The Allentown Art Museum welcomes renowned contemporary Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick and curator Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto for a Dynamic Conversation on Saturday, September 26, 2026, to provide a deeper understanding of the special exhibition Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School. The talk will take place from 1 to 2:30 p.m. in the Museum’s Community Gallery. Admission to the Museum and the talk are free, and plenty of free parking is available in the Museum’s lot. Reserve your seat HERE, or just drop in.

The exhibition, which continues at the Museum through October 11, showcases landscape paintings by WalkingStick alongside classic works from New York Historical’s collection of 19th-century Hudson River School paintings. This artistic dialogue spotlights the ways in which WalkingStick’s work connects to and diverges from the Hudson River School tradition, and explores the agency of art in shaping humankind’s relationship to the land.

Says the artist, “The landscape sustains us physically and spiritually. It is our beautiful corner of the cosmos.”

 

Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935, Syracuse, NY) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma with Cherokee/Anglo heritage. Her six-decade career is both a visual record of her life experience and her attempt to present Native American history as a crucial part of America’s history. She draws on formal modernist painterly traditions as well as the Native American experience to create works that connect the immediacy of the physical world with the spiritual. Attempting to connect the present with the past, her complex works hold tensions between representational and abstract imagery. Her paintings represent a knowledge of the earth and its sacred quality.

WalkingStick’s work is in many museum collections, including the Allentown Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Canada, Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art.

WalkingStick received a BFA from Beaver College (now Arcadia University), Glenside, PA, and an MFA from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. She also has a Ph.D. from both Arcadia University and Pratt Institute. She lives and works in Pennsylvania.

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Since August 2026, Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, Ph.D., has served as director of galleries and assistant professor of curatorial practice at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she oversees the Art Gallery, the Commons Gallery, and the John Young Museum of Art. Previously she served as vice president and chief curator at the New-York Historical Society and worked in academia at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and Vassar College in New York as well as in secondary education at Kamehameha Schools Kapālama in Honolulu, a school for Native Hawaiian students.

At the New-York Historical Society, Ikemoto curated such exhibitions as Democracy Matters; Betye Saar’s Black Dolls; Lost New York; Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School; Nature, Crisis, Consequence; Monuments: Commemoration and Controversy; and the award-winning Scenes of New York City: The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection. She also spearheaded major acquisitions, including works by Kent Monkman, Betye Saar, Suchitra Mattai, Augusta Savage, Oscar yi Hou, Kay WalkingStick, Andrew Melrose, and Robert Kobayashi. Ikemoto established the New-York Historical Society’s Meet the Curator program and helped to develop and teach in the Master of Arts in Museum Studies program created jointly between the museum and the City University of New York School of Professional Studies.

For International Women’s Day 2024, Ikemoto was profiled in the New York Times. She holds a BA in Art History from Stanford University and an AM and PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University.