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Planes of pink, purple, and green give form to a woman’s silhouette, while a bouquet of peonies suggests the blossoming of feminist art.
Kay WalkingStick, Peonies, 1969, acrylic on canvas, 142.2 x 121.9 cm (Art Bridges) © Kay WalkingStick. Speakers: Bill Conger, Chief Curator, Peoria Riverfront Museum and Beth Harris, Smarthistory
0:00:06.8 Beth Harris: We’re standing in the Peoria Riverfront Museum, and we’re looking at a fairly large painting by an artist named Kay WalkingStick called Peonies. And it dates from an interesting moment in her career and also, I think, an interesting moment in art history.
0:00:23.3 Bill Conger: I think the first thing that you are aware of is an array of flowers, peonies, right in the center. They announce themselves very quickly. And it’s at that point, I think, you let your eyes start to wander around the rest of the canvas. And there is some remarkable shapes that become present.
0:00:43.0 Beth Harris: We begin to see the shape of a female body, a woman who is seated, but perhaps lying back nude, raising one arm over her head in a pose that actually reminds me of the central figure in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. So I think there is a speaking to a tradition of the nude here.
0:01:04.7 Bill Conger: She’s also extremely attentive and sophisticated with the color choices. They are subtle, they are muted, they are pastel. But there are these little moments of blue that eek out from behind and little moments of negative space that she allows to peek from the background and move between.
0:01:24.4 Beth Harris: These marvelous broad areas of greens and pinks and purples, these very pale colors.
0:01:35.2 Bill Conger: These are not hard geometric shapes at all. They are very evocative and organic.
0:01:41.8 Beth Harris: One senses that she’s thinking about creating space with these planes of flat color.
0:01:48.2 Bill Conger: And we bounce back to the foreground of the flowers, to the background of the shapes, to the middle ground of the figure who lies sandwiched in between all of this activity.
0:02:00.3 Beth Harris: We immediately sense that the concerns of the artist are largely formal. The shapes, the colors, the sense of space. And yet, against those formal concerns, there is an expression of eroticism, of sensuality. Art historians talk about the 1960s as this period when there is a flowering of erotic art. Here, a woman artist and a female nude.
0:02:26.7 Bill Conger: So the flower becomes the symbol, a surrogate for this blossoming.
0:02:31.1 Beth Harris: And she talks about this period in her career as one where she’s engaging with ideas of sexual liberation. And there’s a kind of freedom of sexuality, especially for women, beginning in the 60s, that will be very important as feminist artists explore the body in the 1970s.
0:02:52.3 Bill Conger: Peoria happens to be home of Betty Friedan. How beautiful that in the home of Betty, that we have this incredible moment of art history here.
0:03:02.8 Beth Harris: And that shift, that enormous shift that’s going to happen in the late 1960s, early 1970s. Critics like Lucy Lippard are writing about how difficult the art world is for women, the enormous extent of discrimination. And I sense this moment of awakening, kind of opening up of possibilities for women artists. And I suppose that’s, in a way, what the peonies here represent for me.
0:03:28.6 Bill Conger: And in reference to the male painters of history who have used the nude in so many ways. The odalisques, the women in repose, allowing their body to be observed and painted. And in this instance, I see a strength. Her arm appears to be up, over and perhaps behind her head, as if completely at ease and completely owning the space and the moment.
0:03:54.2 Beth Harris: And it’s true. Her body goes from the very top of the canvas to the very bottom. And from side to side, she takes up space. And I’m really struck by the way that the flowers are foreshortened and move so beautifully toward us, while everything else in the painting is so flat. And that contrast is really interesting to me.
0:04:14.3 Bill Conger: Here we have Kay not really establishing her Native American roots. Much of the Betty Friedan era was really about white housewives who were relegated to the home and certain part of the family unit.
0:04:29.3 Beth Harris: She will leave behind this kind of organic abstraction to explore more of her Native American heritage. We’re on the verge of the American Indian movement. We’re on the verge of full blown second wave feminism. We’re on the verge of a continuation of the civil rights movement, of the gay liberation movement. This is a painting that sits historically right on the cusp of all of those things and the cusp of her career as well.
| Title | Peonies |
| Artist(s) | Kay WalkingStick |
| Dates | 1969 |
| Places | North America / United States |
| Period, Culture, Style | Modernisms / Civil Rights era / Native North American (First Nations) / Southeastern Native North American / Cherokee |
| Artwork Type | Painting |
| Material | Acrylic paint, Canvas |
| Technique |
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963).
Kathleen Ash-Milby and David Penney, editors, Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist, exhibition catalogue (Washington, D.C.; New York: Smithsonian Books, 2015).
Rachel Middleman, Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).
