Mary Sully's Astonishing Art Pictures American History Through Indigenous Eyes
September 27, 2024
A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum reveals how deeply embedded a Native woman’s perspective on our culture might be.
Elizabeth Pochoda
Portrait of the artist as a young Dakota: Mary Sully, born Susan Mabel Deloria on the Standing Rock Reservation, in a promotional photo.
(The Mary Sully Foundation)
This article appears in the October 2024 issue, with the headline “Native Wit: Mary Sully’s American Journey.”
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When Jaune Quick-To-See Smith lit up the Whitney Museum’s galleries last year, and the New-York Historical Society followed with Kay WalkingStick’s painterly revisions of Hudson River School landscapes, it seemed as if Indigenous women’s art had finally made its mark on the contemporary scene. Both artists cast a cold eye on American history and American art while never descending into caricature, and although some of the art press celebrated their shows as something new, they weren’t really. The two artists have been admired for decades, if largely unknown to the wider museum-going public.
Over at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the revelatory exhibition “Mary Sully: Native Modern” (through January 12, 2025) suggests just how deeply embedded in American art a Native woman’s perspective on American culture might be. Until recently, Mary Sully (1896–1963) was all but unknown except as the sister of the ethnographer Ella Cara Deloria, the aunt of Vine Deloria Jr. (author of Custer Died for Your Sins), and the great-aunt of Philip Deloria (author of Indians in Unexpected Places, among other works). In 2006, Philip Deloria and his mother, Barbara, opened a tattered box of Sully’s art that had been passed down to them. What they found inside—more than 100 vertically arranged images, each done in colored pencil or graphite on paper—inspired Deloria to write his superb book, Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract. The works have now been restored, and 15 of the 25 that were purchased by the Met are on view in the museum’s American Wing.
She was not born Mary Sully; Susan Mabel Deloria was her birth name. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation, pathologically shy and reclusive in a family that was anything but, she adopted her mother’s maiden name—perhaps to link her art to that of her great-grandfather, the illustrious painter Thomas Sully, whose portrait of “Indian killer” Andrew Jackson is the source for the image on our $20 bill. The ironies don’t end there: Her grandfather Alfred Sully (1820–1879), a colonel in the US Army, would boast more than once about his 1863 massacre of Indians at Whitestone Hill. Alfred Sully left his Indian family and eventually married a daughter of the Confederacy.
An American story, although one that does not entirely explain how Mary Sully’s sense of irony and social justice kept such easy company with her witty, affectionate, and sly appreciations of figures in American popular culture.
More:
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mary-sully-native-american-artist-metropolitan/
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https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Loop01-1.mp4
Jill Radsken
Harvard Staff Writer
July 11, 2019
long read
Philip Deloria’s family had never taken his eccentric great-aunt Mary Sully’s art seriously. He remembered thinking, back when he was a kid, that her pencil drawings were “elaborate doodles,” judging them “cool, but weird.” Deloria first unpacked them with his mom in the 1970s, and though he carried three favorites with him as he moved along in his life, the full set of drawings were not given another look until two decades later.
That’s when the professor of history discovered Sully (given name Susan Deloria) was an artist of two worlds. On one side of her family she was descended from American portrait painter Thomas Sully (“The Passage of the Delaware” and Andrew Jackson’s portrait on the $20 bill) and on the other, members of the Dakota Sioux tribe.
In his new book, “Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract,” Deloria couples her personal story — a life battling anxiety and possibly synesthesia, as well as her complicated relationship with her sister, the anthropologist Ella Deloria — with an examination of her art, which defied categorization in the early 20th century. Core to her collection are 134 “personality prints,” three-panel pieces inspired, in many cases, by artists and celebrities including Babe Ruth, Gertrude Stein, and Amelia Earhart. Three of Sully’s works appear in “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists,” which recently opened at Minneapolis Institute of Art. Deloria talked to the Gazette about Sully’s modernist mind, his family’s past, and how he hopes to elevate his great-aunt’s work.
. . .
Top panel for “Indian Church.”
More:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/07/in-sioux-aunts-work-historian-finds-art-on-fringes-of-modernism-tradition/
Sully around 1912
Born Susan Mabel Deloria
May 2, 1896
Standing Rock Indian Reservation, South Dakota
Died August 29, 1963 (aged 67)
Omaha, Nebraska
Nationality Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (American)
Mary Sully (1896–1963) was a Yankton Dakota avant-garde artist.[1][2] Her work remained largely unknown until the early 21st century.[3]
Sully is best known for her colored-pencil triptychs and "personality prints," which often depicted celebrities such as Amelia Earhart, Gertrude Stein, and Greta Garbo. Her panels, characterized by abstract forms, symbols, rich colors, and symmetry, often appear kaleidoscopic in nature.
Her designs draw from and incorporate classic Native American designs — specifically Navajo textiles and Plains parfleches, painted rawhide containers — while also aligning with the Art Nouveau and Bauhaus movements.
Although she was active during the early decades of the 20th century, when Native American art and Art Nouveau were gaining prominence in mainstream fine art exhibitions, Sully was considered revolutionary for her synthesis of these two genres.
Early Life and Background
Mary Sully was born Susan Mable Deloria on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota in 1896. She was the daughter of Tipi Sapa (Black Lodge), or Philip J. Deloria, and Mary Sully.[4] She was the great-granddaughter of the respected 19th-century American portrait artist Thomas Sully, known for capturing the personalities of America’s early celebrities, including the figure of Andrew Jackson immortalized on the twenty-dollar bill. She was also the granddaughter of military officer Alfred Sully.[5]
Her sister, Ella Cara Deloria, was an anthropologist with whom she traveled extensively throughout the United States, visiting many Native communities and observing the art that was integral to their daily lives. Sully also spent much of her time in New York City, drawing inspiration from the thriving art scene there.[
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sully