Although he minored in ceramics at the Kootenay School of Arts, Beam’s move to New Mexico in 1980 brought him into contact with a vibrant contemporary “Indian art” scene. He greatly admired the painted pottery made by ancestral Puebloan peoples of the Southwest, and combined ancient elements of this art with his own contemporary iconography. “There’s power in the old bowls,” Beam stated in 1981. “They are physical, psychic and graphic, and that is the only reason that I paint the bowls the way that I do.”