Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935 Syracuse, NY) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, she has Cherokee/Anglo heritage. She received a BFA from Beaver College (now Arcadia University) Glenside, PA in 1959 and an MFA from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY in 1975. She lives and works in Pennsylvania.
Over a career spanning six decades, WalkingStick’s practice has focused on the American Landscape and its metaphorical significance to Native Americans. WalkingStick draws on formal modernist painterly traditions as well as the Native American experience to create works that connect the immediacy of the physical world with the spiritual.
WalkingStick’s early work focused on an exploration of the body, which she painted as a flattened silhouette and often depicting nudes in bright colors. From the mid-1970s, WalkingStick shifted towards abstraction. In this critical period, her paintings became increasingly geometric and minimalist. Using her hands and a pallet knife to spread a mixture of acrylic paint and saponified wax on the canvases. The thickly layered surfaces of these paintings are sculptural, creating a cartographic texture of ridges and valleys, suggesting geological formations or the earth seen far above.
In the 1980s after spending time in the Colorado Rockies, WalkingStick became enamored with the rugged western landscape there. She felt compelled to depict it combining abstraction with landscape in pairs of paintings joined together as diptychs. These iconic two paneled works directly combine traditional modes of landscape painting with the formally American abstraction of New York. Each work holds a duality, WalkingStick states, “the diptych is an especially meaningful metaphor to express the beauty and power of uniting the disparate and this makes it particularly attractive to those of us who are biracial. It also visualizes the connection between our sacred earth and the cosmos, reminding us of the need to protect our planet.”
In the 1990s WalkingStick lived in Rome for three semesters while teaching at Cornell University, where she was Professor of Fine Arts from 1988 until her retirement as a Professor Emerita in 2005. She traveled extensively while in Rome and as one would expect, those travels had a profound effect on her work. During this time her experiences led her back to not only using brushes again, but also incorporating figures in her work – often dancing figures. The golden interiors of the many churches led to her use of gold leaf referencing the spiritual or the unknown in a long series of paintings.
In her most recent works, WalkingStick paints single viewpoint landscapes of non-industrial America, reclaiming the land by overlaying the paintings with designs of the Native American people who have inhabited or live there now. Sublime vistas are painted in fluid brushstrokes with bands of traditional Native American patterning floating on the surface, as if protecting them.
