The Remaindered Line: Kay WalkingStick, Postminimalism, and the Politics of Indigeneity

References to Indigenous forms and histories abound in Postminimalism during the 1970s in the United States. In the midst of that decade’s political, economic, and environmental crises, fantasies of Indigeneity offered artists a means to envision futures beyond the ruins of the present. These fantasies were exploited, contested, and shaped by Indigenous activists, artists, and intellectuals in the era of Red Power, but as they transited through other countercultures and liberation movements they were often refracted through settler-colonial grammars. This talk examines the obscured relationship between Postminimalist aesthetics and Indigenous politics through the lens of Cherokee painter Kay WalkingStick’s Chief Joseph Series (1975–77). Deploying the abstract forms of Minimalist painting to commemorate Indigenous histories of removal, reservation, and allotment, these paintings illuminate those forms’ prehistories in the visual technologies of settler-colonial dispossession. Creatively misreading the black monochromes of Frank Stella, the artist developed a formal device she calls the “remaindered line,” which allows the viewer to trace the unsettling place of Indigenous difference in the structures of settler modernity. 

Part of the Art History Seminar Series, convened by Mary Roberts and presented by the discipline of art history at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.

This seminar is also accessible via Zoom (click here to join).