Growing, Faltering, Changing, Growing: Lessons From Kay WalkingStickPosted in Articles, Arts, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States, Women on 2018-06-08 01:53Z by Steven |
Growing, Faltering, Changing, Growing: Lessons From Kay WalkingStick
The New York Times
2018-06-07
Holland Cotter, Co-chief Art Critic
 Kay WalkingStick’s “New Mexico Desert,” 2011, in which bands of Navajo patterning float across scrub land and mesas as if surveying and protecting them. National Museum of the American Indian |
MONTCLAIR, N.J. — An artist’s career retrospective, if shaped with care, is more than a look at a life of labor. It’s also a record of contingent lives, cultural changes and a political passage in time. This is true of “Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist,” an era-spanning survey of this 83-year-old painter at the Montclair Art Museum here. Yet what powers the chronologically arranged show, first and last, is the personal: the sense it gives of one worker growing, changing, faltering, then growing and changing more.
Born in 1935 in Syracuse, Ms. WalkingStick was the child of a biracial marriage: “Syracuse Girl Weds Cherokee Indian” was the headline on the report of her parents’ wedding in the local newspaper. As it turned out, she saw little of her father over the years, though her mother, Scottish-Irish by descent, made a point of instilling pride in her daughter’s Native American heritage.
Ms. WalkingStick studied painting in college, and as a young wife and mother in suburban New Jersey in the 1960s, she continued to paint, keeping a close eye on what was happening in Manhattan. Among the earliest pieces in the show, from 1971, are two crisp, Pop-ish silhouette images in bright colors of female nudes. The artist herself was the model, and feminism — or at least the loosened-up spirit of it — a spur…
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