Kay WalkingStick was born and raised in Syracuse, New York. She is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and is of both Cherokee and Scottish-Irish descent. K. WalkingStick received her BFA from Beaver College, Glenside, Pennsylvania, and her MFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1975. She taught painting and drawing at Cornell University for seventeen years. Since 2005, she has served as a Professor Emerita. Over the span of her long career as an artist, K. WalkingStick has explored themes of Native Americans’ physical, spiritual and historic connections to land. She has experimented with both modernist abstraction and traditional modes of landscape painting.

Beginning in the early 1970s, the artist drew upon pop art-inspired colour palettes and forms to explore silhouetted depictions of the body. Such works include April Contemplating May (1972). By the mid-1970s, with works such as Red Painting/Red Person (1976), her work grew increasingly textured, minimalistic and geometric. Inspired by both the burgeoning feminist movement and the American Indian Movement, K. WalkingStick began to use art to grapple with her Native identity and heritage. The Chief Joseph (1974-1977) series is a seminal work from this period that meditates on Native historical pain, resistance, and memory. The series consists of thirty-six separate abstract geometric paintings made with acrylic and wax. By the 1980s, the artist had begun her long-running examination of the American landscape. She combined her love of both abstraction and landscape in the form of diptychs. These works, such as Blame the Mountains III (1998), explore the duality of art forms and cultural and racial identities. Since the early 2000s, K. WalkingStick has combined traditional American landscapes with overlays of Native designs. The artist utilises patterns from pottery, rugs or pictographs created by Native Americans who have long inhabited these aesthetic spaces. The unique combination of the two art forms asserts everlasting Native presence and spiritual connections to space. Orilla Verde at the Rio Grande (2012) captures the inherent beauty of a section of the Rio Grande with an abstract Pueblo design imprinted on the left side of the painting. The artist utilised a design found on ancestral Pueblo pottery which serves to reclaim land with a nod towards cultural continuity. K. WalkingStick’s landscapes disrupt the traditional “white settler gaze” on the American landscape and ask onlookers to reconsider their preconceived notions of humans’ relationships to the earth.

K. WalkingStick is a highly respected painter and one of the most influential Indigenous artists of her time. She has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, and her work is in the permanent collections of many renowned institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., among others. She now resides in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she continues to paint landscapes.