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Talk: Mary Sully: Native Modern

Museum Exhibit Lecture
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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.

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.

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More about Minneapolis Institute of Art
Inspiring wonder through the power of art. The Minneapolis Institute of Art enriches the community by collecting, preserving, and making accessible outstanding works of art from the world’s diverse cultures.
When & Where
Mar 16, 2025, 2:00pm to 4:00pm Timezone: CDT
Minneapolis Institute of Art
2300 Third Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN
$10.00
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