Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract

by Philip J. Deloria

Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully was the great-granddaughter of respected nineteenth-century portraitist Thomas Sully, who captured the personalities of America's first generation of celebrities (including the figure of Andrew Jackson immortalized on the twenty-dollar bill). Born on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota in 1896, she 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. And like her great-grandfather Sully was fascinated by celebrity: over two decades, she produced hundreds of colorful and dynamic abstract triptychs, a series of "personality prints" of American public figures like Amelia Earhart, Babe Ruth, and Gertrude Stein.

Sully's position on the margins of the art world meant that her work was exhibited only a handful of times during her life. In Becoming Mary Sully, Philip J. Deloria reclaims that 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. Working in a complex territory oscillating between representation, symbolism, and abstraction, Sully evoked multiple and simultaneous perspectives of time and space. With an intimate yet sweeping style, Deloria recovers in Sully's work a move toward an anti-colonial aesthetic that claimed a critical role for Indigenous women in American Indian futures―within and distinct from American modernity and modernism.

Genres: Art, Indigenous, Nonfiction, History

336 pages, Paperback

First published April 24, 2019

About the author

Philip J. Deloria is 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, as well as the comparative and connective histories of indigenous peoples in a global context.

Reviews

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent excellent book! First book about someone’s art I’ve ever read. So well written and the pictures are lovely.

[Lowell J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mary Sully perceived the early 20th century first through the eyes of an artist, blending her Sioux heritage with her own form of modernist abstraction, and further as a fully-invested consumer of popular culture. Her particularly American fascination with celebrity came to life in colorful three-panel prints: beguiling storytelling in an energized, visual form. Deloria’s interpretation and expansive analysis of her life and of her art are warmly delivered, the depths of his exhaustive research readily apparent and the fascinating narrative compelling.

Great writing, and really fun. What a character!

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed learning about Mary Sully's art. Without the author's explanation of Sully's art I would not been able to get meaning from them.

[Gaye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating story of a little known artist, full of information about the artist and her work. A delight to peruse or read in depth.
Finely bound with a beautiful cover, high quality paper and color images throughout.

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

awesome

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazingly insightful and creative. Deloria weaves art, history, biography, Native studies, and theory to out his great aunt at the front of Native modernism and a whole lot else!

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book a lot. I got it at the MET after hearing the talk by Philip J Deloris who impresses me with the multifaceted approach to the artist’s story. Truly fascinating and layered read!