Kay WalkingStick

Kay WalkingStick (born March 2, 1935) is a Native American landscape artist and a member of the Cherokee Nation. Her later landscape paintings, executed in oil paint on wood panels, often include patterns based on Southwest American Indian rugs, pottery, and other artworks.

WalkingStick's works are in the collections of many universities and museums, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Israel Museum, the National Museum of Canada, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. She is an author and was a professor in the art department at Cornell University, where she taught painting and drawing. She has been accepted into many artist residency programs which gave her time away from teaching duties to paint. WalkingStick won many awards and in 1995 was included in H.W. Janson's History of Art, a standard textbook used by university art departments. WalkingStick is an Honorary Vice President of the National Association of Women Artists, Inc.

Personal life Kay WalkingStick was born in Syracuse, New York, on March 2, 1935, the daughter of Simon Ralph Walkingstick and Emma McKaig Walkingstick. Kay's parents had four other children, and as they raised their family Ralph Walkingstick worked in the oil fields as a geologist. He became an alcoholic. While pregnant with Kay, her mother left Oklahoma with their other children and moved to Syracuse, New York. WalkingStick grew up in Syracuse without having experienced the cultural heritage of her Cherokee ancestors. Her siblings, who spent some of their childhood in Oklahoma, had a better understanding of their father's Cherokee traditions. Her mother told her "Indian stories" and talked about her handsome father. The family was proud to be Native Americans. Kay liked to color and draw from a young age. She married artist Dirk Bach.

Education WalkingStick received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1959 from Beaver College, Glenside, Pennsylvania.

In another personal search, Walkingstick created Messages to Papa in 1974 to better understand the conflicted feelings that she had for her father. The work was a stereotypical image of a Native American dwelling, the tipi, although it was not a Cherokee structure. She used the image, as a symbol of Native Americans to people of non-native descent. In the middle of the work she hung a Cherokee language translation of the Lord's Prayer and a letter to her deceased father. Walkingstick said, "I do not see my paintings as landscapes, per se, but rather as paintings that describe two kinds of perception of the earth. One view is visual and fleeting and the other is abstract and everlasting. These paintings are my attempt to express the mythically inexpressible and to unify the present with eternity."

After her husband died unexpectedly in 1989, she introduced waterfalls to her works, like the painting Abyss, an abstract painting with blood-red water and white foams. She said that the waterfall paintings are "a metaphor for the onrush of time and the unstoppable, ultimate destiny of our lives."

In 1995, she was included in art history textbook, H. W. Janson's History of Art, which is a standard of universities and colleges.

Educator In 1988, WalkingStick was hired by Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, to be an assistant professor of art. She taught there until 1990 when she was employed by the State University of New York, Stony Brook, a position she held for two years. She returned to Cornell University in 1992,

Awards She is the recipient of the following: 1983: National Endowment of the Arts grant 1995: Joan Mitchell Foundation award 2011: Lee Krasner award for lifetime achievement, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Abyss, 1989 Winter Flight, 1998–1999.

Exhibitions According to author Deborah Everett, "WalkingStick became solidly established in the mainstream art world during the 1980s and 1990s." For instance, her works went on a touring exhibition in 1994 after she exhibited at the Cairo Biennial.

In 2008, her "American Abstraction: Dialogue with the Cosmos" that honored Native American women was exhibited at the Montclair Art Museum. It contained parfleche bags with images of landscape designs, like the Wallowa Mountains, and abstract designs of the Nez Perce and other indigenous tribes. The bags were used to store and carry food and other items. and the Heard Museum in Phoenix. The show is the first to trace her four-decade-long career and includes many works that reflect "own hybrid cultural identity, engaging Native history along with feminism, Minimalism, and other key art historical movements. She has become particularly renowned for her majestic and sensual landscapes, which imbue natural scenery with the charge of personal and collective memory."

The Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio, began its 2017 special exhibition season with "Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist". The exhibit ran February 2017 through May 2017. "Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist" was also shown in 2018 at the Montclair Art Museum.

In 2020, the art of WalkingStick was exhibited in the exhibition Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

In 2023, the exhibition Kay WalkingStick/Hudson River School opened at the New-York Historical Society. At this time, this was the artist's largest museum exhibition in New York City.

Her work was included in the 2024 exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Collections WalkingStick's works are in the collections of:

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, an art museum in Buffalo, New York New Jersey State Museum Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts San Diego Museum of Art Southern Plains Indian Museum, Anadarko, Oklahoma Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas Steinman Hall and Shepard Hall, City University of New York

Publications Kay WalkingStick Alfred Bierstadt. "Primal Visions: Albert Bierstadt 'Discovers' America," catalog essay, A Cherokee Artist Looks at the Landing of Columbus. Montclair Museum, New Jersey, 2001. Kay WalkingStick. "Democracy, Inc: Kay WalkingStick on Indian Law." Artforum 30, November 1991, pp. 20–21. Kay WalkingStick, "Native American Art in the Postmodern Era." Art Journal 51, Fall 1992, pp. 15–17. Kay WalkingStick, "So Fine! Masterworks of Fine Art from the Heard Museum," curator's essay, Great American Artists, Heard Museum, Phoenix, 2002. W. Jackson Rushing III and Kristin Makholm, foreword by Kay WalkingStick "Modern Spirit, The Art of George Morrison". University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 2013. Kay WalkingStick, "Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 3", essay "No Reservations," Museum of Art and Design 2012.