Kay WalkingStick
An artist exploring landscape, memory, and Cherokee identity through painting.
Kay WalkingStick was born on March 2, 1935, in Syracuse, New York, to Emma McKaig Walkingstick, of Scottish-Irish descent, and Ralph Walkingstick, a Cherokee Nation citizen born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Her mother left Oklahoma while pregnant with WalkingStick, relocating the family to Syracuse — meaning she grew up apart from the day-to-day cultural life of the Cherokee Nation that her older siblings had known. Still, as the Smithsonian American Art Museum notes, her mother reminded her to take fierce pride in her heritage, once telling a young Kay simply: “Stand up straight, Kay, you’re a Cherokee.”
WalkingStick showed an early interest in drawing and color. She earned her BFA from Beaver College (now Arcadia University) in Pennsylvania in 1959, the same year she married and began raising a family in New Jersey. Balancing motherhood with a developing studio practice proved difficult, but she remained committed, visiting New York City’s galleries and museums while slowly forming her own visual language. She later earned a Danforth Foundation Graduate Fellowship for Women and completed her MFA at Pratt Institute in 1975.
Her early 1970s work — bright, Hard Edge-influenced figurative paintings exploring the body and female identity — emerged directly from the energy of the women’s movement. As the American Indian Movement gained national visibility later in the decade, WalkingStick began to weave together feminist and Indigenous perspectives, producing works that engaged historical Native figures such as Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph. In 1984, she developed the diptych format that would define much of her mature practice: two-panel paintings pairing a representational landscape with an abstracted image of that landscape, uniting what she called “snapshot” memory — what we see now — with “mythic” memory, the deeper spiritual and historical layers of place.
WalkingStick’s life and practice have been shaped by both recognition and loss. After the sudden death of her first husband, Michael Echols, in 1989, her work took on a more introspective tone for a period. From 1988 until her retirement in 2005, she taught as Professor of Fine Arts at Cornell University while continuing to paint and exhibit prolifically.
In the early 2000s, WalkingStick began traveling to specific American landscapes — including the Southwest, the Wallowa Mountains, and the Great Smoky Mountains — sketching and photographing sites before returning to her studio to create large-scale panel paintings, often incorporating motifs inspired by the artistic traditions of the Indigenous peoples historically connected to those places.
WalkingStick’s contributions have been widely recognized. In 1995, she became the first Native American artist — and first Native American woman — to be included in H. W. Janson’s influential History of Art. Her career was honored with a national touring retrospective organized by the National Museum of the American Indian, a major exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, and inclusion in the 2024 Venice Biennale, reflecting a career that has helped bring Native perspectives into the center of American art history.
Discover WalkingStick’s Studio Session here:
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Internal curatorial and exhibition materials provided to borrowing partner institutions.