National Gallery of Canada Examines the Co-creative Practice of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge

The National Gallery of Canada has published an article examining the six-decade collaboration between artists Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, whose politically engaged practice addressed labour, health care, environmental concerns and workers’ rights. The article, ‘Condé + Beveridge: A Co-creative Process,’ focuses in part on two works held in the Gallery’s collection: ‘Carole’s Garden’ (2021), acquired in 2024, and ‘The Fall of Water’ (2006–07). ‘Carole’s Garden’ was the final work the artists produced together.

Condé and Beveridge were married partners as well as artistic collaborators. They met while studying at the Ontario College of Art, now Ontario College of Art and Design University, and moved to New York City in 1969. During their years there, they became involved with the city’s conceptual art scene and activist communities. Condé also joined the Women’s Ad Hoc Committee, co-founded by critic Lucy Lippard with artists including Faith Ringgold, Brenda Miller and Poppy Johnson.

After returning to Toronto in 1977, the pair established their home and studio downtown, where they continued to develop a practice grounded in political analysis and collective action. Their early work included ‘Art is Political’ (1975), a declaration of the position that guided their subsequent production. In 2022, Condé and Beveridge received a Governor General’s Award in the Visual and Media Arts. Condé died on July 19, 2024.

‘Carole’s Garden’ presents Condé in the garden outside the couple’s home, watering plants as a suited figure with a Minotaur’s head pours gasoline from a jerrycan. Smoke and flames fill the background. Beveridge appears beneath the costume, continuing a recurring role in the duo’s photographic montages, while Condé generally worked behind the camera. The article describes the couple’s process as flexible, with the artists switching between roles as actor and director.

The work’s intimate domestic setting is set against an image of ecological threat. Breakfast remnants and spilled water appear within the scene, while the garden’s abundance contrasts with the fire spreading beyond it. The article interprets the three windows as resembling a medieval altarpiece and identifies the snake in the tree as a portent. In a statement associated with the work, Condé wrote: “We all need to become gardeners. To root out the virus of capital. To grow for each other. To save the earth.”

‘The Fall of Water,’ also in the Gallery’s collection, was the artists’ first digital composition. It reworks Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘The Fall of the Rebel Angels’ (1562) as an allegory of the global water crisis and the effects of market and government agendas. An Andean Indigenous woman replaces Bruegel’s archangel Michael, representing resistance to the privatization of water in Bolivia. The figures in the montage were drawn from the artists’ arts and activist communities.

Condé and Beveridge’s earlier montages were assembled by hand from photographs and other elements. Their collaborations with trade unions used staged fictional scenes—initially, according to the article, to protect participants’ identities—as a format for addressing labour rights and social and environmental justice. Both ‘Carole’s Garden’ and ‘The Fall of Water’ are part of the National Gallery of Canada’s collection of approximately 93,000 works and are currently not on view.