?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
KAY WALKINGSTICK Untitled (Landscape).
Oil on canvas, 1964. 870x610 mm; 34¼x24 inches. Signed "Kay WalkingStick Echols" and dated in oil, lower left recto.
Provenance: Private collection, Massachusetts.
WalkingStick (born 1935) is a Native American landscape artist and a member of the Cherokee Nation, as well as an Honorary Vice President of the National Association of Women Artists, Inc. She was born in Syracuse, New York, to a mother of Scottish-Irish heritage and a father who was a member of the Cherokee Nation, who wrote and spoke the Cherokee language. WalkingStick received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1959 from Beaver College, Glenside, Pennsylvania, and later, the recipient of the Danforth Foundation Graduate Fellowship for Women, she attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and received a Master of Fine Arts in 1975. WalkingStick married R. Michael Echols in 1959, and they had two children; her first husband died in 1989 and she later married artist Dirk Bach in 2013.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., which has a significant holding of Walkingstick's paintings, spanning her career thus far, noted on its acquisition of three works in 2021, "WalkingStick, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, first began exhibiting in the late 1960s and is still creating new artworks today. She is celebrated for her powerful landscape paintings, which imbue depictions of place with spiritual significance and cultural memory.
WalkingStick's work has moved through many phases. Over her multi-decade career, she has engaged with Native history, feminism, minimalism, and other key artistic movements. What has remained constant is her deep dedication to the practice of painting; an abiding interest in exploring, through this medium, the power of embodied and spiritual experience—in particular, in relation to place. WalkingStick created Two Women II [acrylic on canvas, 1973, now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.] when she was in her thirties. She had married soon after graduating from college in 1959 with a degree in painting, and she and her husband quickly started a family. But despite moving from New York City to the New Jersey suburbs and the demands of raising two young children while her husband commuted into the city for work, WalkingStick never wavered in her identity or determination as an artist."
