Red Painting/Red Person, 1976

Acrylic, saponified wax, and ink on canvas
© Kay WalkingStick; courtesy the artist and Hales, London and New York. Photo by Ian Reeves.

Using paint as her primary medium, Kay WalkingStick explores the landscapes and iconography of the American West, renewing and recasting them as Native terrain and in the context of Native concerns. While her earliest works, a series of self-portraits made in the late 1960s, were informed by the feminist art she encountered upon moving to New York, her Cherokee heritage became the focus of her output from the beginning of the next decade. Red Painting/Red Person features incised, abstract symbols that echo certain aspects of Native American iconography—a bow or a canoe, most explicitly. The artist has described the motif in geometric terms, as a segment of a circle, to encourage wider readings. In Red Painting/Red Person, four of these forms are arranged in a row across a burgundy-hued square, one facing in the opposite direction from the rest. This red field and the matching outer border contrast with the ink-streaked, yellowish inner border, creating the kind of duality that has occupied WalkingStick throughout her practice.