An artistic dialogue across eras

ST. PETERSBURG — “Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School” will open on Saturday, Nov. 7, during National Native American Heritage Month, at the James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art, 150 Central Ave., St. Petersburg.

Developed by The New York Historical, the exhibition showcases landscape paintings by the renowned contemporary Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick in conversation with classic works from The New York Historical’s collection of 19th-century Hudson River School paintings including work by the illustrious painter Albert Bierstadt. This exhibition is the result of a close collaboration between the artist and Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto (Native Hawaiian), former chief curator at The New York Historical. For information, visit thejamesmuseum.org.

“Bringing Kay WalkingStick’s works to St. Petersburg allows our visitors to experience landscape paintings from a fresh, vital perspective,” said Caitlin Pendola, associate curator at The James Museum. “By pairing 19th-century Hudson River School works with contemporary Indigenous paintings, this exhibition prompts us to consider how lived experiences shape our perspectives of the land we share, and how it is represented in the American story.”

The exhibition spotlights how WalkingStick’s work connects to and diverges from the Hudson River School tradition and explores art’s role in shaping humankind’s relationship to the land. By examining and highlighting contemporary Indigenous art in the changing discourse of American art history, the exhibition celebrates a shared reverence for nature and galvanizes critical discussions on land dispossession and its reclamation by Indigenous peoples and nations.

“I hope viewers will leave the museum with a renewed sense of how beautiful and precious our planet is,” said Kay WalkingStick. “Also, that they depart with the realization that those of us living in the western hemisphere are all living on Indian Territory. These are certainly straightforward, even obvious, thoughts, but I believe they are concepts easily forgotten. It’s easiest to simply get on with our lives. We are all responsible for the health of our planet. We are all responsible to see that our legislators honor the many treaties made with the American Indians throughout our history and that Native rights are honored. Painting is a visual language. This is what my paintings are saying to you.”

Highlights of the exhibition’s more than 30 works include WalkingStick’s paintings inspired by Hudson River School artists examples of her early painted sculptural abstractions inspired by nature; and several of her most recent paintings — like “Niagara” and “Sagebrush Cholla” — 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 a ceramic jar, offer insight into WalkingStick’s source patterns and artistic process.

Showcasing WalkingStick’s work alongside both Euro-American and Indigenous traditions of art, the exhibition demonstrates the complex ways the artist contends with and interweaves these artistic lineages. “Niagara” is grouped with two paintings of the iconic waterfalls by Louisa Davis Minot (1788-1858), which are among the few known works by her hand and rare examples of early 19th-century landscape paintings by a Euro-American woman. These works position WalkingStick within a lineage of women landscape painters in the Hudson River region while also considering the critical differences between the two artists’ approaches: Minot’s composition includes generic Indigenous figures to distinguish the site as North American, while WalkingStick uses a culturally specific Haudenosaunee pattern to mark the land as Indigenous.

Other works from The New York Historical’s collection demonstrate the Hudson River School artists’ attempts to forge landscape into an expression of national and cultural identity. These include Asher B. Durand’s “Catskill Study, N.Y.,” ca. 1870, which invites direct communion with nature; Albert Bierstadt’s 1860 painting “Indian Encampment, Shoshone Village,” which promoted U.S. expansion westward; and John Frederick Kensett’s “Pulpit Rock, Nahant,” from 1859, depicting the touristic allure of coastal nature.

“In Kay’s paintings, landscapes are imbued with agency, through which contemporary Indigenous peoples and cultures exert their robust presence in history and modern society. Kay WalkingStick — long admired for her humanity, erudition, and grace — has been a trailblazing visual historian for 60 years,” said Agnes Hsu-Tang, board chair of The New York Historical.

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 painting 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.