The Dakota Sioux artist who called herself Mary Sully is having an enchanting first survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but she came close to being swept off the stage of history. When she died in Omaha, Neb., in 1963, at age 67, her primary output of around 200 color-pencil-and-ink drawings lay hidden in a cardboard box kept by her older sister, with whom she had lived most of her adult life.
When that sister herself died a few years later, the box ended up among piles of ephemera waiting to be sorted through. Time passed. More than once the box came close to being tossed until one of Sully’s nieces, who happened to be a librarian, opened it and transferred the contents to a suitcase, which was then tucked away under a staircase.
More time passed. In 2006, the drawings resurfaced and came to the attention of Sully’s great-nephew, Philip J Deloria, who happened to be a history professor at Harvard, and who documented them in a terrific 2019 book called “Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract.” Last year the Met acquired much of the work. And now we have this rich, strange show, “Mary Sully: Native Modern.”
Organized by Patricia Marroquin Norby, the Met’s associate curator of Native American art (of Purépecha descent), and Sylvia Yount, curator in charge of the American Wing, it includes 25 drawings along with a smattering of documentary material (family photos, examples of traditional Native American art) for context, not that context is needed to bring her art to life. Visually, with its vivid coloring and fine-cut coloratura patterning, it sings.
Still, the music is complicated. Each “drawing” actually consists of three separate, different-sized vertical drawings, or panels, on paper. Many of the top panels are illustrational — some topically narrative, even implicitly political — and refer to elements in American popular culture as Sully knew it the early 20th century.
The middle panels, always the largest, tended to riff on that content — on its meanings, colors, forms — in a language of Modernist geometric abstraction, which, by the 1920s, had passed from museum galleries into commercial design.
The bottom panels, always the smallest, were also abstract but from a different direction. Here the source was the symbolically loaded geometry found in traditional Native American quillwork, beadwork and quilting.
Exactly how Sully came up with this symphonically bicultural work, we don’t know. The Met show, following Deloria’s lead, locates the source, at least in part, in Sully’s biography. A thumbnail version of it would include mention of her paternal great-grandfather, the British-born American painter Thomas Sully, who, in the 19th century, was famed as a portraitist to political celebrities. (His likeness of Andrew Jackson, the president who signed the Indian Removal Act, now appears on the U.S. $20 bill).
Thomas Sully’s son Alfred, an Army officer during the American Indian Wars, had a child by a Native American woman. That child, named Mary Sully, eventually married Philip J. Deloria, a leading figure in the Sioux Episcopal Church at Standing Rock in South Dakota. In 1896 the couple had daughter — the future artist — whom they christened Susan Mabel Deloria but who, as an adult, adopted her mother’s maiden name.
Sully’s story is of a life spent in both Native and non-Native worlds, on reservations and off, and frequently on the road. Her older sister Ella Deloria was a linguistic ethnologist who trained with Franz Boas and whose busy research career took her back and forth across the country by car, with Sully doing all the driving. Among many other places, they spent a considerable time in New York City, absorbing its cultural life, including its new art.
Was it there, in the 1920s, that Sully began producing the triptych drawings, which she sometimes referred to as “prints?” Again, we don’t know. She rarely spoke on the record about her art, left no paper trail of letters or journals. Her sister described her as pathologically shy, subject to panic attacks. She seems to have only been fully comfortable behind the wheel or working alone in a room.
So all we really have of her is the art — and extraordinary, in concept and execution, it is. A few pieces are explicitly about reservation life as Sully might have experienced it. The drawing called “Indian Church” is one. Its top panel is a spectacularly detailed image of a crowd of people gathered before an altar, protectively enclosed by what look like tipi walls, here dyed Episcopalian purple.
Almost all the figures — which appear twice as exact mirror images — are of women, and female pre-eminence is re-emphasized in the middle panel in a different way, through repeated images of woven robes that correspond in design to those worn by the worshipers above.
A bold abstract design in the bottom panel of two high-color vertical rainbows may seem unrelated. But a close look — which is the way to look at Sully’s work — reveals that this Native American symbol of hope and transcendence, which was also a staple element in Sioux quillwork, traditionally a female art, subtly weaves through both other panels.
On the whole, though, it was rare for Sully to focus exclusively on Native American subjects, and in her major series of drawings, the so-called personality prints, she didn’t. Most of these three-panel works are symbolic portraits of American celebrities of the day: movie and theater stars (Claudette Colbert, Eddie Cantor, Fred Astaire), politicians (J. Edgar Hoover, Fiorello La Guardia), sports heroes (Babe Ruth), and news media sensations like Helen Keller and Father Flanagan of “Boys Town” fame.
Some subjects she seems to have chosen out of respect, others just to have imaginative fun with. Babe Ruth is defined by patterns of stylized baseball diamonds; Gertrude Stein by garlands of roses; the operatic barihunk Lawrence Tibbett by clusters of musical notes that bulge like flexed biceps. Sometimes the humor is broad, sometimes refined. The overwhelming impression is of ready empathy, pinpoint wit and astonishing graphic ingenuity.
And, importantly, in each case, the progression is the same: a readable statement of the theme at the top; a Modernist-style abstraction of its elements in the middle; and, like a foundation stone, a translation of those elements into a language of Native American design in a bottom panel.
The result is an art — rare at the time, still rare — that is consciously “other” without being isolationist, and “outsider” while fully engaging with the larger culture. Sully expressed hopes of finding an art world audience for her work, without knowing where to find it. Deloria writes in his book that “she was a solo artist in every sense of the word,” and that sounds right. She was personally caught between cultures, ethnicities, social classes, gender expectations, hostage to a still crushing colonial history.
She knew this, and fully expressed this knowledge in at least one work, “Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present,” which, Deloria speculates, was one of the very last triptych drawings she did before abandoning the series, but which comes at the beginning of the Met show.
It’s exceptionally complex in format; the top panel alone has four layers of images. In the lowest strip we see Native American life in a mythically idyllic past of open fields and communal calm with women dominant. Above, and drawn mostly in gray graphite pencil, is a vista of a desiccated reservation, surrounded by barbed wire. In a third strip, nude brown-skinned figures gesticulate beseechingly, and over all of this a line giant feet, shod in military boots and or emerging from pinstripe trousers, that seem to be crushing all below.
The drawing’s middle panel, too, is filled with gesticulating brown-skinned figures, trapped between rows of narrow walls like cattle in a chute, but maybe putting up a fight, pushing toward an exit?
The bottom panel is, as these panels usually are, an exercise in balanced geometric abstraction, with references to Native design. It also suggests an aerial view of the middle panel’s entrapping narrow-walled space, now empty of struggling figures. Did they escape? If so, where did they go? “Home,” wherever that is? Or into a still-unwelcoming world? We can’t know, and Sully’s art of adamant uncertainty tells us so.
Mary Sully: Native Modern
Through Jan. 12, 2025, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, (212) 535-7710; metmuseum.org.
Read More: Native Modern Art: From a Cardboard Box to the Met
