11 April – May 2026
Opening reception: Saturday 11 April, 3 – 5pm
Hales is delighted to announce Mesas/Mountains/Sky, a solo exhibition of new and recent landscape paintings by Kay WalkingStick at our New York gallery. The exhibition will be WalkingStick’s third with Hales, and follows the major presentation of works from this series in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2024) as well as the ongoing touring exhibition Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School, which originated at The New York Historical in 2023 and is currently on view at the Heard Museum, Arizona.
WalkingStick (b. 1935, Syracuse, NY) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and has Cherokee/Anglo heritage. Over a career spanning seven decades, WalkingStick's practice has focused on the American Landscape and its metaphorical significances to Native Americans and people across the world. Drawing on modernist painterly traditions as well as Native American cultural experience, WalkingStick creates works that connect the immediacy of the physical world with the spiritual.
The exhibition features new paintings on panel and paper that continue WalkingStick’s engagement with non-industrial landscapes. Spanning present-day Colorado, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho and Rhode Island, the works serve as both visual record and spiritual testimonial. After visiting sites in person, she makes sketches and later works from memory, improvising and adapting elements as she moves between watercolor and oil, and between passages of precision and expressive painterliness, considering the essence of a place as much as its physical beauty. Central to this body of work is WalkingStick’s signature use of traditional Indigenous patterning, which she overlays onto the painted surface, in a symbolic gesture of reclamation and protection.
Many of these Indigenous designs are researched in the archives of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. In South of Ouray (2024), Ascent to Ouray (2025), and Silverton (2025), the geometric pattern is drawn from a Southern Ute shoulder bag design. In Sage Brush and Cholla (2025), the pattern derives from a Navajo rug design and the composition foregrounds plant life—cholla cactus and sagebrush—both of which hold ecological and cultural significance for Navajo communities.
WalkingStick’s practice sits within the long tradition of landscape painting in American art history. Complementing and reframing this tradition, she reclaims the land not as territory to be conquered but as a site of cultural memory and continuity. Balancing memory with lived experience, her landscapes subtly evoke her personal history while engaging a Native American past that has often been overlooked or marginalized. Through rich color, bold forms, and layered symbolism, the works suggest an enduring ancestral connection to place.
WalkingStick 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.
WalkingStick's works are held in numerous museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR; National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian, Washington DC; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Denver Art Museum, CO; and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, VA, among many others.
WalkingStick’s extensive retrospective at 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). WalkingStick has been included in many exhibitions, including at The Whitney Museum of[MF1] 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; Dayton Art Institute, OH; National Gallery of Canada, ON; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; and Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT.
