The Brooklyn Rail

Kay WalkingStick is currently enjoying a moment of tremendous recognition, with multiple solo exhibitions and international group shows on the near horizon. If her stars have aligned, it’s not because WalkingStick has done anything different. As the artist says in the interview that follows, she hasn’t changed. On the occasion of her exhibition at Hales Gallery in New York, WalkingStick met with curator Patrica Marroquin Norby to discuss her love for materials, especially paint, her admiration for the bridges of New York City, and her deep appreciation for geometry and drawing.

Patricia Marroquin Norby (Rail): We’re talking today about your exhibition Deconstructing the Tipi at Hales Gallery in New York City, which centers on some of your works from the 1970s, a time when you were working somewhat differently than you have been more recently. I wondered if we could talk about that earlier time period, the seventies and the eighties. What was happening for you that influenced or encouraged this particular body of work on view?

Kay WalkingStick: Well for one thing, there was the takeover at Alcatraz. And the American Indian Movement (AIM) was very active then. I was very emotionally involved although not physically involved. I felt that it was important that Native people be recognized and their rights be recognized.

I had been very involved in the feminist movement, and done a number of paintings concerning that. I felt that I had resolved my issues about that, and had to connect with my non-existent father. And I am my father’s daughter—I’m tall, I look like him. And I felt that it was important that I learned as much as I could about Native history, and especially Cherokee history, which I set out to do.

I made a big tipi. Now Cherokees did not use tipis, they lived in cabins. They did not live in tipis. But the tipi is a symbol of Indian dwellings, to Americans. I use that as a symbolic image. I built a tipi and wrote a letter to my father. Since he spoke Cherokee I copied out the Lord’s Prayer in Cherokee; it was the only thing I had in the language. I wrote him a letter in English and told him that I forgave him and I hoped he forgave me for hating him all those years. I put black bands around the tipi and sat in it for a while. But the black bands, of course, were for him; he was by then dead.

Bizarrely, my mother and father, who were separated for twenty-five years, actually got together for a while before she passed, so I saw him a few times as a young adult. And I asked him, “What Native people do you admire the most? And he said, “Oh, well, Chief Joseph, of course.” So I proceeded to look up Chief Joseph and find out as much as I could about him. That tiny bit of information from my father has influenced a lot of my paintings.

These earliest paintings are really about poured paint and making shapes that derived from the tipi that I had made. I also made a painting of that same tipi, which will be in the show. And the tipi was made of canvas and poured paint, and 1-by-2s, you know a studio thing. It had a draped canvas, making the festoon arc shape. The negative shape that I use in these present paintings is an arc shape. It looks like a draped hide, or a draped canvas with large simple shapes that resemble a sail, perhaps.

When I was driving to Brooklyn every day, to go to grad school (I went to school at Pratt), I passed these bridges, all the wonderful bridges in New York—the greatest sculpture of New York is the bridges I think. As I was driving past these bridges, they often had large, draped nets on them. They were being painted, and there were guys up there painting. The nets were to catch the paint brushes and stuff that was dropped. But also in case somebody fell, the net would catch them. These great nets were to catch whatever—humans included. And I liked the idea of this thing that was catching us, was protecting us, was holding us. So this shape that I was using is a combination of those—a shape derived from a tipi, derived from my ideas about the hide shapes, and derived from these big catching nets from the bridges.

So the shapes you see are really, as the title is, deconstructing the tipi itself. The tipi had poured paint on it. The interiors of these shapes that I evolved are poured ink. The ink is somewhat fugitive, so it really shouldn’t be in bright sunlight. The ink that’s poured was poured onto raw canvas prior to anything else being done. I would move the canvas, of course, to get it to shift around, and it comes out looking very much like a landscape, or sometimes a skyscape. So there are intimations of landscape in these paintings. That’s a very long answer for a short question. [Laughter]

Rail: Well, it was a wonderful answer and filled with so much meaning. Your description of the tipi as a structure, but also as symbolic of this particular historical period, is relevant to what many Native American and other Indigenous people were going through during a time of political and social unrest. We had the American Indian Movement and also the Chicano Movement. Both movements spurred a great deal of activism and creative expression, literature, and art production. But I want to go back to something you opened up with regarding the occupation at Alcatraz, your personal experiences, and how all this relates to your artwork. You mentioned something so similar to what many Indigenous artists with whom I’ve worked, or interviewed, have experienced. That is a sense of disconnection from our fathers, or communities, while we also held really strong connections to our Indigenous identities, perhaps on our maternal sides, depending on the community where we’re from. For instance, I was thinking about how this is relevant to your friend and colleague in the nineties, George Morrison, who was Grand Portage Ojibwe. You both have had such a strong and important presence here in New York City. You both examined your connections to your communities and ancestral home lands through your art making practice while living and working in New York City.

WalkingStick: I loved George. I really did.

Rail: You had a conversation with George in the 1990s that was really meaningful for me because of my own relationship with George’s work, and also my relationship with Truman Lowe, who was Ho-Chunk, and my professor at the University of Wisconsin.

WalkingStick: I loved Truman very much, also!

Rail: Yes. Truman was my teacher—I grew up in the Midwest and learned about George’s work from Truman. I understand you also had connections with George and Truman. So, I want to go to that time. You wrote in your essay in Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison that you wanted to visit George—I believe this was in the 1990s. You and George were in an exhibition together, which was—this will bring back memories for both of us—Shared Visions, curated by Margaret Archuleta, who was Tewa and Hispanic, who has now walked on.

WalkingStick: I was very close to Margaret.

Rail: Yes. That exhibition was held at the Heard Museum and in many ways, it really was a breakthrough moment for many Indigenous artists. In your essay, you wrote that you wanted to talk to George not necessarily about art or artwork, or exhibiting, but you wanted to talk to George to answer your “questions about being an Indian in a white art world while not playing the ‘Indian card,’” and what it was like for him. I believe that visit happened sometime around 1991. Today, you opened with the tipi form and how it’s tied to your identity. I wondered about that for you now. What would you tell yourself, that person in the seventies, and also the nineties who was going to George seeking answers? What would you tell your earlier self? Considering where you are now?

WalkingStick: I did the right thing going to see George. And we didn’t talk a whole lot. I mean, he wasn’t a big talker. But it was very reassuring to know that this very solid man was still making art, still talking about art, still involved with it. My husband Dirk Bach knew him very well at RISD and he said George never mentioned that he was Native, never talked about that. And I don’t think it was necessary for me to either. We are who we are. And I was proud of who I am.

I certainly wanted to help other young Native artists enter the mainstream. I thought it was important that we be accepted fully into the mainstream. But the real thing, the real success is simply continuing. Simply making art. Simply keeping at it. I’ve been at it for over sixty years. I think George lived almost as long as I have. The thing is we are who we are, we contribute to our community, but we also contribute to the art world. And I think that is important as well. George certainly did too. He was very much part of the New York art world, and that’s an important contribution, in a lot of ways. It makes people realize that we have something major to offer. We Native people—we Indians. And I think that Truman did the same thing. He had something major to offer all the time.

Rail: You had a really important retrospective in 2015 with National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI)—

WalkingStick: That was a wonderful exhibition. I think of that as a major highlight of my career.

Rail: You were also part of the “Continuum” exhibition series that was curated by Truman Lowe at NMAI New York. Would you talk about that experience? I understand that it was challenging. I believe at that time you were working directly on the surface of the gallery wall?

WalkingStick: Of course. I have a story about it. Truman came to see me, and as I said, I’ve always loved Truman—he just always made me giggle. So he came to see me, and he asked me to do a show at the NMAI in New York City, and I would be showing with Rick Bartow, who had also been invited. And would I please be ready to show—and this was October of 2002—would I please be ready to show in April of 2003? And he wanted all new work.

And I said to him, “Truman, I can’t do a show of paintings like that, that quickly. I just can’t. It takes me a month to do a painting—minimum.” And he said, “Oh, well, you could do it Kay, come on.” And I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what, if you will hang the paintings that I did in the seventies, the series for Chief Joseph, and let me paint the mountains that Chief Joseph was raised in, the Wallowa Mountains, on the far wall, I will do a series of works on paper to fill the rest of the space.”

So I packed up my stuff and went out to Montana for maybe a week or ten days. I stayed with my student’s mom who had a B&B out there and drove around Montana. She made me take a sleeping bag with me. It was October and she said “you know we might have a blizzard.” It was great fun. I was all alone. I drove around, looked at the mountains, looked at all the battlefields. I wept a little. I went to museums there, saw the parfleche bags that the Nez Perce women make, and it was just such a beautiful, sweet experience following the trail of Chief Joseph and his band.

In Montana the air was so sharp and clean and beautiful. And there was very little traffic, so driving was pleasant. I went up to Bear Paw, which was the last battlefield in October of 1877. I was there in October to see that last battlefield. Then I came home and did a series of works on paper about the experience of seeing all those battlefields. I painted the Wallowa Mountains on the far wall of the NMAI gallery. It was a beautiful experience. I mean, I can’t tell you what fun it was. I hope other people who saw it enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed doing it! It was wonderful. And I would never have done it had Truman not prodded me by saying “Oh, you can do it Kay. Just do it.”

