The New-York Historical Society acquires work by Kay WalkingStick

Hales is proud to announce that The New-York Historical Society has acquired Kay WalkingStick's 2022 work, Niagara.

 

WalkingStick's practice in recent years has predominantly focused on single viewpoint landscapes of non-industrial America. Often painted across two panels, having evolved from diptychs which began in the 1980s. Still thinking about duality and symbiotic relationships, in WalkingStick's recent landscape works this is more closely bound to create one united piece. In the majestic paintings, WalkingStick reclaims the land by overlaying the site with the designs of the Native American people who have inhabited the area or live there now.

 

WalkingStick suggests that painting the landscape ‘is a dialogue with the mythic, the spiritual, with that with which transcends our bittersweet daily lives.’ The power and eternal quality of nature is felt in the monumental mountains, canyons, cliffs and vast skies. The landscapes reflect a balance between memory and lived experience, subtly evoking her personal history. 

 

WalkingStick’s practice is both a visual record of her experience on earth and an attempt to come to terms with a Native American history that has been forgotten or ignored. In works of rich colors and bold forms there is a sense of ancestral presence and a deep connection to place.