Kay WalkingStick, Havasu Revisited

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0:00:05.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and we’re looking at a diptych. This is by Kay WalkingStick, a contemporary artist who is also a member of the Cherokee Nation, titled Havasu Revisited. And the landscape is Northern Arizona, the area of the Grand Canyon where the Havasupai, that is, the people of Havasu, have lived for centuries.

0:00:27.4 Dr. Ashley Holland: What we have here is two panels that are placed next to each other. On the left side is a landscape that we can infer is most likely Havasu. But unlike what you would expect of maybe seeing the Havasu Falls, we’re looking at more of a rocky landscape that is likely above that area and looking down into that space. And on the right side, you have an encaustic painting that has a copper symbol or figure embedded into it.

0:01:00.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: So on the left is this more traditional landscape. And the artist was in love with the history of American landscape painting, understanding its colonial complications, but still very much willing to draw on that tradition. On the right, you have purely abstract form. And yet, despite the evident distinction between these two panels, they are also closely related.

0:01:25.2 Dr. Ashley Holland: The two works feature similar colors in that copper tone that you see both through the rock formations on the left panel and the copper piece on the right panel. Copper was very much a precious metal for many Indigenous communities, including the Cherokee. We would make gorgets out of it. We would make objects that had significance, that were embedded with cultural memory and knowledge in symbology. And the revisiting is both a revisiting a location, but also revisiting a practice that she has been doing for many decades, which is the encaustic, and then also the very abstracted, almost slice that goes through that canvas, revealing the copper piece in it. And that’s something that you see in her earlier works, where she’s building up these canvases and then she’s revealing components of them.

0:02:19.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: One of the characteristics of that landscape is that because there are so many deep ravines and high plateaus that surround them, when we stand on those plateaus, we look across and over those ravines. And so the landscape is not fully revealed to us. And yet somehow we are looking in this image on the left, both across with a hint of down, but on the right, it does seem as if, even in a more symbolic sense, the earth is revealed to us.

0:02:49.4 Dr. Ashley Holland: That top down approach to it, I think, fits in what Kay is doing with the landscape. When she’s thinking about those early American landscapes, that in many ways Indigenous presence is removed, she is re-Indigenizing these spaces. Havasu is a very Indigenous space. All of the United States was Indigenous land at some point and continues to be Indigenous land, even if it is not viewed that way by many people. But she is embedding that Indigeneity into it.

0:03:21.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: And yet at the same time, she’s taking all of her sophisticated knowledge of the history of European art and also utilizing that. For example, this is a diptych, which is familiar to many people in the medieval European tradition, where sacred images are represented on two panels. But here, the landscape has replaced those figures, and yet this is still sacred imagery.

0:03:45.5 Dr. Ashley Holland: Land is sacred to Indigenous people, and we know that when viewers look at a diptych, they understand it as a story that’s being told. Kay is telling a story here, but she’s telling a story of Indigenous sacredness.

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This work at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Kay WalkingStick’s artist talk at the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.

Oral history interview with Kay WalkingStick, conducted by Mija Riedel, 2011 December 14–15. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Kathleen Ash-Milby and David Penney, editors, Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist, exhibition catalogue (Washington, D.C.; New York: Smithsonian Books, 2015).

Contemporary art, an introduction

1980–now in the United States, an introduction

Read a Reframing Art History textbook chapter, Re-mapping land art: earthworks, borderlands, ecology