Kay WalkingStick
Personal Icon, 1975
Acrylic, wax, and ink on canvas
106.7 x 121.9 cm
42 x 48 in
42 x 48 in
Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935 Syracuse, NY) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She received a BFA from Beaver College (now Arcadia University) Glenside, PA in 1959 and...
Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935 Syracuse, NY) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. 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.
Over a career spanning five decades, WalkingStick’s practice has focused on the American Landscape and its metaphorical significances to Native Americans and people across the world. 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. Attempting to unify the present with history, her complex works hold tension between representational and abstract imagery. Her paintings represent a knowledge of the earth and its sacred quality.
Personal Icon (1975) is from a period of paintings that marks WalkingStick’s first foray into abstraction. In the year prior she had created a series of paintings of her artist apron hanging on a wall of colour. The draped piece fabric became a repeating motif, which WalkingStick describes as, ‘simple iconic shapes.’ Here, she removes the reference to the outside world in favor of pure abstraction, a work that explores shape and colour.
From the mid-1970s WalkingStick shifted away from previous figuration towards abstraction, which coincided with her burgeoning interest into Native American histories and her own heritage. In this critical period of work, WalkingStick is highly attuned to the expressive qualities of colour drawn from the Native American experience, especially those that reflect feelings of loss and tragedy.
A painting from the same body of work, made in the same year, For John Ridge (1975) was included in WalkingStick’s touring retrospective: The National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC, toured the United States to the Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Dayton Art Institute, OH; Gilcrease Art Museum, Tulsa, OK; Kalamazoo Institute of Art, MI; and Montclair Art Museum, NJ (2015-2018); and is now in the collection of the Gilcrease Museum, OK.
Over a career spanning five decades, WalkingStick’s practice has focused on the American Landscape and its metaphorical significances to Native Americans and people across the world. 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. Attempting to unify the present with history, her complex works hold tension between representational and abstract imagery. Her paintings represent a knowledge of the earth and its sacred quality.
Personal Icon (1975) is from a period of paintings that marks WalkingStick’s first foray into abstraction. In the year prior she had created a series of paintings of her artist apron hanging on a wall of colour. The draped piece fabric became a repeating motif, which WalkingStick describes as, ‘simple iconic shapes.’ Here, she removes the reference to the outside world in favor of pure abstraction, a work that explores shape and colour.
From the mid-1970s WalkingStick shifted away from previous figuration towards abstraction, which coincided with her burgeoning interest into Native American histories and her own heritage. In this critical period of work, WalkingStick is highly attuned to the expressive qualities of colour drawn from the Native American experience, especially those that reflect feelings of loss and tragedy.
A painting from the same body of work, made in the same year, For John Ridge (1975) was included in WalkingStick’s touring retrospective: The National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC, toured the United States to the Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Dayton Art Institute, OH; Gilcrease Art Museum, Tulsa, OK; Kalamazoo Institute of Art, MI; and Montclair Art Museum, NJ (2015-2018); and is now in the collection of the Gilcrease Museum, OK.