Frieze Los Angeles: Kay WalkingStick

For the 2025 edition of Frieze Los Angeles, Hales is proud to exhibit a solo presentation of late 1970s to early 1980s abstractions by revered American artist Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935 Syracuse, NY), marking her first solo project on the West Coast in forty years. WalkingStick's celebrated solo exhibition, Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School, originating at The New York Historical, is currently touring the United States and in 2024 her work was featured in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. WalkingStick is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. 

 

In a renowned oeuvre spanning seven decades, WalkingStick draws on formal modernist painterly traditions as well as her indigenous heritage to create works that connect the immediacy of the physical world with the spiritual. The late 1970s to early 1980s abstractions are the culmination of a period of great artistic development and experimentation during her time working in New York City, where WalkingStick strove to develop an abstract language that was distinctly her own. From the mid-1970s she had shifted away from her earlier figurative works towards abstraction, a move that coincided with her burgeoning interest into her own Cherokee heritage, her enrolment at the Pratt Institute, and a backdrop of the The American Indian Movement (AIM) that had been active in recent years. 

 

Across this critical period, WalkingStick's work maintained a significant engagement with geometry, situating her compositions within grids whilst progressively applying layers of paint to create thick impasto surfaces. In striving for a physical connection to her work, WalkingStick layered the different colors of acrylic and wax medium directly with her hands, imbuing the painting with a sensuality and expressive gesture. For WalkingStick, adding the wax to the acrylic paint, "gave the manmade acrylic a warm, natural look." Through this building up of layers as well as the deep depth of the canvases she worked on, her paintings became muscular, sculptural-like objects into which she would then vibrantly cut with a woodcutter's tool to reveal the colors underneath. Beneath the dark surfaces of The Night Café, and Synaptic Blue, vivid greens and reds are revealed. This interplay of surface, color and depth was critical to WalkingStick's work from this period. 

 

The arc shape seen throughout WalkingStick's paintings and drawings of the 1970s and '80s, seemingly suspended on and within the surface, became a reoccurring motif that she would explore with progressive complexity and rigor. Always anchored with an underlying geometry, in works such as Giddy Grey, Memory of the Santee Sioux, and Anger Ritual, WalkingStick cut into the surface to reveal these semi-circle forms and gridded lines, allowing the appearance of earlier layers of color to define the shapes. In other works, such as The Night Café, the arc form developed into raised ridges-an additional layer of canvas added so that it could be cut into and raised into a relief position, by filling the crevice with more of the medium and heavy acrylic gel. This method of sculpting the surfaces and edges of her paintings, often deployed in the later paintings from this period, allowed WalkingStick to imbue the abstractions with suggestions of the earth, one that would subsequently lead her work to delve deeper into the natural world around us. 

 

Works from this period of WalkingStick's career are featured in numerous museum collections, notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR.

 

More broadly, WalkingStick's works are held in collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; New York Historical Society, NY; National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian, Washington DC; Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD;  Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI;  Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Denver Art Museum, CO; Saint Louis Art Museum, MO; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS; and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA.     

 

WalkingStick has been included in many exhibitions, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian, Washington DC; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR;  Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN; Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ; Montclair Art Museum, NJ;  Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Kalamazoo Institute of Art, MI; Dayton Art Institute, OH; Heard Museum, Phoenix, AR; National Gallery of Canada, ON; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; and Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT.