August | 2024 | University of Washington Press Blog

Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully (1896–1963) is having a moment thanks to the first solo exhibition of her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hailed as “enchanting” by New York Times art critic Holland Cotter, Mary Sully: Native Modern includes twenty-five of Sully’s enigmatic triptychs alongside family photos and other contextual materials.

Born on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota in 1896, Mary Sully was largely self-taught. Steeped in the visual traditions of beadwork, quilling, and hide painting, she also engaged with the experiments in time, space, symbolism, and representation characteristic of early twentieth-century modernist art. Her position on the margins of the art world meant that her work was exhibited only a handful of times, including in the exhibition Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Mary Sully, *The Indian Church* (detail). Author’s collection.

In his book, Becoming Mary Sully, historian Philip J. Deloria recovers his great-aunt’s work from obscurity, exploring her stunning portfolio through the lenses of modernism, industrial design, Dakota women’s aesthetics, mental health, ethnography and anthropology, primitivism, and the American Indian politics of the 1930s.

Read our Q&A with Deloria below to learn more about the reclamation of his great-aunt’s artwork and why “the moment to savor [Mary Sully] . . . has arrived” (New York Times).

Your great-aunt’s drawings were nearly lost. What were the circumstances of their discovery and your initial reaction to them? Were you at all familiar with her artwork before then?

The drawings passed from Mary Sully to her sister Ella and then to their brother, Vine Deloria, Sr., my grandfather. He passed them to my mother in the mid-1970s, and I remember opening the box that held them and being both mystified and captivated by the drawings. I had heard bits and pieces about my great-aunt, including that she had artistic ambitions. No one had really taken those ambitions seriously, however, and it wasn’t quite clear just what it was we were looking at. The works had names attached to them and, while we knew some, many were completely unfamiliar. My mother, more than any of us, recognized them as something potentially important and so worked to keep them safe over the ensuing years.

Can you describe the process of introducing Mary Sully’s art to a wider audience? Were people immediately receptive to her drawings?

After my father passed in 2005, my mother and I began the task of going through his papers, at which point the Mary Sully drawings resurfaced. This time around, though, we went through them with a laptop in hand and were able to make sense of those names that left us mystified back in the 1970s. I did a short talk on the works at one point, and a few art historians suggested I do more with them.

I wanted to emphasize that Sully was a Native person exploring that thing we call “modernism.” She did so from an utterly unique place, not part of any of the classic narratives.
Philip J. Deloria

Being completely naive, I approached some of my curator friends with the idea of an exhibition. They reminded me that museum curators are often (perhaps too often!) approached by people who have found a box of a long-dead relative’s artwork in the basement and think that their museum should mount an exhibition. In effect, they challenged me to make an argument for the importance of the works.

As a historian, Becoming Mary Sully was your first foray into art history. At what point did you decide to write the book? Did you anticipate it being part of a wider initiative of reclaiming your great-aunt’s work?

It was that challenge [from the museum curators] that led me to conceive of the book, which developed first as a series of talks. Presenting the work to an audience always affirmed my sense that the art mattered. It spoke to many people and in many distinct ways. And audiences would raise questions and make observations, which sent me back to the works themselves.

My thinking, in other words, was part of a collective effort, even as I was slowly building an audience for Mary Sully’s art. That work paid off when the curator Jill Ahlberg Yohe included three of Sully’s works in the Minneapolis Institute of Art [MIA] exhibition, Hearts of Our People. Eventually, I was able to convert what was by that time a seriously over-stuffed talk into the more detailed and extended argument found in the book. And it was about that same time that I found myself in conversations with Sylvia Yount of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Johanna Minich of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts [VMFA], and Jill Ahlberg Yohe from MIA about the possibilities of an exhibition. At that point, I knew that things had come full circle.

In the book, you introduce the idea of Mary Sully being “native to modernism.” Can you elaborate on this idea?

I wanted this phrase to convey a double meaning. On the one hand, I wanted to emphasize that Sully was a Native person exploring that thing we call “modernism.” She did so from an utterly unique place, not part of any of the classic narratives. She wasn’t a bohemian, did not self-consciously resist academic painting traditions, and was not part of a performative avant-garde. She was a Native ethnographer of the modern world. On the other hand, I wanted to reject any categorical boundary that would separate out Indigenous people from “the modern world.” Indeed, Native people often recognized “modernism” as part of a crisis of Euro-American epistemology, even as they took the supposed changes of modernity in stride. In that sense, Mary Sully was literally native to—she belonged within—modernity and modernism.

How did the first survey at the Met come about?

I started discussions with the Met, the VMFA, and MIA in early 2021 about the possibility of museum acquisitions and a shared traveling exhibit. Later that year, I was able to gather with curators Sylvia Yount, Patricia Norby, Johanna Minich, and Jill Yohe, and we had a fabulous day going through Mary Sully’s works together. Plans evolved over time, and the Met was able to schedule what became a single-artist, new acquisitions exhibition for July 2024.

What’s next for Mary Sully’s oeuvre?

Ten of the works in the Met show, owned by the Mary Sully Foundation, will be traveling next to the Minneapolis Institute of Art for a quite different exhibition opening in March 2025. Minneapolis is the largest museum proximate to the Dakota landscapes where Mary Sully spent much of her life, and so it will be appropriate and compelling to place her art in the context of a world of Dakota women’s aesthetic production. I’ve been in dialogue with several curators about including Sully’s work in other exhibitions. One of the major goals of the foundation that we’ve created around Mary Sully’s oeuvre is to advance her work in the American art canon, and I’m looking forward to continuing that work in the years to come.

Philip J. Deloria (Dakota descent) is professor of history at Harvard University and the author of Indians in Unexpected Places, Playing Indian, and American Studies: A User’s Guide, coauthored with Alexander I. Olson. He is a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, where he chairs the Repatriation Committee; a former president of the American Studies Association; and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.