Awareness Post Q2 - Week of 12/11

South Rim, 2016, oil on wood panel, 36" x 72"

Niagara, 2022, oil on panel, 40" x 80"

This week, I want to highlight the artist Kay WalkingStick, a Cherokee painter and landscape artist, whose work draws attention to the connection between the land and Native culture. Her work has been a part of many solo museum and gallery exhibitions such as the exhibit "Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist," at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. (2015), and Painting as Memory," at the Froelick Gallery in Portland, OR (2021). Some of the  group exhibitions WalkingStick was a part of include  "Epoch of Abstraction," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY (2022), and  “Hear My Voice: Native American Art of the Past and Present,” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, VA (2017).

Although I am not a landscape artist, I greatly appreciate WalkingStick’s work and find it truly breathtaking. The vibrancy in the colors and the softness of the landscape give her work a deeper and more spiritual feel to them, something that goes far beyond a simple landscape. One thing that I really like about both South Rim and Niagara are the symbols the artist chose to include. I have been trying to introduce more symbols into my own work, and seeing how WalkingStick chose to incorporate pieces of her culture into her art, makes her work all the more compelling and inspiring to me. WalkingStick's ability to interweave parts of her self and her culture through multiple uses of symbolism is somehting I wish to take with me on my own artistic journey.