Kay WalkingStick

Kay WalkingStick (born March 2, 1935) is a Native American landscape artist and a member of the Cherokee Nation.

Her later landscape paintings, executed in oil paint on wood panels often include patterns based on Southwest American Indian rugs, pottery, and other artworks.

WalkingStick's works are in the collections of many universities and museums, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Israel Museum, the National Museum of Canada, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

She is an author and was a professor in the art department at Cornell University, where she taught painting and drawing.

She has been accepted into many artist residency programs which gave her time away from teaching duties to paint.

Kay WalkingStick was born in Syracuse, New York, on March 2, 1935, the daughter of Simon Ralph Walkingstick and Emma McKaig Walkingstick.

Emma was of Scottish-Irish heritage, and Kay's father, Ralph, was a member of the Cherokee Nation, who wrote and spoke the Cherokee language.

Ralph was born in the Cherokee Nation capital of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and attended Dartmouth College.

Kay's parents had four other children, and as they raised their family Ralph Walkingstick worked in the oil fields as a geologist.

He became an alcoholic.

While pregnant with Kay, her mother left Oklahoma with their other children and moved to Syracuse, New York.

WalkingStick grew up in Syracuse without having experienced the cultural heritage of her Cherokee ancestors.

Her siblings, who spent some of their childhood in Oklahoma, had a better understanding of their father's Cherokee traditions.

Her mother told her "Indian stories" and talked about her handsome father.

The family was proud to be Native Americans.

Kay liked to color and draw from a young age.

WalkingStick married R. Michael Echols in 1959, and they had two children, Michael David Echols and Erica WalkingStick Echols Lowry.

WalkingStick received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1959 from Beaver College, Glenside, Pennsylvania.

Ten years later she received the Danforth Foundation Graduate Fellowship for Women, and attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

WalkingStick was at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire for a month-long residency in both 1970 and 1971.

In graduate school during the early 1970s, her work became more abstract and were included in many New York City exhibitions, at a time when Native American artists' works were seldom exhibited.

In graduate school she began to study Native American art and history, seeking to understand her "Indianness".

In another personal search, Walkingstick created Messages to Papa in 1974 to better understand the conflicted feelings that she had for her father.

The work was a stereotypical image of a Native American dwelling, the tipi, although it was not a Cherokee structure.

She received her Master of Fine Arts in 1975.

In July 1976 she was an artist-in-residence in Saratoga Springs, New York, at the Yaddo Artists' Colony, and at Montauk, New York, in August 1983 at the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center.

In 1978 she had a solo exhibition at Bertha Urdang Gallery.

WalkingStick later integrated other elements into the works, like small rocks, pieces of pottery, metal shavings, and copper.

Throughout the process she added paint with her hands or a knife in the areas exposed from the cut wax to create her final work.

Michael Echols died in 1989.

She married artist Dirk Bach.

In 1992 she painted at the Conference and Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.

WalkingStick won many awards and in 1995 was included in H.W. Janson's History of Art, a standard textbook used by university art departments.

Ms. WalkingStick is an Honorary Vice President of the National Association of Women Artists, Inc. www.thenawa.org

In 1995 she was a visiting teacher and artist at the Vermont Studio Center for a month.

In 2011, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree by Arcadia University.

She created representational art works after college which for the next 10 years were self-described as "hard-edged" and "realistic".

They married in November 2013 and have lived in Easton, Pennsylvania.

WalkingStick began a series of works about the 19th-century Nez Perce "Chief Joseph" who resisted reservation life.

She layered wax and acrylic paint, mixed together onto inked canvas and left the design unpainted then cut to create designs.