Kay WalkingStick, born to a mother of Scottish–Irish descent and a Cherokee father, has worked over six decades to create paintings and sculptures that reckon with America’s past – reinscribing Indigenous presence onto a history from which it has been largely erased. The Silence of the Glacier (2013), South Rim (2016), Galena Pass (2023), and Salmon River Valley (2023) draw from WakingStick’s memories and sketches of awe-inspiring views of the Grand Canyon, Glacier National Park, and Sun Valley. Renowned as sites of recreation and tourism, they are also ancestral homes to Native communities who were once displaced and resettled into reservations. In these works, WalkingStick overlays motifs belonging to the peoples who are the original custodians of these lands as a way to recover historical memory of their ongoing existence. Just as she has grappled with her sense of belonging as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and her mixed heritage, WalkingStick asks viewers to confront the collision of these histories and imagine how they might coexist.
This is the first time the work of Kay WalkingStick is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Elena Ketelsen González
