The Architect

Ralph Adams Cram, Leading Ecclesiastical Architect

Crafted on paper, with colored pencil, black ink, gold gilt, and occasional dabs of white paint, Mary Sully’s triptychs are organized vertically. The top image toes the lines between symbol, representation, and abstraction, situated in the contemporary moment of the long 1930s, Mary Sully’s now, and then look forward into a Native futurity being conjured into being.

As the eye moves through the three panels, one is led from modernist abstraction to images that truly “make it new,” emerging in a sense of Indigenous cosmopolitanism that becomes visible in the bottom panels. Where American moderns often represented a “primitive” Indian, Sully inverts that inclination: she was a Dakota anthropologist in her own right, casting an observant—and often celebratory—eye on American culture without ever losing her bearings in Native culture and aesthetics. 

Sully took her inspiration from popular culture, often paying tribute to figures appearing on the cover of Time Magazine or written up in The Saturday Evening Post. And so: a celebrity aviator, a famous film actress, the quintessential American stage and movie dancer, an international tennis star. 

Exhibitions

PREVIOUS

Hearts of our People: Native Women Artists, Minneapolis Institute of Art, June – August 2019 

Frist Museum, Nashville, September – January 2020 

Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, February – August 2020 

Philbrook Museum, Tulsa, October 2020 – January 2021

Saint Louis Art Museum, Action/Abstraction Redefined, June - September 2023

Amherst College Museum of Art, Fall 2023

Inside a suitcase

The Art

Clockwise from top left: Artwork inspired by pilot Amelia Earhart, Mexican actress Lupe Velez, Leap Year, and tennis star Helen Wills.

The bottom panels in the triptychs play with multiple visual cosmopolitan vocabularies: Navajo rugs, Indian woodlands designs, art deco, arts and crafts, pictorial representation, kaleidoscopes, and more. 

Top, left to right: Bottom Panels: Betty Boop/Helen Kane, John Phillip Sousa, Gertrude Stein; Middle, left to right: Alice Fazende, George Ade, Mildred Dilling; Bottom, left to right: Amelia Earhart, Helen Wills, Bishop Rowe. 

“The first time we looked at the personality prints was in the ’70s. I remember my mom, Barbara Deloria and I opening this suitcase and being mystified by them and thinking, “Well, they are kind of cool … but a little weird.” And this is where the sense that these are just elaborate doodles kind of came from. We didn’t really take her seriously as an artist because no one really had taken her seriously as an artist, in the family or elsewhere.

“This is truly modern art, modern design, with its cross-racial themes, its fascination with celebrity and popular culture. There were moments when I thought, ‘Andy Warhol. She was here first.’” 

Philip J. Deloria, great-grandnephew of Mary Sully and author of Becoming Mary Sully: Toward and American Indian Abstract