Mary Sully (1896–1963) is enjoying, perhaps, the most unlikely museum solo show debut in all of art history. A self-taught, 20th-century Dakota Sioux woman artist whose entire life’s work sat forgotten in the family home for decades, Sully is now the subject of a fascinating posthumous exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently acquired a suite of 19 of her works.
“This is a reclamation project,” Sylvia Yount, the Met’s American wing curator, said in a tour of the show, which also included 10 works on loan from the Mary Sully Foundation. “We are inserting Mary Sully into the canon of American art.”
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” follows the 2019 book Becoming Mary Sully, by Sully’s grandnephew, Phillip J. Deloria, a historian and Harvard professor who inherited the artist’s work, packed away in a suitcase under the stairs. Miraculously, he not only recognized its worth, but made it his mission to ensure that others did as well.
“Nobody ever took her seriously as an artist—no one in the family. They thought she was the crazy women who just doodled up in her room,” Deloria said. “I think of her as the Indian Emily Dickinson.”
Mary Sully, Babe Ruth (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund and funds from various donors, 2023.
Drawn on paper from the late 1920s to the early ’40s, Sully’s multi-panel compositions feature carefully composed, often symmetrical designs that employ pattern and geometry. The top panel is typically the most figurative, with Modernist-inspired abstractions of this imagery in the center page, and more overtly Native American designs on the bottom sheet.
Many of these kaleidoscopic colored pencil works, of which roughly 200 are known to exist, were what the artist called “personality prints,” inspired by the celebrities of the day, from Gertrude Stein to Babe Ruth to Fiorello La Guardia. Upon close examination, each one contains figurative elements that relate to their subject’s life, like a baseball diamond for Ruth—although the imagery, while beautiful, can be hard to parse.
That these pieces are now in the collection of the nation’s foremost art institution, which is showing no less than 25 of her drawings, would have been a dream come true for Sully.
Suffering from social anxiety and mental illness that was never formally diagnosed, she had struggled to find her way, with an unsuccessful stint as a shop owner after failing to complete her college education. Sully lived with and relied financially on her sister, Ella Deloria, an ethnographer who, like Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston, trained under the noted anthropologist Franz Boas.
Mary Sully, Fiorello La Guardia (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of the Mary Sully Foundation, 2023.
Though the family may not have appreciated them, her drawings were something that Sully excelled at, and gave purpose and meaning to her life.
“Her being isolated in her room, spending hours—years really—drawing, that’s actually now something that’s really encouraged in regards to self-care,” Patricia Marroquin Norby, the Met’s associate curator of Native American art, said. “Now we have all the adult coloring books for people.”
Sully took up her art with a unique vision, exacting detail, and a determined dedication, creating her own personal style and visual language. She was informed both by her Native heritage—techniques such as quillwork, beadwork, and quilting—and the prevailing trends of the day, including commercial design and fashion, as well as mainstream pop culture.
In this, Sully was unique among other Indigenous artists working at the time, who typically hewed more closely to traditional Native subject matter.
Mary Sully, Eugene Field (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund and funds from various donors, 2023.
Despite her lack of formal training, Sully saw art as her birthright. Her great-grandfather was Thomas Sully (1783–1872), one of the most famous and successful early American painters.
Thomas Sully’s son, Alfred Sully (1820–1879), was also an artist—as well as a military man, rising to the level of a brigadier general in the Army. Alfred’s service brought him out West, where he commanded U.S. forces in the 1863 Whitestone Hill Massacre, killing as many as 300 Native Americans.
But before that, he had an intimate relationship with a Dakota woman named Susan Pehandutawin, who gave him a pair of beaded moccasins, on view in the show, that he sent back East—and, more importantly, bore him a daughter, also named Mary Sully.
It’s not clear if Alfred ever knew Pehandutawin had given him a child, but his daughter and grandchildren knew the artistic lineage from which they were descended. And when Sully began making her art, she eschewed her birth name, Susan Mabel Deloria, in favor of her mother’s name, which reflected this ancestry.
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Paul Lachenauer, ©the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York.
Just as Thomas Sully painted portraits of the leading citizens of Early America, his great-granddaughter looked to celebrities—some of whom have long since been consigned to obscurity—for inspiration. Her “Personality Prints,” Deloria said, “are really a portrait of America in the 1930s,” and reflect the artist’s engagement with literature, theater, and popular music.
Sully was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, but spent her life between two worlds, Native and non-Native. Her father, Philip J. Deloria, was a leader of the Sioux Episcopal Church. Ella Deloria’s work took the sisters across the country, with Sully serving as driver, and the sisters even lived for a time in New York.
But in her only brush with fame, as the subject of one of Paramount Pictures’s “Unusual Occupations” shorts in 1944, Sully was exoticized. Shooting her drawing in the desert in a stereotypical “Indian Princess” outfit, the film identifies her as a member of New Mexico’s Zuni tribe.
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Paul Lachenauer, ©the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York.
“Obviously cultural and historical accuracy were not of concern. There was more for entertainment value,” Marroquin Norby, who is herself a Purépecha Indian woman, said of the footage, which is included in the show. “It’s just such a quirky, fun video.”
Some of Sully’s drawings delve into the complex question of Native American identity, like the Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present, and Indian Church.
The former wrestles with the sad trajectory of Native life under colonial rule, her people shown trod beneath the foot of the white man and forced off their land into reservations. (Sully conveys this masterfully in four vertical layers.) The latter depicts a Native congregation gathered before an altar in front of the cross, but inside a tipi, illustrating the ways in which Indigenous communities blended their own traditions with settler culture.
Mary Sully, Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present (ca. 1920s–40s). Courtesy of the Mary Sully Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Despite some efforts to attract collectors, Sully never sold her work. And she appears to have only exhibited three times, at two Indian schools and at the Milwaukee Women’s Club. But Deloria’s book opened new doors for the late artist, as scholars and academics began to discover her extraordinary art.
In 2019, a trio of Sully’s works appeared in “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists,” which opened at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), and traveled to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville; the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa. (The Met show was originally going to be organized in partnership with Mia, which has also acquired several Sully drawings; instead, a separate exhibition will open there in March.)
Mary Sully, Indian Church, top panel (ca. 1920s–40s). Courtesy of the Mary Sully Foundation.
The drawings are shown exactly as Sully intended—thankfully, they were carefully packed away in neat groups, still with the tape she used to hang them as vertical triptychs during her lifetime. Otherwise, it might have been quite a challenge to match the corresponding panels together.
“When my wife and I saw them on the wall, we just kind of burst into tears,” Deloria recalled. “To see Mary Sully’s works now hung on the walls of major museums, it’s just this amazing thing. But she’s wholly and completely deserving of it.”
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, July 18, 2024–January 12, 2025.