Talk: Mary Sully: Native Modern

Tickets available February 16.

Active between the late 1920s and early 1940s, Dakota artist Mary Sully created a series of “personality prints,” abstract portraits of American popular culture and its celebrities that drew upon modernist tropes and urban, cosmopolitan styles. Yet Sully’s geometries, color choices, and cultural inclinations point just as strongly to Native women’s arts traditions of the Great Plains. In this talk, we’ll explore Sully’s eclectic style as an expression of her grounding in Plains aesthetics and material culture. We’ll also consider her emergence as a newly recognized artist immersed in the principles of both Native arts and American modernism.

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. He is the author of “Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract,” published in 2019.