Kay WalkingStick K
Passion and Place
ay WalkingStick has always been
enthralled with the beauty of the landscape. Sitting last May along the edge of the Ra-
mapo River, in northern New Jersey, a place brimming with activity as tiny insects leaped across the surface of the water and thick foliage bristled in the summer breeze, WalkingStick silently studied the scene as she sketched. “My paintings aren’t exact depictions of a
place; they are based on the look and feel of a place,” she says. “Landscape paintings are depic- tions of nature re-organized by an artist. This is what landscape painters have always done.” This thoughtful, but sophisticated, approach to landscape painting has led WalkingStick to her standing today as both a celebrated Native artist and landscape painter. The retrospective Kay WalkingStick: An
American Artist, which opens this fall at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., will be a major milestone in this Cherokee artist’s career. It will provide a de- tailed visual history of her life’s work, from the early 1970s onward. It may come as a surprise to some visitors that WalkingStick’s paintings have ranged from edgy, playful, candy-colored nudes, such as Me and My Neon Box (1971) to dramatic abstractions which pay homage
to American Indian historical figures, such as Sakajeweha: Leader of Men (1976). However, in a career spanning almost five decades, it is the landscape that calls to her again and again. Early in her career, while she balanced the
challenge of raising a young family in north- ern New Jersey with pursuing opportunities in the buzzing art world of New York City, her representational imagery focused on color and form, including numerous nudes depicted in silhouette, and also elegant, lightly whimsical depictions of the Hudson River and a cloud-filled sky. In 1973, WalkingStick decided to pursue her MFA at Pratt Insti- tute in New York City and turned wholly to abstraction, both as a formal exploration of geometry and as a means to express deeper meaning about Native history and leaders. Though she had always taken her Cherokee identity for granted, during this time Native people were becoming more and more visible within the national media, leading her to use her art to more closely examine her relation- ship to a larger American Indian identity. Sakajeweha: Leader of Men (see page 53),
is an iconic example of WalkingStick’s work from this period. The surface is covered with an acrylic and a cold wax emulsion, giving
BY KATHLEEN ASH-MILBY AND BRADLEY PECORE
→ SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 19
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