Mary Sully at the Met
NEW YORK—If you’re in NYC this summer, visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Mary Sully: Native Modern.
Born Susan Mabel Deloria on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, Mary Sully (1896–1963) was a Yankton Dakota artist who, between the 1920s and 1940s, produced distinctive work informed by her Native American and settler ancestry.
Sully was the great-granddaughter of 19th-century portraitist Thomas Sully, and her sister, Ella Deloria, studied with famed anthropologist Franz Boas. Her nephew was Vine Deloria Jr., and her great-nephew is historian and Harvard professor Philip J. Deloria, author of Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract, the only scholarly investigation of her art and life.
Working without patronage and largely self-taught, Sully produced approximately 200 intricately designed and vividly colored drawings in colored pencil, graphite, and ink on paper that captured meaningful aspects of her Dakota community mixed with visual elements observed from other Native nations and the aesthetics of urban life.
Euro-American celebrities from popular culture, politics, and religion inspired some of her most striking works, which she called “personality prints”—abstract portraits arranged as vertical triptychs. She also depicted important concepts of the time the same way, including “Divorce” and “Greed.”
Of interest in the “personality prints” are the celebrities she did capture, from Gertrude Stein to Babe Ruth, Florenz Ziegfeld to Fiorello LaGuardia, but also who she did not create portraits of, including prominent African American musicians of the time, or her sister’s contemporary Zora Neal Hurston.
Her work hung as a show three times, at two Indian Boarding Schools, as well as the Milwaukee Women’s Club.
The Met’s show features 25 rarely seen Sully compositions—primarily her “personality prints”—as well as archival family material, and a short film produced by Paramount in the 1940s, in which Sully is dressed as a ‘Zuni Indian Princess’ — but is filmed with her drawing board, creating art.
Exhibition Dates:
July 18, 2024–January 12, 2025 www.metmuseum.org Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 746 North, The Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery, The American Wing
