12 Chuen
Blue Crystal Monkey
Hymn to Melpomene*
I am a Woman of Soul
and Wonder
Sown together and
torn asunder
By Love
In every Aspect
Scarred and veiled
my Heart
Out of Gold and
Silver spun
Broken by Betrayal
By Forgiveness Won
Compassion warms
My pulsing Blood –
Drowning Sorrow
With a Song
Eternal Return
After the Fall
Goat-Songs rise –
Hymns to Dionysus
God of Joy and Ecstasy
Code of
Dismemberment
Death and Resurrection
–
He calls to All incessantly
In Shades of Indigo
Shades of Blue
Life eternal – life anew
Upon Beloved Earth.
*Melpomene: Greek Muse of Tragedy,
Singer of Lamentations, Mother of the Blues.
©Kleomichele Leeds
Kay WalkingStick, Wallowa Mountains Memory, Variations, oil and gold leaf on wood, 35 3/4 x 71 1/2 in, 2004, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Kay WalkingStick (born March 2, 1935) is a Native American landscape artist and a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Her later landscape paintings, executed in oil paint on wood panels often include patterns based on American Indian rugs, pottery and other artifacts.
Her works are in the collections of many universities and museums, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Israel Museum, the National Museum of Canada and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. She is an author and was a professor in the art department at Cornell University where she taught painting and drawing. She has been accepted into many artists residency programs which gave her time away from teaching duties to paint. WalkingStick is the winner of many awards and in 1995 was included in H.W. Janson's History of Art, a standard textbook used by university art departments.
Personal life
Kay WalkingStick was born in Syracuse, New York, on March 2, 1935, the daughter of S. Ralph WalkingStick and Emma McKaig WalkingStick. Emma was of Scottish-Irish heritage, and Kay's father, Ralph, was a member of the Cherokee Nation who wrote and spoke the Cherokee language. Ralph was born in the Cherokee Nation capital of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and attended Dartmouth College. Kay's parents had four other children, and as they raised their family Ralph WalkingStick worked in the oil fields as a geologist. He became an alcoholic. While pregnant with Kay, her mother left Oklahoma with their other children and moved to Syracuse, New York. WalkingStick grew up in Syracuse without having experienced the cultural heritage of her Cherokee ancestors. Her siblings, who spent some of their childhood in Oklahoma, had a better understanding of their father's Cherokee traditions. Her mother told her "Indian stories" and talked about her handsome father. The family was proud to be Native Americans. Kay liked to color and draw from a young age. A number of other members of her family were artists.
WalkingStick married R. Michael Echols in 1959, and they had two children, Michael David Echols and Erica WalkingStick Echols Lowry. Michael Echols died in 1989. She is now married to artist Dirk Bach. They married in November 2013 and live in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Education
WalkingStick received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1959 from Beaver College, Glenside, Pennsylvania. Ten years later she received the Danforth Foundation Graduate Fellowship for Women, and attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She received her Master of Fine Arts in 1975.
WalkingStick was at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire for a month-long residency in both 1970 and 1971. In July 1976 she was an artist-in-residence in Saratoga Springs, New York, at the Yaddo Artists' Colony, and at Montauk, New York, in August 1983 at the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center. In 1992 she painted at the Conference and Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. In 1995 she was a visiting teacher and artist at the Vermont Studio Center for a month. In 2011, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree by Arcadia University.
Career
Artist
She created representational art works after college which for the next 10 years were self-described as "hard-edged" and "realistic". In graduate school during the early 1970's, her work became more abstract, and they were included in many New York City exhibitions, at a time when Native American artists' works were seldom exhibited. In graduate school she began to study Native American art and history, seeking to understand her "Indianness". WalkingStick began a series of works about the 19th-century Nez Perce "Chief Joseph" who resisted reservation life. She layered wax and acrylic paint, mixed together onto inked canvas and left the design unpainted then cut to create designs. In 1978 she had a solo exhibition at Bertha Urdang Gallery. WalkingStick later integrated other elements into the works, like small rocks, pieces of pottery, metal shavings, and copper. Throughout the process she added paint with her hands or a knife in the areas exposed from the cut wax to create her final work.
"My wish has been to express our Native and non-native shared identity. I want all people to hold on to their cultures — but I also want to encourage a mutual recognition of a shared being."
Kay WalkingStick
In another personal search, Walkingstick created Messages to Papa in 1974 to better understand the conflicted feelings that she had for her father. The work was a stereotypical image of a Native American dwelling, the tipi, although it was not a Cherokee structure. She used the image, as a symbol of Native Americans to people of non-native descent. In the middle of the work she hung a Cherokee language translation of the Lord's Prayer and a letter to her deceased father.
WalkingStick has become best known for her use of diptychs, two-paneled works of art. She said, "[T]he diptych is an especially powerful metaphor to express the beauty and power of uniting the disparate and this makes it particularly attractive to those of us who are biracial."
She began making abstract/landscape diptychs in 1985, for which she gained success nationally and internationally. Generally, she made an abstract work on one panel of the diptych and a representational, or realistic, image on the other. She has made landscapes of the Rockies and the Alps and of the ancient southwestern sites, Mesa Verde and Canyon De Chelly from sketches she had made during her visits there. Walkingstick said, "I do not see my paintings as landscapes, per se, but rather as paintings that describe two kinds of perception of the earth. One view is visual and fleeting and the other is abstract and everlasting. These paintings are my attempt to express the mythically inexpressible and to unify the present with eternity."
Educator
In 1988 WalkingStick was hired by Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, to be an assistant professor of art. She taught there until 1990 when she was employed by the State University of New York, Stony Brook, a position she held for two years. She returned to Cornell University in 1992,where she taught drawing and painting as a full professor, retiring in 2005. She then moved to New York City to work full-time in her studio. She has retired as Professor Emerita of Cornell University.
Awards
She is the recipient of the following:
1983 - National Endowment of the Arts grant
1991- Richard A. Florsheim Art Fund Award, Tampa, FL
1995 - Joan Mitchell Foundation award
1996 - National Honor award for Achievement in the Arts, Women's Caucus for Art
2003 - Distinguished Artist Award from the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, the first woman to win this award
2011 - Lee Krasner award for lifetime achievement, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation*
CHUEN
Kin 51: Blue Crystal Monkey
I dedicate in order to play
Universalizing illusion
I seal the process of magic
With the crystal tone of cooperation
I am guided by the power of abundance
I am a galactic activation portal
Enter me.
Any act of kindness, goodness or compassion admits you into relationship with the Absolute.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2017-2018.
The Sacred Tzolk'in
Muladhara Chakra (Seli Plasma)
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