Event | Kay WalkingStick and Chin Chih Yang to be Honored at 2022 NYFA Hall of Fame Benefit

NYFA’s first in-person benefit since the pandemic will be held on Thursday, April 7 at Capitale in Manhattan.

New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) will celebrate the induction of two arts luminaries into the NYFA Hall of Fame during its annual benefit on Thursday, April 7 at Capitale, 130 Bowery, New York, NY 10013. The event recognizes visual, literary, and performing artists who have received NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowships and have had a profound impact on the arts through their creative work, and patrons of the arts who have championed the value of the arts in the world around us. The evening’s honorees, who were to be honored at our cancelled 2020 in-person benefit, are: 

• Kay WalkingStick, Visual Artist (Fellow in Painting ’92, Murray Reich Award ’18)
• Chin Chih Yang, Multidisciplinary Artist (Fellow in Digital/Electronic Arts ’11)

The ticketed event will feature cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, a silent auction, dinner and an awards presentation, and dessert. All proceeds will benefit NYFA’s programming and mission to empower artists at critical stages of their lives. All Hall of Fame Benefit tickets come with a signed, limited-edition print by Kay WalkingStick created exclusively for the event. Attire is festive cocktail.

On the inductees, arts advocate and NYFA Board Chair Marc Jason said: “Kay WalkingStick and Chin Chih Yang are creating important works that prompt us to question our relationship with the environment. Their work captivates because it is both highly personal—in terms of the spiritual and physical impact of landscape—and universal for how we navigate an increasingly complex world.”

The event recognizes the sustained achievements of artists who received early career support from NYFA, and the vision and commitment of enlightened patrons of the arts. WalkingStick and Yang are past recipients of the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, which are individual unrestricted grants made to artists who are living and working in New York State. Other past NYFA Hall of Fame Inductees include Ida Applebroog, Paul Beatty, Sanford Biggers, James Casebere, Christopher d’Amboise, Phil Gilbert, Anna Deavere Smith, Min Jin Lee, Zhou Long, Christian Marclay, Terry McMillan, Mira Nair, Lynn Nottage, Eric Overmyer, Suzan-Lori Parks, Wendy Perron, Dwight Rhoden, Faith Ringgold, Carolee Schneemann, and Andres Serrano. WalkingStick was also more recently recognized with the Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award, which is awarded to mature and established visual artists with a long history of creative practice.

“We’re thrilled to induct Kay WalkingStick and Chin Chih Yang into our Hall of Fame,” said Michael L. Royce, Executive Director, NYFA. “Both first came to NYFA as NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellows, which is often seen as a validation of an artist’s vision and voice by their peers. It’s wonderful to bring them back to NYFA in this significant way, to further recognize their contributions in the arts and beyond,” he added.

NYFA is proud to present this year’s honorees and celebrate their impact on the cultural community:

Kay WalkingStick is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma with Cherokee/Anglo heritage. Over a career spanning six decades, WalkingStick’s practice has focused on the American Landscape and its metaphorical significances to Native Americans and people across the world. WalkingStick 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 unify the present with history, her complex works hold tension between representational and abstract imagery. Her paintings represent a knowledge of the earth and its sacred quality.

WalkingStick’s current solo show, “Mountains/Canyons/Clouds,” is on view through April 16 at Hales Gallery, New York, where she is also represented. Her work has been included in many institutional exhibitions, including shows at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; National Gallery of Canada, ON; The New Museum, NY; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA. WalkingStick’s extensive retrospective at The National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC, toured the United States with stops at Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Dayton Art Institute, OH; Gilcrease Art Museum, Tulsa, OK; Kalamazoo Institute of Art, MI; and Montclair Art Museum, NJ. Her work is in many collections, including Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Cherokee Heritage Foundation, Tahlequah, OK; Denver Art Museum, Denver CO; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Portland Art Museum, Portland OR; and Southern Plains Indian Museum, Anadarko, OK.

WalkingStick received a BFA degree from Beaver College (now Arcadia University) and an MFA degree from Pratt Institute, and was a Professor of Fine Arts at Cornell University from 1988 until her retirement as a Professor Emerita in 2005. She lives and works in Pennsylvania.

Chin Chih Yang is a multidisciplinary artist from Taiwan who lives and works in New York, NY. Yang’s work addresses society’s efforts to protect itself, physically and psychologically, against catastrophe resulting from pollution, surveillance, isolation, and religious/political/social intolerance. Yang perceives the modern world as a mixture of anxiety and entrancement and addresses the irony of 21st century products that can do wondrous things but also result in producers and consumers wantonly discarding too much waste. Most of his work is presented not in museums but on the streets—in Union Square, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, and the United Nations in New York, NY, and elsewhere.

Most recently, Yang orchestrated a miniature version of his upcoming large-scale performance, “Watch Us, Together We Can Do It” at the Bogliasco Foundation, Italy. Other new and recent works include “Who Cares?,” a conversation and video compilation of Harlem and New York City residents expressing their opinions and views about their neighborhood and current issues, and the COVID-19 triptych “PROTECT AND CONNECT,” which consisted of a Mobile Quarantine House at the World Trade Center and two works at Time Square: “Dream for Fresh Air” and “Free Money.”

Yang has received many awards and commendations from prestigious organizations and institutes, New York Foundation for the Arts among them. His recent accomplishments include a solo show at Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei and residencies at Bogliasco Foundation, Italy; Santa Fe Art Institute; MacDowell; and Yaddo. In 2018, the retrospective documentary covering 30 years of his work, Chin Chih Yang: Face the Earth, was named “Best Documentary” at the Southampton International Film Festival, UK. He received a BFA degree from Parsons School of Design and an MS degree from Pratt Institute. 

Ticket prices start at $650 and Tables at $6,500; you can purchase tickets here. For more information about NYFA’s Hall of Fame Benefit, please contact Kim Goodis at [email protected] or 212.366.6900 x 207.