Kay WalkingStick, April Contemplating May, 1972 is included in “Untitled” (America) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and will be on continuous view.
This exhibition features renowned works from the Whitney’s collection alongside recent acquisitions, highlighting key ideas and approaches in American art from 1900 through the early 1980s. Beginning with the Whitney’s robust holdings in figurative and realist traditions, the presentation considers how artists have responded to place and memory in the American landscape, popular culture and the rise of consumerism, the seductions and illusions of mass media, and the spatial and cultural dynamics of abstraction.
Inspired by the sight of her shadow on a beach, Kay WalkingStick made a series of paintings featuring colorful silhouette portraits that allude to her multiple identities as an artist, a woman, a mother, and an Indigenous person of Cherokee ancestry. April Contemplating May portrays the artist in repose, fully nude, while a second figure, suggested only by the outstretched feet, shares this space of tranquility and sexual liberation. What appears to be a window is rather a reproduction of one of the artist’s landscape paintings: a stylized depiction of clouds made in response to reports of air pollution. The neon, acid hues in the work not only convey sensual euphoria but also hint at environmental catastrophe.