Rail: What a wonderful story.

WalkingStick: And to show with Rick Bartow, whose work I admire tremendously, was perfect. He was a marvelous draftsman. I mean, his birds and other critters always talk to me.

Rail: I’m so glad that you brought up parfleche and Chief Joseph, who was Nez Perce. I’m not sure that many of our readers will know that working the hides, the parfleche—the skin and then the tipi, working those materials which are made from different types of animal hides—that’s often considered women’s work. To create that, to tan the hides, to process those materials, but also the shelter that’s created and transported everywhere. This is women’s work. In many of our cultures, women “own” the property. It all comes from matrilineal, matrilocal, matriarchal lineages, and the property, material belongings, all of these things are often passed down through the women.

A lot of times this is misunderstood. You see historical images of Indigenous women carrying all of the household materials, and it is characterized as a burden. When in reality it’s part of our sense of belonging, authority, or leadership, and also our sense of being—the honor of caring for our homes and caring for our families. You mentioned earlier that you were connected with the feminist movement. Could you touch briefly on what that meant for you? I often think, well, there’s the mainstream women’s movement, but there’s also Indigenous concepts of feminism. I wonder if you have any thoughts about that?

WalkingStick: Well, the area where I was active, which I felt very strongly about, was the Equal Rights Amendment, which was never passed, and, of course, it should have been. I felt that that was part of the feminist movement, that political movement. In addition, I know that the Native women are strong. I mean, they’re strong, they have a power in their tribe, they have authority; the grandmothers of the Cherokee decided when to go to war, not the men, the grandmothers. Native women have a strength, not only a physical strength, but a strength of mind, of will, of idea. And that’s the way that I want to see myself.

I am a grandmother. I see myself as a strong woman. And I always have been determined to make art that speaks to people. I suppose there’s a decorative element in all painting, after all, but there is also this visual language that we use, that speaks to people. I want my paintings to express strong ideas. My present paintings have patterns on them, Native patterns on landscape. And I expect people to respond to those patterns and understand why they’re there.

Going back to the feminist movement, there’s a lot of things about the feminist movement that I respond to, certainly equal pay for equal work is important. When you think about what it was like in the fifties, there were no women CEOs, there were no women anything. I mean, there were a few women doctors, there were a few women professors. That shift happened within the last twenty-five, thirty years.

Rail: Let’s talk about this wonderful, fresh energy that’s surrounding you and your work right now. Every time I check my email there’s another Kay WalkingStick exhibition or program, and you have some exciting things happening. New York Historical Society, Hales Gallery, the Met recently reinstalled your work—which we’ve had in collection since the nineties. You have a work that’s going on view soon at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site that’s curated by Scott Manning Stevens, who is Akwesasne Mohawk. How are you feeling about all of this?

WalkingStick: Well, one thing that you didn’t mention that is really absolutely stunning is that five of my paintings are going to be in the Venice Biennale this year.

Rail: [Laughter] I’m sorry, yes, of course. This international representation is quite exciting.

WalkingStick: It’s absolutely amazing. It’s like—maybe my stars are in the right position finally. [Laughter] On the other hand, I think it doesn’t have that much to do with me, because I’m the same as I always was.

Rail: I want to switch to talking about materials, and how that relates to what you just shared. You’ve worked with acrylic, you’ve worked with ink, charcoal, wax, and—some of my favorite materials—crushed shells that you have used to build up your painting surfaces.

WalkingStick: I was trained in oil, which is wonderful. I believe in training people with oil, even if they never use it, because you learn so much. I turned to acrylic, and acrylic and wax in the early nineties. Then I went to Rome, and saw so many great paintings in oil. So I returned to oil. Oil is so flexible. I find that acrylic, although it is very useful, is not as flexible. I also think you can get gorgeous color out of oil that maybe other people can get out of acrylic, but I can’t. So there is a reason for returning to oil. I wanted to paint more realistically. It lent itself to that experience. I tried painting landscape with acrylic and I found that I had to do the painting really, really quickly to get the kind of excitement in the paint that I wanted. It was hard to do a painting in a couple of hours. With oil, you can paint relatively slowly and also go over it. I mean, I love paint. I love to manipulate paint. I love what paint can do. Paint is magic—it’s made of the earth after all. Our great colors, the siennas, umbers, and red oxides—all our wonderful colors are from the earth. Paint is mud and oil. Therefore we make gorgeous things out of mud and oil. And that’s magic for me.

