Kay WalkingStick

An acclaimed Indigenous artist, Kay WalkingStick has spent the last six decades painting landscapes that foreground her identity and heritage as a biracial citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her works range from modernist abstractions to representational images of mountains, deserts, and other sites of monumental scope and significance across the United States. WalkingStick is best known for her diptychs that visually connect dualities, coupling the physical and the spiritual, traditional imagery and abstraction, and the sacred and the earthly. These paintings were among the highlights of her first retrospective in 2015—organized by the National Museum of the American Indian—which toured the country for nearly three years. Rooted in ancestral history, WalkingStick’s serene depictions of land challenge popular understandings of Native American art while simultaneously reclaiming these sites as Indigenous-owned. Her works are in the collections of museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.