The Life and Work of a Dakota Sioux Artist
The Mary Sully Foundation is dedicated to showcasing and celebrating the work of Mary Sully, a Dakota Sioux artist active between the late 1920s and the mid-1940s.
Sully was born on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota in1896. Her most significant work—what she called the Personality Prints—comprises 134 triptychs, each set representing the “personality” of an individual or the essential character of an idea current in the American popular culture of the period.
Sully’s work, hidden away for decades, now offers art historians the opportunity to craft new narratives of European and American modernism.
Mary Sully Debut Opening
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
July 18, 2024 - January 12, 2025
1000 5th Avenue, Gallery 746 North, NY, NY
Opening Public Programming -September 30th
Upcoming Shows
See Sully’s work at forthcoming single artist shows:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, July 18, 2024 - January 12, 2025.
The Minneapolis Institute of Art, March 2025 - September 2025.
Other venues are currently in planning.
Previous Exhibitions
See where Sully’s work has previously been displayed:
Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists
The Minneapolis Institute of Art, June 2019 - August 2021.
Frist Museum, Nashville, September 2020 - January 2021.
Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian February 2020 - March 2020.
Philbrook Museum, Tulsa, October 2020 - January 2021.
Saint Louis Art Museum, Summer - Fall 2023.
A Dakota Artist
Sully cast an observant—and often celebratory—eye on American culture without ever losing her bearings in Native culture and aesthetics. Often working out of a precarious poverty, Mary Sully used simple tools—paper and pencil—to create transformative design that continues to resonate today. Drawing on themes from the top panels of the triptychs, she crafted intricate patterns in the middle panels, aiming for possibilities in surface design and textiles.
Becoming Mary Sully
In his book, Becoming Mary Sully, Philip J. Deloria, Sully’s great grand-nephew, reclaims Sully’s 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.