Mary Sully—born Susan Mabel Deloria on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota—was a little-known, reclusive Yankton Dakota artist who, between the 1920s and 1940s, created highly distinctive work informed by her Native American and settler ancestry. This first solo exhibition of Sully’s groundbreaking production highlights recent Met acquisitions and loans from the Mary Sully Foundation, works that complicate traditional notions of Native American and modern art.
Working without patronage, in near obscurity, and largely self-taught, Sully produced intricately designed and vividly colored drawings. They mix meaningful aspects of her Dakota heritage with visual elements observed from other Native nations as well as 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. Featuring 25 rarely seen Sully compositions, as well as archival family material and other Native items from The Met collection, Mary Sully: Native Modern offers a fresh and complex lens through which to consider American art and life in the early 20th century.
The exhibition is made possible by the Barrie A. and Deedee Wigmore Foundation.
Mary Sully (Dakota, 1896–1963). Alice (detail), ca. 1920s–40s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund and funds from various donors, 2023
