Kay WalkingStick’s Landscape Paintings Highlight the Absence of Indigenous Groups

How do you paint absence? A new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society (NYHS) puts Kay WalkingStick in dialogue with artists of the Hudson River School to reckon with the lack of Indigenous presence in their paintings. Featuring more than 40 works, “Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School” is on view through April 14, 2024. To date, it’s the largest exhibition in New York of works by WalkingStick, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

Often called America’s “first art movement,” the Hudson River School refers to a group of 19th-century painters who primarily focused on landscapes. Artists such as Frederic Edwin Church, John Frederick Kensett, and Albert Bierstadt specialized in showcasing America’s beauty and bounty. Collectively, their art served as a tantalizing advertisement for the country and promoted the concept of manifest destiny.

“I have mixed feelings about the Hudson River School,” said WalkingStick, who was born in 1935 in Syracuse, New York, in an interview with Artsy. Some painters, the artist said, like Asher Brown Durand, Bierstadt, and Kensett, “could really put paint down.” Their work features an admirable richness and depth of color, she said. Other work is “kind of dull,” with “too much of this old violin color.” Ultimately, though, the Hudson River School portrayed a highly romanticized view of the land and effectively erased the Indigenous peoples who inhabited it.

This erasure is conveyed right from the show’s opening, with two paintings by WalkingStick that directly engage with two key figures from the Hudson River School. The titles of her works address these painters and their failure to portray the Indigenous groups that inhabited the areas they depicted: Thom, Where are the Pocumtucks (The Oxbow) (2020) responds to Thomas Cole’s most famous painting, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (1836) (often called “The Oxbow”). Meanwhile, Durand’s Homage to the Mohawks (2021) refers to Durand’s East Branch of the Ausable River (1846). The paintings’ titles cleverly convey WalkingStick’s attitude: the 19th-century originals deliberately—and effectively—erased signs of Indigeneity.

These works grew out of feeling “adrift” during the pandemic, the artist explained: “I have to be working in the studio or I’ll go nuts.” So she set herself the technical challenge of copying some Hudson River School painters “just to see how they do it.” But she also wanted to work against the impression of an unoccupied and history-less land that’s conveyed by many Hudson River School paintings.

Nevertheless, the slash in the exhibition’s title matters, too—the exhibition complicates its criticism by teasing out relationships and intersections among the artworks.

The exhibition came about after Dr. Agnes Hsu-Tang, chair of NYHS’s board, invited WalkingStick to tour the society’s storage facilities. WalkingStick was particularly taken with the NYHS’s Hudson River School holdings. “How can you not be?” she said. “I was kind of blown away.”

Following that tour, WalkingStick went to Niagara Falls. The result of this visit—Niagara (2022), which was later acquired by the museum—hangs in the final room of the exhibition. In it, WalkingStick emphasizes the awesome scale of the Falls. Her goal was much the same as that of Louisa David Minot, one of the few women artists within the Hudson River School. Minot also sought to capture the Falls’ vast majesty in her paintings, and her efforts hang nearby in the exhibition.

And yet WalkingStick has been complicating the narrative around American landscape painting for decades, incorporating geometric designs from parfleche (painted rawhide bags historically made by women of Plains migratory cultures for seasonal travel) into her paintings. The NYHS exhibition includes a framed parfleche as well as WalkingStick’s Our Land Variation II (2008). This painting couples bold triangles, diamonds, squares, and other shapes, with depictions of the craggy Bitterroot Mountains. It was here that Nez Perce Chief Joseph led his people in 1877 in order to try to avoid being captured by the U.S. Army for resisting forced removal from their homelands.

More recently, WalkingStick has turned to Indigenous beadwork, baskets, and jars—some contemporary, some historical—to find representative patterns. She often starts with the National Museum of the American Indian (part of the Smithsonian), where she researches the people who once lived on the land she’s painting. In some cases, groups continue to maintain a presence. Other times, as in the case of the Pocumtucks, entire populations died or were assimilated into other cultures and WalkingStick finds a pattern from a later group.

Once she’s selected a pattern, she creates a stencil, which she uses to apply the pattern halfway along the bottom of her signature diptychs. The Indigenous patterns occasionally echo elements of the landscape, such as a soft mauve that mimics the sand in Aquidneck, After the Storm (2022) or a vertical shape that matches the upward thrust of rock in Saint Mary’s Mountain (2011). The patterns have a hypnotic, almost incantatory effect. They reverberate through the landscape, activating and animating it.

For WalkingStick, the patterns demarcate a “barrier” that’s meant to encourage viewers to maintain a critical distance and contemplate the Indigenous absence, as opposed to simply falling into the aestheticized landscape. “I want [people] to recognize that everyone here in this hemisphere is living on Indian territory,” she said.