WalkingStick Weekend Offers Gallery Tours, Live Music and a Painting Session

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian celebrates the last few weeks of the retrospective, “Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist,” with a weekend of hands-on activities and gallery tours Aug. 5–7. The exhibition closes Sept. 18. More details are available on the museum’s website.

An adults-only event, “IndigeArts CREATE: A Kay WalkingStick Soiree,” will be held Friday, Aug. 5, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. This after-hours event features a book signing by Kay WalkingStick from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.; Native-inspired hip-hop music by DJ Young Native; refreshments, including wine, beer and snacks, available for purchase; curator-led gallery tours; and demonstrations by three Native artists from the western United States that inspired WalkingStick’s most recent art: hide-painter Kevin Peters (Nez Perce), traditional cornhusk-weaver Jenny Williams (Omaha/Nez Perce) and traditionally rooted, punk rock-inspired weaver Melissa Cody (Navajo). Visitors can also participate in a painting workshop inspired by WalkingStick’s pop art and landscapes. This workshop is offered in collaboration with local painting workshop Art Jamz; a materials fee applies for this portion of the evening. Painting workshops are scheduled for 5:30 p.m.–6:30 p.m. and 7 p.m.–8 p.m.

On Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m., the artists will also participate in the family-friendly weekend event, “WalkingStick Weekend: Hands-On Salon.” Cherokee recording artist Martha Redbone, whose music blends Native American, funk, Appalachian folk and blues, will join them. Redbone will perform Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. Gallery tours will be available at 12:30 p.m. each day. Throughout the weekend, make-and-take activities for children include decorating a parfleche (a canvas bag, though traditionally made of rawhide), a paper activity inspired by hide painting and Navajo textile designs, and a pop-art stencil activity.

About the Exhibition

“Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist” is the first major retrospective of the artistic career of WalkingStick (b. 1935), a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and one of the world’s most celebrated artists of Native American ancestry. Featuring more than 65 of her most notable paintings, drawings, small sculptures, notebooks and the diptychs for which she is best known, the exhibition traces her career throughout more than four decades and culminates with her recent paintings of monumental landscapes and Native places. Her distinctive approach to painting emerged from the cauldron of the New York art world, poised between late modernism and postmodernism of the 1960s and 1970s. Thorough decades of intense and prolific artistic production, she sought spiritual truth and metaphysical reflection through the acts of painting. Organized chronologically around themes that mark her artistic journey, “Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist” traces a path of constant invention, innovation and evolving artistic and personal growth through visually brilliant and evocative works of art.

For additional information about the National Museum of the American Indian, visit AmericanIndian.si.edu. Follow the museum via social media on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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