Kay WalkingStick takes on Hudson River School paintings at Addison Gallery of American Art

This fall, the Addison Gallery of American Art, located on the campus of Phillips Academy, Andover, MA will present “Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School,” an exhibition organized by the New-York Historical Society that showcases landscape paintings by the renowned contemporary Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick in conversation with classic works from New-York Historical’s collection of 19th-century Hudson River School paintings. On view September 14, 2024– February 2, 2025, this artistic dialogue spotlights the ways in which WalkingStick’s work connects to and diverges from the Hudson River School tradition and explores the agency of art in shaping humankind’s relationship to the land.

“This exhibition is a meditation on the theme of humanity’s relationship to nature, as observed by Kay WalkingStick and the artists of the Hudson River School,” Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of New-York Historical, said. “It has been an incredibly rewarding experience to collaborate with the artist on this exhibition and showcase her work, while also examining our historic collections from a new perspective.”

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.

“As New York’s first museum founded in 1804, the New-York Historical Society is proud to be the first American historical institution to doubly honor an esteemed contemporary Indigenous artist with a focused exhibition of her artistic achievements and a landmark celebration acknowledging her stature as a stateswoman—through her artistry and teaching—of Indigenous heritage,” Dr. Agnes Hsu-Tang, board chair of New-York Historical, said. “In Kay’s paintings, landscapes are imbued with agency, through which contemporary Indigenous peoples and cultures exert their robust presence in history and modern society.”

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.

“I hope viewers will leave the Museum with a renewed sense of how beautiful and precious our planet is,” Kay WalkingStick said. “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. It’s easiest to simply get on with our lives. We are all responsible for the health of our planet. We are all responsible to see that our legislators honor the many treaties made with the American Indians throughout our history and that Native rights are honored. Painting is a visual language. This is what my paintings are saying to you.”

In the mid-nineteenth century American painters began focusing attentively on the landscapes of the developing United States, often depicting scenes with a sense of awe for their abundant and majestic natural resources. As Manifest Destiny ideals occupied the interests of both government and citizens, the sunset-drenched narratives of painters such as Albert Bierstadt and Alvan Fisher became the nationalistic vision that solidified Americans’ proprietorship and settlement of the ever-expanding American West.

“It truly is a privilege to present Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School at the Addison Gallery. This exhibition will offer our visitors and student groups the opportunity to view 19th-century landscape paintings, depictions of American land, and the idea of Manifest Destiny through a new lens,” said Allison Kemmerer, the Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison.

WalkingStick’s Niagara is positioned in conversation with a painting of the iconic waterfalls by Louisa Davis Minot (1787–1858), one of few known works by her hand and a rare example of early 19thc entury landscape painting by a Euro-American woman. This work positions 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.

Other works from New-York Historical’s collection demonstrate the Hudson River School artists’ attempts to forge landscape into an expression of national and cultural identity. These include Asher B. Durand’s Catskill Study, NY, ca. 1870, which invites direct communion with nature; Albert Bierstadt’s 1860 painting Indian Encampment, Shoshone Village, which promoted US expansion westward; and John Frederick Kensett’s Pulpit Rock, Nahant, from 1859, depicting the touristic allure of coastal nature.

At the Addison, over a dozen landscape paintings from the museum’s collection will join the N-YHS’s Hudson River School works.

Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935) 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 painterly 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.

WalkingStick’s work is in many museum collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art; Denver Art Museum; Detroit Institute of Arts; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art.