Rail: I would add that there’s something about the viscosity of oil paint, but also the smell. It’s such a rich experience to work with oils. I completely understand your thinking about acrylic versus oil. Acrylics are made with a polymer resin, which is a very different texture than oil.

WalkingStick: The reason I added wax to my acrylic is so that it would cover that plastic quality that acrylic paint has. When it dries it’s like a plastic film. If you add wax to it—I used beeswax, so it smelled like honey. My kitchen would smell like honey. [Laughter] I’d mix this wonderful wax emulsion with the acrylic so that the acrylic became very malleable, it dried more slowly. But it also had a look of nature. It carried a look of nature that it does not on its own.

Rail: I want to stay here for a moment because I love talking about materials and process. Are there any materials that you wanted to work with, but never had the opportunity?

WalkingStick: I’ve always thought it would be nice to work with glass. Joe Feddersen has done some wonderful things with glass. And it’s partly because of Joe that I’ve always thought that glass would be a nice thing to work with. On the other hand, one of the things about a material is that when you change materials, it takes a while to get into the material—like six months, sometimes longer. It also takes a lot of concentration. The good thing about that is if you’re having trouble making art—if you’re in a hole, and you just can’t get out—if you change materials, the material will force you to come up with some new ideas. So it’s good to change at that time, those times—and we all have those times, when you just feel empty of all ideas. The other thing that’s wonderful at that time is drawing. That’s what I usually turn to, because there’s so many different materials for drawing. I love Sumi ink. Charcoal is marvelous, but so is drawing with gouache or watercolor. When I don’t know what to do I usually turn to drawing. So of course, I have hundreds of drawings. [Laughter]

Rail: That’s so interesting. I was just reading one of your essays; in it, you reflect on your own process. You talk about drawing, going back to the drawings. You wrote, “my work in the seventies and eighties was actually planned very carefully.” Would you talk about that—planning carefully?

WalkingStick: Well, the paintings that I was referring to were the ones that were wax and acrylic. The Met has one called Genesis/Violent Garden, I believe.

Rail: From 1981. Yes. It was acquired by the Met in 1993.

WalkingStick: Those paintings look really simple. They have an active surface, a couple of lines cut, maybe an arc or two, but they’re really simple. The forms within them are relatively reduced, but to do that, I had to make those strong enough to support it all. I built wooden stretchers out of 1-by-3s, big stretchers to handle the heavy duty canvas. First I would stain the canvas so it has some color, and then I would put a second canvas on top and glue it with an archival glue. If it was going to have a line or an arc, I would cut that out of that second canvas and then attach the whole thing. If the arcs were raised, and some of them are, I would cut another shape to fit over the acrylic plaster-like material, which I used to build it up. They were constructed like sculpture, actually, and then painted. And as I said, the paint itself was heavy. A pint of water is a pound, right? These would often have eight pints of paint on them, heavy paint, which has wax in it. They were very heavy. I was told by a conservator at that time that they wouldn’t last more than thirty years. I’m pleased to say that she was wrong.

Rail: I love your description of the layered canvases, and working into the surface to expose the under layers. In an essay on your work from the art scholar Kate Morris, she described your slicing into the canvas as a “wound.” As a trained fine artist myself, someone who understands the physicality of art materials, I didn’t see it as a wound. I wondered what your thoughts are about that?

WalkingStick: I didn’t see it as a wound. I never did, although a lot of people have. Some people thought of it as some sort of a wound to women. Other people saw those arc shapes as vulva-like, and they saw them as wounded vulvas for God’s sake. I didn’t. I didn’t see it that way. My thoughts about all that is that people bring their own psyches to my paintings, [Laughter] and if they need to see wounds, bless their hearts, there you are. I mean, that’s fine. I’m not going to argue with people about what they see. People see what they see. I hope it doesn’t make the paintings painful to them.

When my daughter, Erica, was a little girl she walked into the studio one day and looked at one of those big red paintings and she said, “Spaghetti sauce!” And that’s kind of the way I think about it, you know, it’s just as understandable to see spaghetti sauce as it is to see wounds. They were meant to be a geometric combination of the simplest forms possible. An arc of a circle, a line or two, a square format, and very often an implied triangle. Implied by the sides of the arcs and the lines, the arcs are usually a half of the length of the square of the format. The lines are usually the same length.

It’s a very geometric puzzle for me to work out. It’s my game of working on a grid that’s hidden. And I get a great deal of pleasure out of it. I find them very sensual. Margaret Archuleta wrote an article about my art being sensual; I think those paintings are the most sensual paintings I ever made. Because it’s a love affair with the paint itself. And these paintings are less about content than any of the paintings I ever did. There’s so much about geometry and about the relationships of forms in a kind of space. Many of them have a very flat space, but they’re about these problems of arrangement.

