Kay WalkingStick, Red Synapsis
Kay WalkingStick
1935-
Cherokee
Date
1985
Medium Specific
acrylic and wax on canvas
Classification
Painting
Dimensions
56 x 56 in. (142.2 x 142.2 cm)
Accession Number
2004.20.15.03
Credit
Gift of the Artist
Biography
A New York City Native painter whose style includes realism, conceptualism, and abstract expressionism, Kay Walkingstick (b.1935) uses her identity, religion, and heritage to create landscapes, figural depictions, and other symbolic works to connect reality with spirituality. She attended Beaver College in Glenside, Pennsylvania, graduating with a BFA in 1959 and in 1972 she earned a Danforth Fellowship, which she used to attend the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In 1975, she graduated with her Master’s degree in Fine Arts.
As an abstract artist, her work deals with issues of her mixed ancestry, the sacredness of the earth, the balance between land and space, and the relationship between spirituality and the physical being. In the mid-1980s, Walkingstick began an ongoing series of diptych paintings, prints, and drawings, in which she used two juxtaposed images to represent different aspects of a subject or a theme. Loaded with meaning, her paintings have always been highly referential, yet quite minimal. Her work can be found in several museum collections, including the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Arts in Indianapolis, Indiana, the National Museum of the American in Washington, D.C. and the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She currently resides in New York and was a professor at Cornell University from 1988-2005.
As an abstract artist, her work deals with issues of her mixed ancestry, the sacredness of the earth, the balance between land and space, and the relationship between spirituality and the physical being. In the mid-1980s, Walkingstick began an ongoing series of diptych paintings, prints, and drawings, in which she used two juxtaposed images to represent different aspects of a subject or a theme. Loaded with meaning, her paintings have always been highly referential, yet quite minimal. Her work can be found in several museum collections, including the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Arts in Indianapolis, Indiana, the National Museum of the American in Washington, D.C. and the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She currently resides in New York and was a professor at Cornell University from 1988-2005.