Kay WalkingStick, a landscape painter and citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, makes paintings that reflect the importance of land to Native Americans and all people. North to Taos comes from a recent series of paintings that span two panels. To choose the subjects for these paintings, WalkingStick traveled to landscapes that inspire her, spending time in different places across the U.S. The landscape depicted here is near Taos, New Mexico, close to the Taos Pueblo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the country. WalkingStick has explained that painting the landscape “is a dialogue with the mythic, the spiritual, with that which transcends our bittersweet daily lives.”

On her Taos visit, the artist filled notebooks with sketches and took reference photographs. She also researched Native history and art. In this research, several Pueblo objects in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian caught her interest. The abstract Indigenous pattern that appears in the right panel is taken from one of these objects, marking the land as Native land.