Upcoming Exhibition: Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School

This exhibition showcases landscape paintings by the renowned, contemporary Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick in conversation with classic works from The New York Historical’s collection of 19th-century Hudson River School paintings, including work by the illustrious painter Albert Bierstadt. 

Highlights From the Exhibition

Kay WalkingStick, July Low Water, 2010, Oil and palladium leaf on panel in two parts. Courtesy the artist and Hales, London and New York. Photo by JSP Art Photography © Kay WalkingStick

Asher B. Durand, East Branch of the Ausable River, 1837-1878, Oil on canvas. Long term loan courtesy of Mr. Chet Schmitt, New Britain Museum of American Art, 2003.76LTL. Image courtesy of New Britain Museum of American Art.

Kay WalkingStick, Niagara, 2022, Oil on panel in two parts. The New York Historical, Purchased through the generosity of Agnes Hsu-Tang and Oscar Tang; Nancy Newcomb; Anonymous; Barry Barnett; Helen Appel; Belinda and Charles Bralver; Dorothy Tapper Goldman; Margi and Andrew Hofer; Louise Mirrer; Jennifer and John Monsky; Suzanne Peck and Brian Friedman; Pam and Scott Schafler; Barbara and Elliott Wagner; and Linda Ferber, 2023.2ab © Kay WalkingStick

Louis Davis Minot, Niagara Falls, 1818, Oil on linen. The New York Historical, Gift of Mrs. Waldron Phoenix Belknap Sr. to the Waldron Phoenix Belknap Jr. Collection, 1956.4

The exhibition spotlights how WalkingStick’s work connects to and diverges from the Hudson River School tradition and explores art’s role in shaping humankind’s relationship to the land. By examining and highlighting contemporary Indigenous art in the changing discourse of American art history, the exhibition celebrates a shared reverence for nature and galvanizes critical discussions on land dispossession and its reclamation by Indigenous peoples and nations.

Bringing Kay WalkingStick’s works to St. Petersburg allows our visitors to experience landscape paintings from a fresh, vital perspective. By pairing 19th-century Hudson River School works with contemporary Indigenous paintings, this exhibition prompts us to consider how lived experiences shape our perspectives of the land we share, and how it is represented in the American story.

Caitlin Pendola, Associate Curator

Showcasing WalkingStick’s work alongside both Euro-American and Indigenous traditions of art, the exhibition demonstrates the complex ways the artist contends with and interweaves these artistic lineages. Niagara is grouped with two paintings of the iconic waterfalls by Louisa Davis Minot (1788-1858), which are among the few known works by her hand and rare examples of early 19th-century landscape paintings by a Euro-American woman.

These works position WalkingStick within a lineage of women landscape painters in the Hudson River region while also considering the critical differences between the two artists’ approaches: Minot’s composition includes generic Indigenous figures to distinguish the site as North American, while WalkingStick uses a culturally specific Haudenosaunee pattern to mark the land as Indigenous.  

About Kay WalkingStick

Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935, Syracuse, NY) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma with Cherokee/Anglo heritage. Her six-decade career is both a visual record of her life experience and her attempt to present Native American history as a crucial part of America’s history. She draws on formal modernist painting traditions as well as the Native American experience to create works that connect the immediacy of the physical world with the spiritual. Attempting to connect the present with the past, her complex works hold tensions between representational and abstract imagery. Her paintings represent a knowledge of the Earth and its sacred quality.

I hope viewers will leave the Museum with a renewed sense of how beautiful and precious our planet is. Also, that they depart with the realization that those of us living in the western hemisphere are all living on Indian Territory. These are certainly straightforward, even obvious, thoughts, but I believe they are concepts easily forgotten.

Kay WalkingStick

_{This exhibition has been organized by The New York Historical.
Major support for Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School is provided by the Lily Auchincloss Foundation.}

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