Kay Walkingstick

Kay WalkingStick is a celebrated landscape painter, with a focus on the non-industrial landscapes of America. Her decades-long career has drawn on modernist painterly traditions and Native American cultural experience. WalkingStick’s Cherokee ancestry influences her distinctive approach to painting the American landscape and its metaphorical significances to Native American history. “The landscape sustains us physically and spiritually.  It is our beautiful corner of the cosmos,” she writes on her website. Throughout her practice are references to traditional Indigenous patterning, cultural memory, and WalkingStick’s own personal history. Her work seeks “spiritual truth through the acts of painting and metaphysical reflection.”

Recent Release - Still Blaming the Mountain (2026)

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Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School is an ongoing exhibition currently traveling from the Heard Museum in Arizona to the Allentown Art Museum in Allentown, PA, where it will be on display from June 20th to October 11th, 2026. Following Allentown, the exhibition will travel to The James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art in St. Petersburg, FL, and be on display from November 7, 2026, to March 21, 2027.

Organized by The New York Historical Museum in 2023, the exhibition showcases WalkingStick’s landscape paintings alongside classic works from the 19th-century Hudson River School, such as those by Albert Bierstadt and John Frederick Kensett. Additionally, the exhibition highlights contemporary Indigenous art as part of the changing discourse of American art history, while examining critical discussions on land dispossession.

WalkingStick was also recently on display with the Hales Gallery in New York until June 6th, 2026. The exhibition, Mesas/Mountains/Sky, is a solo presentation of new and recent landscape paintings of Colorado, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, and Rhode Island. “After visiting sites in person, she makes sketches and later works from memory, improvising and adapting elements as she moves between watercolor and oil, and between passages of precision and expressive painterliness, considering the essence of a place as much as its physical beauty.”

WalkingStick is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, but she lives and works in Pennsylvania. She received a BFA from Beaver College (now Arcadia University) in Glenside, PA, in 1959 and an MFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, in 1975.

Her work is part of many institutions including, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY; the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minneapolis, MN; the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, CA; the Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Canada; the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, PA; the Portland Art Museum in Portland OR; the Rockwell Museum of Western Art in Corning, NY; the San Diego Museum of Fine Arts in San Diego, CA; the St Louis Art Museum, in MO; the Southern Plains Indian Museum in Anadarko, OK; the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, KS; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, VA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY, among others.