Mothers of Invention: Kay WalkingStick
Originally published July 31, 2020
Installation view of Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.All installation images courtesy of the NMAI unless otherwise noted
You might be wondering how I select an artist for this ongoing Mothers of Invention series, since there are so many talented women with impressive and influential careers. I begin with a solo exhibition, which provides me with an opportunity to see her oeuvre. Usually it’s a museum show. For Kay WalkingStick, it was a 50-year retrospective, Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist, which originated at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and traveled to five successive museums through 2018, the last of which was at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey.
Installation view at the Montclair Art Museum
Kay WalkingStick, New Mexico Desert, 2011, oil on panel, 40 x 80 inches
Purchased through a special gift from the Louise Ann Willilams Endowment, 2013
Photo courtesy of the Montclair Art Museum and American Federation of Arts
In Montclair I not only got to view the show but to hear the artist and one of the exhibition’s curators, Kathleen Ash-Milby, in conversation. And recently I had a long phone talk with WalkingStick as we hunkered down in our respective studios. I’ll intersperse elements of both conversations, as well as information from the exhibition catalog, throughout this post. The exhibition, curated also by David Penney, organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, follows the chronological path of an artist whose concerns have included figuration, abstraction, reductive forms, and the landscape of upstate New York and the American West, their formal issues and aesthetic expressions circling around one another to inform and enrich some five decades of work.
Two comments, culled from the catalog, contextualize the rich complexity of the artist:
"What does heritage have to do with my art? It is who I am. Art is a portrait of the artist, at least of the artist's thought processes, sense of self, sense of place in the world. If you see art as that, then my identity as an Indian is crucial." At the same time she notes, "This is who we Americans really are. All different, all the same, all it it together, making art."
Installation view at the National Museum of the American Indian
This view is just to the right of the museum's entrance to the show, with WalkingStick's paintings of silhouetted figures from the early Seventies, an exuberant time of body positivity supported by the Women's Movement. There's a lovely dichotomy here: hard edges depicting fluid figures in a saturated palette of what you might call robust pastels.
On the left wall, Feet Series Arrangement, 1972, acrylic on canvas, six panels each 20 x 20 inches
In the distance, two paintings from the Hudson Reflections series, acrylic on canvas
Below: Me and My Neon Box, 1972, acrylic on canvas, 1973, 54 x 60 inches
Writing in the catalog to the show, Kate Morris identifies these figures as "a composite self portrait"
Kay WalkingStick in 1972 before Hudson Reflection, 1
Photo by Michael Echols
Kay WalkingStick in 1972 before Hudson Reflection, 1
Photo by Michael Echols
A Sensual Suggestion, 1974, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 42 inches
Installation view at the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma, showing A Sensual Suggestion. I'm including views from museums other than the National Museum of the American Indian and the Montclair Art Museum so that you can see the various iterations of curatorial organization, as well as get a sense of the scale of the work
Photo: Erik Campos, courtesy of the Gilcrease Museum and American Federation of Arts
At the Montclair Art Museum, the exhibition's curator, Kathleen Ash-Milby (in gray sweater) with MAM's curator Gail Stavitsky, standing before Sakajaweha, Leader of Men, 1976; acrylic, saponified wax, and ink on canvas
Image courtesy of the Montclair Art Museum
Installation view at the National Museum of the American Indian
The Sakajaweha painting is on the far wall. Cardinal Points (more of which in a moment) is on the middle of the long wall
Installation view at the National Museum of the American Indian
The Chief Joseph Series is in the foreground
Above and below: the Chief Joseph series, 1974-76, 36 paintings, each 20 x 15 inches; acrylic, ink, and saponified wax on canvas. They are shown here in configurations that vary by number and placement.
Installation view at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa showing another grid of the Chief Joseph paintings
Photo: Erik Campos, courtesy of the Gilcrease Museum and American Federation of Arts
Cardinal Points, 1983-85, acrylic and saponified wax on canvas, 60 x 60 inches
Switching venues: Here we see the placement of Cardinal Points and Montauk, II (Dusk) at the Dayton Art Institute
Photo from daytonlocal.com
Montauk, II (Dusk), 1983; acrylic, saponified wax, and ink on canvas; 56 x 56 inches
This painting marks a turning point for WalkingStick. An abstract composition, it nonetheless draws from the land and sea she experienced during a monthlong residency in Montauk, at the tip of Long Island, courtesy of the Edward F. Albee Foundation. From this point on landscape anchors much of her work in a side-by-side diptych format or in the horizontal proportion that would have been made by two squares.
Installation view at the National Museum of the American Indian
Night/ORT (Usvi), 1991; oil, acrylic, saponified wax, and copper on canvas, 36.25 x 72.25 inches
Montclair art Museum, New Jersey, purchased with funds provided by Alberta Stout, 2000.10
Installation view at the National Museum of the American Indian
Two paintings from this view are shown below
The Abyss, 1989; left panel: oil on canvas; right panel: acrylic and saponified wax on canvas; 36 x 72 inches
In terms of chronology, this painting was made in grief, after the unexpected death of the artist's husband, Michael Echols. WalkingStick had just been appointed to the Cornell faculty and found solace in the landscape surrounding the university, particularly the gorges, which found their way into her work
Remnants of Cataclysm, 1992; acrylic, saponified wax, oil, and copper on canvas; 28 x 56 inches
The diptych format is a signature for WalkingStick's work, a way of bringing together seemingly incongruous elements--abstraction and landscape, the spiritual and the physical, imagination and experience, undefined space and the tangibility of earth and water set into perspectival views. The format has even been identified as an expression of the artist's bicultural identity.
