Becoming Mary Sully

In Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract, historian Philip J. Deloria likens his approach to the peeling of an onion, conducting a “systematic excavation of intertwined worlds of meaning and context” in the work of his great-aunt, Dakota artist Mary Sully (born Susan Deloria,1896–1963) (p. 5). Stored away for decades by family members after the artist’s death, the body of work uncovered in 2006 by Deloria and his mother included 134 sets of three-panel “personality prints,” drawings in colored pencil and graphite. Produced from the late 1920s to early 1940s and encompassing celebrity figures from the world of film, music, sports and theater, such as Babe Ruth, Fred Astaire, and Greta Garbo, each of Sully’s vertically stacked panels abstracts and represents unique individual personalities. As a primarily self-taught artist with a scant exhibition record and an aversion to documentation, Sully did not fit neatly into the narratives...

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