Hales is proud to announce representation of American artist Kay WalkingStick. WalkingStick’s works are currently included in Site, a three-person exhibition at Hales New York. The gallery will host a solo show of her work in New York City in 2022.
Primarily a painter, Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935 Syracuse, NY) has for over six decades explored the American Landscape and its metaphorical significances to Native Americans and people across the world. WalkingStick has Cherokee/Anglo heritage, and she draws on the Native American experience as well as formal modernist painterly traditions 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.
WalkingStick’s practice is both a visual record of her experience on earth and her attempt to come to terms with Indian history that is such a crucial part of America's history. In these works of rich colors and bold forms there is a sense of ancestral presence and a deep connection to place.
Her extensive retrospective, Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist at The National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C., toured institutions throughout the United States to the Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Dayton Art Institute, OH; Gilcrease Art Museum, Tulsa, OK; and Kalamazoo Institute of Art, MI. In its final iteration at The Montclair Art Museum, NJ in 2018, Holland Cotter reviewed the exhibition in the New York Times, stating ‘The show lets us see an artist of deep curiosity and poised discipline developing an art that will let her give politics and personal history, reality and memory with equal, and eventually undivided weight.’
WalkingStick’s work is held in many collections, including the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Denver Art Museum, CO; Israel museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Metropolitan museum of Art, New York, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa, Canada; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, as well as others.
