The Art of Kay WalkingStick Color and Form

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The Art of Kay WalkingStick
Nude Color and Form 1971-1973
Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD
and the artist's collection

1
Two Women II
Kay WalkingStick (1935- ), American / Cherokee
Acrylic on canvas, 44" x 42" (w x h), 1973
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

This painting's eye-popping hues and lack of volumetric detail create playful confusion between the figures and the background. She describes this painting as a joyful expression of female self-determination and sensuality. Produced amid the women's movement and the sexual revolution of the 1970s, it offers a response to the long history of male artists depicting the female nude.

"One's entire personhood is represented in art and I am who I am -- a biracial woman. I'm a Cherokee, I was raised in a White culture, and both are in everything I do, whether it's landscape or figures or abstraction. It is always there because I'm there." - Kay WalkingStick, 2023

Wiki, edited
Kay WalkingStick (1935- ) is a Native American landscape artist and a member of the Cherokee Nation. Her art is in the collections of many universities and museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Israel Museum, the National Museum of Canada, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

2
April Contemplating May
Kay WalkingStick (1935- ), American / Cherokee
Acrylic on canvas, 50" x 50" (w x h), 1972
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Source: Wiki edited
Kay WalkingStick liked to color and draw from as a child. She holds a BFA from Beaver College (1959), now Arcadia University, Cheltenham Township, PA. She received a Danforth Foundation Graduate Fellowship for Women and got her MFA Pratt Institute (1971), New York, NY. She is an author and was a professor in the art department at Cornell University, where she taught painting and drawing. Kay WalkingStick is a painter who addresses interrelated themes of Native history, feminism, spirituality, cultural memory, embodiment, and land.

3
Fantasy for a January Day
Kay WalkingStick (1935- ), American / Cherokee
Acrylic on canvas, 56" x 50" (w x h), 1971
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD

Source: Wiki Edited
Kay WalkingStick has been accepted into many artist residency programs which gave her time away from teaching duties to paint. WalkingStick has won many awards and in 1995 was included in H.W. Janson's History of Art, a standard textbook used by university art departments. Ms. WalkingStick is an Honorary Vice President of the National Association of Women Artists, Inc.

4
Me and My Neon Box
Kay WalkingStick (1935- ), American / Cherokee
Acrylic on canvas, 60" x 54" (w x h), 1971
Collection of Kay WalkingStick

Smithsonian Museum Exhibition Label
WalkingStick brings to mind casual sexuality in this grouping of nude bodies and the suggestive title. In fact, three self-portraits populate this painting. She painted both the figures and the spaces between them with vibrant color so that the background shapes become an active part of the composition.

Heritage Source: Wiki Edited and Gabriella Shypula, American Women's History Initiative Writer and Editor:
Kay WalkingStick was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1935, the daughter of Simon Ralph WalkingStick and Emma McKaig WalkingStick. Kay's mother, Emma, was of Scottish-Irish heritage. Kay's father, Ralph, was a member of the Cherokee Nation, writing and speaking the Cherokee language. Ralph, born in the Cherokee Nation capital of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, attended Dartmouth College.

Kay's parents had four other children. They raised their young family while Ralph WalkingStick worked in the Oklahoma oil fields as a geologist. He became an alcoholic. While pregnant with Kay, her mother left Oklahoma with their children and moved to Syracuse, New York. Kay WalkingStick grew up in Syracuse without having experienced the cultural heritage of her Cherokee ancestors. Her siblings, who'd spent some of their childhood in Oklahoma, had a better understanding of their father's Cherokee traditions. Her mother told her "Indian stories" and talked about her handsome father. The family was proud to be Native American.

"One's entire personhood is represented in art and I am who I am -- a biracial woman. I'm a Cherokee, I was raised in a White culture, and both are in everything I do, whether it's landscape or figures or abstraction. It is always there because I'm there." - Kay WalkingStick, 2023