Rail: I appreciate how you talk about it as a love affair with paint. I want to take that a step further and bring that energy to your charcoal drawings, especially in this exhibition, because they are so rich and dense. You almost cannot see the forms unless you’re looking thoughtfully. Could you describe your feelings working with charcoal, perhaps compared to oil and what those drawings were about for you.

WalkingStick: I really like charcoal. One of the things I like about charcoal is that you can manipulate it until you get the surface you want. With charcoal, you can go from a very very pale gray to a licorice black, and it is gorgeous. I always used a hard pressed charcoal. I don’t use vine charcoal because vine charcoal is very lightweight. You make nice lines with it, but you can’t make real gritty, black big fat lines with it, which is what I liked. I had a period in which I really inundated myself with charcoal. I tried to make charcoal drawings all the time. I was pretty gritty up to my elbows most of the time. But that was part of the experience. [Laughter]

In a way the charcoal drawings that are at Hales were things in themselves that had to do with the ideas that I was playing with in my head about geometry and relationships and how to get a kind of mood in those things through geometry itself. It wasn’t about the way that charcoal was put on, although I think that had something to do with it. It was the geometry and it’s a very quiet, very hidden kind of thing. There are some other drawings, or I shouldn’t call them drawings, they’re paintings on paper really, in the exhibition that are about hidden and not hidden. They too have sort of a geometry. They all started on a grid. All those black little paintings and drawings, just like the paintings from that period, the acrylic and wax paintings were started on a grid, and were designed on a grid. They were fun to do. I mean, obviously I wouldn’t do this for sixty years if it wasn’t fun to do.

Rail: Do you ever dream your works? As visual thinkers, many artists do.

WalkingStick: I sometimes have worry-dreams about finishing them. [Laughter] That’s another subject. No, but I used to. I don’t dream much. I sleep like a brick. Which at my age is a great blessing.

Rail: I don’t think people know this about you, but you’re also a wonderful writer. Your writing is so clear.

WalkingStick: I try not to write a lot. Because it is so time consuming. I edit and edit and edit. I don’t think you can write well without going over and over. And so writing takes a lot of time. And I really want to spend my time making paintings.

Rail: I want to go back to your foreword in Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison from 2013. In that essay, you wrote, “I had long felt that people expected a certain type of art from me.” I wondered, has that shifted for you now?

WalkingStick: Yes. I think so. I think it’s partly because the world has shifted. People realize that Native artists don’t just make pottery, or feathers and beads. I mean, I think that whole trope has passed. I think there’s still a tendency to giggle at my name, but I don’t think that people really expect me to make a certain kind of art, but perhaps that may be because I don’t see it anymore. I just go on with my life and ignore things. Although, I can remember someone saying to me, “Oh, well, your work looks like I should be buying it on the road to Santa Fe.” I did not scream. But that doesn’t happen anymore, people don’t think like that anymore. Thank God. Although, the road to Santa Fe has some wonderful things on it.

Rail: Well, I can tell by your beautiful jewelry that you do appreciate the road to Santa Fe.

WalkingStick: Yes, I do. [Laughter]

Rail: I have one last quote, from your own writing, that I wanted to read to you. “What is truly magical about paintings, they speak to us with a silent visual tongue. And the words, the explications, that are written about them, are not crucial to the work’s understanding.” This is from 2015, and I wonder how your own words resonate with you now?

WalkingStick: I think it’s rather well put. [Laughter] Art is a visual language, it speaks through visual tools. It is not a verbal language. And the visual language does speak to people, if they would just spend some time looking. It’s nice that I can write, but the writing about the work isn’t what’s important about the work. It’s the seeing of the work—we should be able to have a museum that has no words in it. As a matter of fact, we all have museums that have big old earphones telling us how we’re supposed to think and see. And I find that a little objectionable, although I understand that there are some people who for some reason, cannot use their eyes. And they don’t. And we have to somehow open them with words. We artists are the visual historians of our era. This is who we are. And we are telling the world, a future world, the current world, about what our experience here on Earth, really is.

Rail: Well, Kay, I feel so lucky to have this conversation with you. I want to ask two very basic questions. Why do you think we have to paint? Why do you think we have to draw?

WalkingStick: [Laughter] Well, I think there’s something about the human spirit that leads us to communicate. We want to communicate with our fellows. And we want to communicate what we know. We want to share what we know. I think that is part of the human spirit.