Kay WalkingStick’s Transformative Paintings — American Art Moments

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Take a tour through celebrated Native artist Kay WalkingStick’s long and complex career through a trio of paintings in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection. Learn about the artist’s perspective, influences, and bold artistic voice with Melissa Ho, SAAM’s curator of 20th-century art, who calls WalkingStick “one of the great American painters of our time.” Ho takes a closer look at three works: Two Women II (1973), With Love to Marsden (1995), and Orilla Verde at the Rio Grande (2012). She shares insights into the different phases of WalkingStick’s artistic practice and discusses the artist’s social commentary, which ranges from statements on female autonomy to the Native presence on sacred lands.

This video is part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's ongoing series American Art Moments. Join a SAAM expert and go beyond the artwork label to discover the untold stories and rich connections represented in some of the museum's most iconic artworks.

Kay WalkingStick is one of the great American painters of our time, and she also is one of the most celebrated and pathbreaking Native-American artists of her generation. She was born in 1935. She was raised in Syracuse, New York. Her father was Cherokee and her mother Scotch-Irish. so she comes from this mixed heritage. One of the most exciting acquisitions in recent time for SAAM was the acquisition of not just one but three paintings by Kay WalkingStick.
Getting that small grouping is so important because she's had such a long and complex career, and so, we have paintings that speak to the early and mid-career and then more recent phases of her work.
"Two Women II" is a painting that WalkingStick made in 1973. There's basically the legs of two figures, on the bottom in this bright lime green, and then to the left and above, in this bright tangerine orange, with their legs bent and their feet pressed together. They appear to be relaxing or reclining on the floor. The green wedge at the top could be read as the corner of a door that's standing open, but there's also completely irrational elements that are just shapes that she put into the composition to make it more kinetic and vibrant. The way she described it to me was that she was trying to jazz the relationships between the forms and the colors.
She started painting in this hard-edged silhouetted way inspired by seeing her shadow on the beach, walking on wet sand, and she was really struck by how there was this abstracted version of her in her shadow that was still very recognizable. You can see the context of pop art. You also can feel the backdrop of the women's movement, of second wave feminism, the open sensuality of it and knowing that this is a female artist painting the female nude. She's often during this period using herself as her model. These are not paintings about the male gaze. They're really statements of female autonomy and the joy of embodied sensuality.
With "Love to Marsden" is a painting from some 20 years after "Two Women II." It's a diptych, which is a painting that's made on two panels put together. The title is a reference to the early American modernist painter, Marsden Hartley, and WalkingStick is a great admirer of his paintings. We have two landscapes by Hartley in our collection. You can see an echo of Hartley in the palette and the very blunt paint handling here. WalkingStick painted both panels just moving and shaping the paint with her bare hands, not using a brush.
The right side of this painting, WalkingStick is showing us something that is recognizable as a landscape. It looks like a mountain face against a sky. On the left side is something that's purely abstract, this red equilateral cross against a black field. WalkingStick talked about this as a dual reference, on the one hand, to the Christian cross, and on the other, to Native belief systems that invoke the four directions. You could look at it as seeing that there's both physical and spiritual significance to land. I think what WalkingStick is suggesting is that there's this important relationship between the two, that one is the extension of the other.
The third work is "Orilla Verde at the Rio Grande," which is the most recent painting out of the three. It was completed in 2012. This work is representative of landscapes that she starts making in the early 2000s, where she goes to a specific site in the United States and paints and sketches and takes photographs. Then in her studio, she paints that landscape.
There still is one abstract element to them, which is, on each of these paintings, she includes a pattern that she's borrowed from a historic object of Native art from the same location. In this case, she's drawing these patterns from ancestral Pueblo pots that now are part of the collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Indian.
She adapted the pattern from those pots and imprints it as her final touch. So she's really making a claim of cultural continuity and literally marking that land as Native land, and offering a rejoinder to the European-American tradition of 19th-century landscape painting that promoted the ideas that the land was empty and unoccupied and to be conquered. This painting is just a beautiful declaration of Native presence and persistence. The variety of Kay WalkingStick's touch across these three different paintings is really something to behold. Her voice, her perspective, just lends really valuable and needed texture to the stories that we can tell about painting in the United States over the last 50 years. She's still making vital works of art today in her eighties, it's just a remarkable career that I'm happy to celebrate at SAAM with these acquisitions.

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Kay WalkingStick’s Transformative Paintings — American Art Moments

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