Kay WalkingStick was born in Syracuse, New York. A member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, WalkingStick’s work is informed by her Native American background but is not defined by it. It is the “shared heritage” of humanity and personal narrative that informs her work, which has enabled her to embark on a career as an internationally known artist for nearly forty years. She has been a painter of the Figurative, Abstract and Landscape. She currently works in diptych format, incorporating at least two of these seemingly disparate styles into a single work.

         Kay WalkingStick received her M.F.A. from the Pratt Institute and recently retired from her position as a Professor of Fine Art at Cornell University. WalkingStick is an internationally exhibited artist and has been showing her work in New York City since 1969 and is included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY, the Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. Kay WalkingStick’s work has been noted and reviewed multiple times in the New York Times, ARTnews, Art In America and she was the first artist of Native American heritage to be included in H. W. Janson’s History of Art, 1995.