Mary Sully's Astonishing Art Pictures American History Through Indigenous Eyes [View all]

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/