On Sunday, September 22, artist Kay WalkingStick and exhibition curator Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, Vice President and Chief Curator of the New-York Historical Society, will present an engaging, informal conversation about the themes explored in Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School. The program will be held in Kemper Auditorium (adjacent to the Addison) from 1:00 to 2:15 pm. The event is free but space is limited and registration is required.
Kay WalkingStick 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; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and National Gallery of Art; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum; and Whitney Museum of American Art. She received a BFA from Beaver College (now Arcadia University), Glenside, PA, in 1959 and an MFA from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, in 1975. She also has a PhD from both Arcadia University and Pratt Institute. She lives and works in Pennsylvania.
Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, PhD, is Vice President and Chief Curator at the New-York Historical Society, where she leads the museum division. She has curated such exhibitions as Lost New York; Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School; Nature, Crisis, Consequence; Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy; Dreaming Together: New-York Historical Society and Asia Society Museum; and the award-winning Scenes of New York City: The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection. She oversees the museum’s paintings, sculpture, and drawings collections and has spearheaded major acquisitions, including works by Betye Saar, Augusta Savage, Oscar yi Hou, Kay WalkingStick, Robert Kobayashi, and Livien Yin. She established the institution’s Meet the Curator program and helped to develop and teach in the Master of Arts in Museum Studies program created jointly between N-YHS and the City University of New York School of Professional Studies. For International Women’s Day 2024, Ikemoto was profiled in the New York Times. She holds a BA in Art History from Stanford University and an AM and PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University.
Cover image: Kay WalkingStick, Wampanoag Coast, Variation II, 2018. Oil on panel in two parts. Collection of Agnes Hsu-Tang, Ph.D., and Oscar Tang. © Kay WalkingStick
