Kay WalkingStick in 'Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection' at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

Kay WalkingStick in 'Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection' at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, USA

 

Kay WalkingStick, 'Red Painting/Red Person', 1976 is included in 'Making Their Mark' at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum through 5 January 2026, its third stop on a nationwide exhibition tour.

 

'Making Their Mark' champions the lives and work of women artists, bringing into vibrant relief their intergenerational relationships, formal and material breakthroughs, and historical impact. Through drawings, mixed media works, paintings, sculptures, and textile works, the artists of 'Making Their Mark' rechart art history through their singular, iconic practices.

 

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.

 

'Red Painting/Red Person', 1976 features incised, abstract symbols that echo certain aspects of Native American iconography—a bow or a canoe, most explicitly. The artist has described the motif in geometric terms, as a segment of a circle, to encourage wider readings. In Red Painting/Red Person, four of these forms are arranged in a row across a burgundy-hued square, one facing in the opposite direction from the rest. This red field and the matching outer border contrast with the ink-streaked, yellowish inner border, creating the kind of duality that has occupied WalkingStick throughout her practice.

Following presentations in New York, Berkeley, and St. Louis, the exhibition will travel to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. in 2026, and to Newfields, Indianapolis in 2027.