Kay WalkingStick
Kay WalkingStick (born March 2, 1935) is a Native American landscape artist and a member of the Cherokee Nation.
[5][6] Ralph was born in the Cherokee Nation capital of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and attended Dartmouth College.
[7] Kay's parents had four other children, and as they raised their family Ralph Walkingstick worked in the oil fields as a geologist.
[4] WalkingStick received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1959 from Beaver College, Glenside, Pennsylvania.
[nb 2] Ten years later she received the Danforth Foundation Graduate Fellowship for Women, and attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
[9] In graduate school she began to study Native American art and history, seeking to understand her "Indianness".
WalkingStick began a series of works about the 19th-century Nez Perce "Chief Joseph" who resisted reservation life.
[5][9] WalkingStick later integrated other elements into the works, like small rocks, pieces of pottery, metal shavings, and copper.
Throughout the process she added paint with her hands or a knife in the areas exposed from the cut wax to create her final work.
In another personal search, Walkingstick created Messages to Papa in 1974 to better understand the conflicted feelings that she had for her father.
In the middle of the work she hung a Cherokee language translation of the Lord's Prayer and a letter to her deceased father.
She said that the waterfall paintings are "a metaphor for the onrush of time and the unstoppable, ultimate destiny of our lives.
[13] The diptych Gioioso Variation I (2001) of the Italian Alps, inspired by the many trips WalkingStick made to Italy between 1996 and 2003, "contains sensuous, mountain crevasses that fold and ripple to create a lush visual space; on the right side is a dancing couple, brown against a lighter brown ground, both sides under a shiny, gold sky.
On the right side are purple mountains with a Nez Perce corn husk bag design.
She taught there until 1990 when she was employed by the State University of New York, Stony Brook, a position she held for two years.
[17] She is the recipient of the following: According to author Deborah Everett, "WalkingStick became solidly established in the mainstream art world during the 1980s and 1990s.
The show is the first to trace her four-decade-long career and includes many works that reflect "own hybrid cultural identity, engaging Native history along with feminism, Minimalism, and other key art historical movements.
She has become particularly renowned for her majestic and sensual landscapes, which imbue natural scenery with the charge of personal and collective memory.