"The diptych is an especially powerful metaphor to express the beauty and power of uniting the disparate and this makes it particularly attractive to those of us who are biracial," says the artist. But, notes David W. Penney, one of the exhibition's curators, in his catalog essay, Stereo View, "The diptychs do not divide into an Indian side on the one hand and white side on the other." As I see it they are, in Buddhist terms, a union of opposites through time, material, and idea. In a recent conversation, WalkingStick said she sees the format not as a reconciliation of opposites but as a "continuation" of ideas, "like the stanzas of a poem."
Installation view at the National Museum of the American Indian
Featuring Venere Alpina, I on the center wall, and ACEA V on right wall
Below: Venere Alpina, 1997, diptych with oil on canvas, left, and steel mesh over acrylic, saponified wax, and plastic stones, right
ACEA V, 2003, gouache and gold acrylic on paper, 19 x 38 inches
Image from the Dayton Art Institute website
The Azienda Comunale Energia e Ambiente, a former thermoelectric facility in Rome, now a museum, houses the historic marble statuary and mosaics that inspired WalkingStick to produce a series of joyous paintings that juxtaposed dancing feet with sumptuous plant patterns and arabesques
Over Lolo Pass, 2003; charcoal, gouache and encaustic on paper, 25 x 50 inches
Going to the Sun Road, 2011, oil and white gold leaf collage on canvas
Farewell to the Smokies, 2007, oil on wood panel, 36 x 72 inches
Foreground: The Sandias, 2008, oil stick on paper, 25 x 50 inches
New Mexico Desert, 2011, oil on panel, 40 x 80 inches
This is the painting that greets visitiors to each incarnation of Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist
Long Valley Caldera, 2014, oil on panel, 40 x 80 inches
These last two paintings are not part of the show but continue the chronology. You can see more recent and current work on the artist's website
Above: Teton Snow Ribs, 2019, oil on panel, 31.5 x 63.75
Below: Oh, Canada!, 2018-19, 36 x 72 inches
A recent photo of WalkingStick in the studio of her Pennsylvania home
"Paint is mud and oil, really. Yet these materials can be transformed into poetry. I love that."
Photo: Rick Schwartz for The Boston Globe
A Brief Interview
What's it like to experience a huge retrospective of your work?
While many of us have experienced, or will experience, the thrill of walking into a solo exhibition of our work, most of us are unlikely to know what it feels like to have a retrospective, particularly one that travels to five difference venues, each with curators who contextualize it for their particular institutions.
"It was overwhelming to see the work for the first time," says WalkingStick. She was talking about the installation at the National Museum of the American Indian in the nation's capitol. "It's a stunning feeling."
The Inaugural opening took place at the National Museum of the American Indian in November, 2015, which she attended with her family. It then traveled to the Heard Museum in Phoenix, where WalkingStick's work is already in the collection; the Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio; the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, Michigan; the Gilcrease Art Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma; and the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey.
What was the Native response?
"There was a wonderful group of Pottawatomies in Kalamazoo. They came to the opening, draped me in a blanket, a Pendleton. That was just so touching and beautiful. I was so moved by their affection." But she admits, "I would have liked it to be seen by more Native Americans."
Illness prevented her from traveling to Dayton and Tulsa. (She had a heart attack and subsequent bypass.) However, the show was in Tulsa when the Native American Art Studies Association was meeting there, and WalkingStick was honored. Her daughter Erica accepted the award in her stead.
What have you not been asked?
WalkingStick's exhibition was much covered as it traveled to its various venues (Google it if you wish to know more). Articles, perhaps drawing from the same press materials, offered much of the same information. I wanted to know what she hadn't been asked and wanted to say.
"I want people to look. If you look at art slowly you can learn all about it. I would like people to see. If you read a book, read it as slowly as the author wrote it. All right, that's not likely, but people need to slow down.
"At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Dirk and I sat in front of Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, the painting that has the Chinese vases. We sat in front of it for probably half an hour. Just examined it really well. I love Sargent. His paintings are organized so beautifully. You can look into the blackness and see light. I wish people would look at my work that way. At yours. At art in general."
The Monograph
If you are an admirer of WalkingStick's work, you must get the exhibition catalog. A handsome tome edited by curators Kathleen Ash-Milby and David W. Penney, it contains essay contributions by critics, academics and curators, Native and not, who offer a multifacted look at this multifaceted artist.
All aspects of WalkingStick's oeuvre are addressed--the feminist figures, the diptych format that is the hallmark of her work, her interest in a landscape that has been inhabited by Native people long before it became "American" land, and her passion for the art and culture of Italy. There are also essays by the artist, who discusses materials and process, and by her daughter, Erica WalkingStick Echols Lowry, who writes about the artist in a more personal and intimate way.
Where to see more work by Kay WalkingStick
WalkingStick is represented by Hales Gallery in Chelsea, New York City, and by the Froelick Gallery in Portland, Oregon. Her work is in numerous collections, including the Heard Art Museum, Phoenix; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. WalkingStick's work is included in the recently published Landscape Painting Now and my own book, The Art of Encaustic Painting, which came out in 2001.
There's also a wealth of information--images and links--on WalkingStick's website.
At Hales Gallery
Gioso i-Fieta, 2000-2020, oil on panel with gold leaf in two parts, 32 x 64 inches
At Froelick Gallery
Cherokee Dancers V, 2016, gouache and acrylic on paper, 17.5 x 34 inches
At the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts
La Primavera, 2005, oil and gold leaf on panel, 32 x 64 inches
JM photo
WalkingStick's work is included in a current exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum, In American Waters, which is on vie through October 3, 2021
Images of Kay WalkingStick's work appear with the artist's permission
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