Becoming Mary Sully: Reclaiming a Modern Native American Artist
Philip Deloria
Harvard University
Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Time: 5:00 - 6:30pm
Location: Gasson Hall 305
Reception following in Gasson Hall 306
Co-sponsored with the American Studies Program, the Institute for the Liberal Arts, the History Department, the Art History Department, the Provost's Office, and Women's and Gender Studies.
“From a cardboard box to the Met”: that’s how the New York Times described the current Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Mary Sully: Native Modern, on display through early January 2025. In this talk, Sully’s grand-nephew Philip J. Deloria will describe the work of this transformative Dakota artist, which boldly mixes Great Plains women’s aesthetics, early twentieth-century modernist traditions, 1930s popular culture, and ethnographic anthropology into stunning and intelligent visual art. The newspaper was correct: Sully’s work has moved from complete obscurity to the galleries of major American museums, and Deloria will detail the process behind its surprising journey.
Philip J. Deloria (Dakota descent) is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States. He is the author of several books, including Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1998), Indians in Unexpected Places (University Press of Kansas, 2004), American Studies: A User’s Guide (University of California Press, 2017), with Alexander Olson, and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (University of Washington Press, 2019), as well as two co-edited books and numerous articles and chapters. Deloria received the Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1994, taught at the University of Colorado, and then, from 2001 to 2017, at the University of Michigan, before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018. Deloria was a long-serving trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. He is former president of the American Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for American History, an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of numerous prizes and recognitions.
Ash-Milby, Kathleen, and Ruth B. Phillips. “Inclusivity or Sovereignty? Native American Arts in the Gallery and the Museum since 1992.” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 10–38. doi:10.1080/00043249.2017.1367190.
Deloria, Philip J. Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2019.
Fowler, Cynthia. “Hybridity as a Strategy For Self-Determination in Contemporary American Indian Art.” Social Justice 34, no. 1 (107) (2007): 63–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29768422.
Herzog, Melanie Anne, and Sarah Anne Stolte. “American Indian Art: Teaching and Learning.” Wicazo Sa Review 27, no. 1 (2012): 85–109. https://doi.org/10.5749/wicazosareview.27.1.0085.
Ramirez, Renya. “Healing, Violence, and Native American Women.” Social Justice 31, no. 4 (98) (2004): 103–16. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29768279.
Schmittou, Douglas A., and Michael H. Logan. “Fluidity of Meaning: Flag Imagery in Plains Indian Art.” American Indian Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2002): 559–604. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4128503.
Seaton, Melynda. “Native American Art Today in the Great Plains: An Overview of the Exhibition ‘Contemporary Indigeneity: Spiritual Borderlands.’” Great Plains Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2017): 37–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44683825.
Vizenor, Gerald. “American Indian Art and Literature Today: Survivance and Tragic Wisdom.” Museum International 62, no. 3 (2010): 41-51. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0033.2010.01732.
On July 25, 2024, The New York Times published an article by Holland Carter about Native American artist Mary Sully. The piece tells the story of Sully’s artwork and its legacy. Carter notes that Sully’s family almost discarded her work after her death at the age of 67 in 1963. The cardboard box full of drawings was shuffled between relatives until Philip J. Deloria, Sully's grand-nephew and Harvard History professor, stumbled upon it. Thanks to Deloria, most of the collection is now on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sully used a number of mediums, including colored pencils and ink drawings. She also made triptych drawings portraying famous cultural figures who reflected the time and culture of Native life. The MET now displays her triptych drawings: the top panel is illustrational, the middle panel follows the theme of the illustration but reflects modernist geometric abstraction, and the final panel is composed of traditional Native American art, specifically quillwork. The MET’s display resurrected the unique and personal style of Sully’s art and brought it into the mainstream with the help of Deloria.
The events of Fall 2024 at the Boisi Center culminated with a co-sponsored lecture by Dr. Philip Deloria (Dakota descent), the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University. Most of Deloria’s work focuses on American Indian history, but this event was particularly personal to him, as he discussed the work of his great-aunt, Mary Sully. He started by outlining the life and ancestry of Sully, whose real name was Susan Deloria, and then he delved deeper into her work. Sully’s work was only discovered and shared with the public quite recently. After she died in 1963, the art was given to her sister, Ella, and then to other relatives. When Philip Deloria discovered the prints in a cardboard box in his mother’s home, he was stunned by the talent they reflected. He set out to research his ancestor and prove the importance of her work.
A child of an Episcopal priest, Sully attended a mission school in her youth and an elite boarding school in her adolescent years. After her schooling, she followed her sister Ella to Kansas and New York where she developed her artistic ability through design. Sully also began producing her popular personality prints during this time. She would use stylistically similar methods to other Northern Plains Indian women artists, but she would use them to represent popular figures of the time. For example, her personality print of Fred Astaire contains shapes and colors abstractly reminiscent of steps on a dance floor. Traditional Northern Plains art uses shapes like squares and diamonds and styles like mirroring and dualism, which are also present in these prints. Later in her career, she took steps toward more ethnographic and pictographic pieces, which were traditionally art made by men. Sully was not the first woman to step outside of gender categories, but she successfully used this style to design objects like suitcases and bags. Thanks to Deloria’s research and advocacy, Sully’s work has been featured in an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and will continue to tour U.S. museums for years to come. Deloria’s research on her art demonstrates the value his relative can bring to the artistic canon in the United States.