Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School

Organized by the New-York Historical Society, Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School places landscape paintings by the renowned, contemporary Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick in conversation with highlights from New-York Historical’s collection of 19th-century Hudson River School paintings. This artistic dialogue showcases the ways in which WalkingStick’s work both connects to and diverges from the Hudson River School tradition and explores the agency of art in shaping humankind’s relationship to the land. The exhibition celebrates a shared reverence for nature while engaging crucial questions about land dispossession and its reclamation by Indigenous peoples and nations and exploring the relationship between Indigenous art and American art history.

Highlights of the exhibition’s more than 40 works include WalkingStick’s sole landscape referencing the Trail of Tears (a journey her Cherokee ancestors were forced to take); examples of her early painted sculptural abstractions inspired by nature; and several of her most recent paintings—like Niagara and Aquidneck After the Storm—which overlay geographically specific abstract Indigenous patterns onto representational landscapes in order to re-assert an Indigenous presence long erased in European settlers’ depictions of North America as a pristine and unpopulated wilderness. Native American objects on loan from the artist and other museum collections, including woven baskets and ceramic jars, offer insight into WalkingStick’s source patterns and artistic process. At the Addison, over a dozen landscape paintings from the museum’s collection join the N-YHS’s Hudson River School works.

This exhibition has been organized by the New-York Historical Society.

Major support for Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School is provided by the Lily Auchincloss Foundation. Generous support for the Addison’s presentation of this exhibition has been provided by Katherine D. and Stephen C. Sherrill (PA 1971, and P 2005, 2007, 2010) and the Elizabeth and Anthony Enders Exhibitions Fund.