This year’s honored artist in residence at the Montana Artists Refuge in Basin for a unique artists residency program and a weekend symposium was Kay WalkingStick, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and of Ho-Chunk descent and an Arcadia University B.F.A. alumni of the Class of 1959.

“Now in its ninth year, the refuge’s American Indian Artists Residency is the only art-making residency program for Native American artists in the country,” reports Marga Lincoln of the Independence Record. The symposium was Sept. 11 and 12.

“A prolific artist, she’s been exhibiting her work both nationally and internationally since 1969, and was a professor of art at Cornell University from 1988-2005. WalkingStick is also the first female Native American artist to be included in H.W. Janson’s authoritative ‘History of Art,’” writes Lincoln. “She’s been creating art ever since a child growing up during the Great Depression.”

Read more about how WalkingStick loves the landscapes of the West and “likes to work in diptychs, juxtaposing different perspectives of a landscape, sometimes contrasting a realistic depiction with a symbolic or abstract representation,” according to Lincoln.