WalkingStick’s practice links her personal experiences with the history of modern art. In Tepee Form Drawing, fields of color recall those in the flowing abstract works by Frank Bowling and Sam Gilliam (also on view), while sharp white lines suggest the draping of a tepee, used by Native Americans in the Great Plains region. Indigenous references recur in WalkingStick’s increasingly abstract works of the late 1970s. The arc form in her black-on-black drawings is a geometric representation of Chief Joseph, a leader of the Wallowa band of Nez Perce people who fought against the US government’s expulsion of his tribe from their ancestral lands in the Pacific Northwest. The way the shape shifts across each composition evokes transformation and survival.
2025
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