30 Minutes on Georgia O’Keeffe, Kay WalkingStick, and American Modernism

Why It Matters

By juxtaposing WalkingStick’s Indigenous abstractions with O’Keeffe’s modernist landscapes, the exhibition redefines American art history and expands institutional recognition of Native contributions to modernism.

Key Takeaways

• WalkingStick’s diptych blends Native beadwork patterns with modernist landscapes.
• First Native woman painting entered Art Institute’s Arts of the Americas collection.
• O’Keeffe and WalkingStick share abstraction‑representation dialogue in landscape art.
• Unmet 1984 meeting highlights parallel artistic concerns across generations.
• Installation “Landscapes in Conversation” juxtaposes Indigenous and American modernism.

Summary

The Art Institute’s recent talk, presented by Rice Curatorial Fellow Lois Taylor Biggs, examined the new “Landscapes in Conversation” installation that pairs Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick with iconic modernist Georgia O’Keeffe. The program highlighted the museum’s acquisition of WalkingStick’s diptych The Silence of Glacier—the first painting by a Native woman to join the Arts of the Americas collection—and its visual conversation with O’Keeffe’s 1932 Green Mountains Canada.

Biggs traced how WalkingStick incorporates Cheyenne beadwork stencils onto sweeping mountain vistas, using texture and flatness to mark the land as Indigenous. She linked this practice to O’Keeffe’s lifelong blend of abstraction and representation, citing the latter’s 1926 essay on color and shape and her “Blue and Green Music” series. Archival research revealed a 1984 letter from WalkingStick to O’Keeffe’s assistant, a missed personal encounter that underscores their parallel artistic concerns.

Memorable quotations punctuated the talk: WalkingStick’s 2015 catalog statement that “art is driven by the content and the materials together,” and O’Keeffe’s claim that she “could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way.” Both artists view form as a conduit for memory, spirituality, and place, bridging modernist aesthetics with Native visual traditions.

The pairing reframes American modernism as a dialogue rather than a monologue, foregrounding Indigenous abstraction within canonical narratives. It signals a curatorial shift toward inclusive histories, potentially influencing future acquisitions, scholarship, and market valuations of Native artists working in abstract landscape traditions.

Original Description

In 1984, artist Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee) asked the 96-year-old Georgia O’Keeffe if she could visit her in New Mexico and was politely refused. If they had met, what would these two artists have talked about? The recent Gallery 160 installation "Landscapes in Conversations" brings these two artist's paintings into conversation, as does this talk.

Lois Taylor Biggs, Rice Curatorial Fellow in Native American Art, considers both WalkingStick's and O’Keeffe’s relationships to American Modernism, locating both artists within a long history of Indigenous abstraction in the Americas.