, focuses on native and nonnative historical stereotypes. Superficially, the media images and objects Beam incorporates into his paintings seem indebted to Robert Rauschenberg’s flatbed constructions from the ’50s, while his autobiographical notations and curious numerological and alphabetical