Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935 Syracuse, NY) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, she has Cherokee/Anglo heritage. She received a BFA from Beaver College (now Arcadia University) Glenside, PA in 1959 and an MFA from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY in 1975. She lives and works in Pennsylvania.

Over a career spanning six decades, WalkingStick’s practice has focused on the American Landscape and its metaphorical significances to Native Americans and people across the world. WalkingStick draws on formal modernist painterly traditions as well as the Native American experience to create works that connect the immediacy of the physical world with the spiritual.

WalkingStick’s early work focused on an exploration of the body, which she painted as a flattened silhouette and often depicting nudes in bright colors. From the mid-1970s WalkingStick shifted towards abstraction. In this critical period, WalkingStick’s paintings became increasingly geometric and minimalist.

In the 1980s after spending time in the Colorado Rockies, WalkingStick became enamored with the rugged western landscape there. She felt compelled to depict it combining abstraction with landscape in pairs of paintings joined together as diptychs. These iconic two paneled works directly combine traditional modes of landscape painting with the formally American abstraction of New York. Each work holds a duality, WalkingStick states, ‘the diptych is an especially meaningful metaphor to express the beauty and power of uniting the disparate and this makes it particularly attractive to those of us who are biracial. It also visualizes the connection between our sacred earth and the cosmos, reminding us of the need to protect our planet.’

WalkingStick’s extensive retrospective at The National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC, toured the United States to the Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Dayton Art Institute, OH; Gilcrease Art Museum, Tulsa, OK; Kalamazoo Institute of Art, MI; and Montclair Art Museum, NJ (2015-2018). WalkingStick has been included in many other exhibitions, most recently Art Basel in Miami (2023) and the Venice Biennale (2024). WalkingStick was a Professor of Fine Arts at Cornell University from 1988 until her retirement as a Professor Emerita in 2005.