Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Delaware
“Kay WalkingStick, Creative Kinship, and Art History’s Tangled Legs”
This talk considers the artist Kay WalkingStick’s (b. 1935) reassessment of art historical difference through her engagement with global visual cultures collected in Renaissance Italy. Although WalkingStick participated in the postcolonial critique of modernism in the wake of the exhibition, “Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” in 1984, her own wide-ranging, elective affiliations suggest other trajectories of entanglement between European and indigenous makers. Jessica L. Horton positions her work at the intersection of Native American kinship studies and insights gleaned from the visual record of first contact.
