Rediscovered after decades in obscurity, Mary Sully’s mesmerizing artwork fuses Native American traditions with bold modernist abstraction, challenging conventional art categories and redefining Indigenous visual expression.
Geometric designs burst into kaleidoscopic colors. Shapes shimmer with soothing symmetry and mesmerizing grip. Visual metaphors melt into pure abstractions, evoking the vivid aesthetics of Native American beadwork and blanket weavings. Midcentury celebrities become fields of flowers. Boundaries are broken in the hands of Mary Sully, a previously little-known Yankton Dakota artist whose rediscovered body of work provides a fresh perspective for understanding Indigenous imagery — and calls into question the conventional categories of Native American and modern art genres.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City underscored Sully’s importance with the recent purchase of 12 of the artist’s pieces and her first solo exhibition, Mary Sully: Native Modern. Unseen for decades, Sully’s artwork now sets forth across the country, stopping next at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, challenging our traditional notions of American Indian art and modern art.
Alice, ca. 1920s – 1940s. Colored pencil, black ink, gilt, white paint, pastel crayon, on paper.
Born on South Dakota’s Standing Rock Reservation as Susan Mabel Deloria, Mary Sully (1896 – 1963) came from a distinguished Dakota family and artistic lineage. Her great-grandfather Thomas Sully was an acclaimed portraitist whose image of President Andrew Jackson appears on the $20 bill; his son Alfred Sully was also a successful painter and U.S. Army officer in the American Indian Wars. Mary’s sister, Ella Cara Deloria, is considered the first Native American female ethnographer. She carried out fieldwork on Dakotaculture under Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, two of the most influential anthropologists of all time.
But despite Mary’s illustrious lineage and connections, she dealt with crippling anxiety that left her isolated from society, working in obscurity without patrons or exhibitions.
She was supported by her sister Ella, her only fan. Largely self-taught, the reclusive artist toiled away, creating drawings on paper with colored pencil, crayon, graphite, and ink.
Unheralded and unknown, Sully died in 1963. Her portfolio moved among various family members until 2006, when her grand-nephew Philip J. Deloria and his mother, Barbara, revisited the collection, which had been in the basement for years. Now an esteemed author and history professor at Harvard University, Deloria recognized the brilliance of
Sully’s illustrations and embarked on a multidecade endeavor to bring the artist to light.
Babe Ruth, ca. 1920s – 1940s. Colored pencil, black ink, gilt, white paint, pastel crayon, on paper.
“I think it’s an amazing thing, that someone so anonymous in their own lifetime could produce a body of work of such power and genius and then, against all odds, end up on the walls of major American museums,” writes Deloria in his comprehensive book Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract, which examines the artist’s profound cultural sensibilities and lasting legacy.
The trove of artwork included approximately 200 works, 134 of which were vertical triptychs that progress deeper into abstraction when viewed from top to bottom. Sully’s unconventional oeuvre chiefly consists of what she called “personality prints,” conceptual drawings of celebrities that explore the connection between contemporary American culture and her Indigenous background.
Sully often takes a unique aerial viewpoint in her creations, and there’s always more than meets the eye. “Each triptych is a puzzle,” says Deloria. “The more you know about the subject, the more you see. And so there’s always a challenge to see new things in the works and to try to understand her humor and wit, her visual puns, her many aesthetic vocabularies.”
The triptych Fred Astaire swirls with kinetic art deco de- signs that suggest tap-dancing steps, all gracefully captured in a Native American pattern. Gertrude Stein plays on the name-sake novelist’s famous musing, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” with pink blooms becoming intricate abstractions. In Babe Ruth, you can practically see the baseball game inside the fractured diamonds and flashy hues.
The Architect, ca. 1920s – 40s, Colored pencil, black ink, gilt, white paint, pastel crayon, on paper 34 × 19 inches.
Sully’s Dakota heritage is central to every piece, such as Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present. The title “gestures to historical chronology — a time of goodness, followed by unhappiness and then uncertainty,” Deloria writes. Each panel of the triptych is linked together visually with repeating shapes of arrows and fences, perhaps hinting at the inseparable nature of the past, the present, and the imagined Indigenous future.
The Met museum’s associate curator of Native American art, Patricia Marroquin Norby, explained the implications and significance of Sully’s distinct illustrations to The Art Newspaper. The term Native modernism has been “typically placed in the context of the Southwest or the Plains, and it’s a label that’s largely attributed to painting and sculpture,” according to Norby. Schools within the movement were “primarily started by non-Native people and had the influence of an aesthetic meant for non-Native people. With Sully’s cache of works being discovered, that previous narrative is entirely blown out of the water. Because she worked in isolation, she was not only working within her own ideas and aesthetics but also developing an intercultural visual language that’s completely her own.”
Brought out of obscurity and into the light, Mary Sully blends a bold modernist spirit with a deeply Indigenous perspective. Her dynamic drawings balance between two worlds, much like the artist herself, expanding our perception of American Indian art — and reminding us of all the undiscovered stories still waiting to be told.
Mary Sully: Native Modern will be on view March 15 through September 21, 2025 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
PHOTOGRAPHY:Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art & The Mary Sully Foundation.
HEADER: Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present, ca. 1920s – 40s, Colored pencil, black ink, gilt, white paint, pastel crayon, on paper 34 × 19 inches
