The late Dakota artist Mary Sully in four key works at the Metropolitan Museum

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Mary Sully: Native Modern (until 12 January 2025) features a recently rediscovered trove of works by the self-taught Yankton Dakota artist. In her lifetime, Sully produced drawings imbued with humour, wit and political and social critique that went unseen for decades—until her great-nephew brought them out of his mother’s basement and into the world.

Sully was born Susan Deloria (later taking her mother’s name) on the Standing Rock Reservation in 1896, one of two daughters of an Episcopalian minister. She descended from a strong artistic lineage: granddaughter of Alfred Sully (an American Indian Wars general and artist) and great-granddaughter of the 19th-century portraitist Thomas Sully, who was known for painting the Andrew Jackson likeness that would later be used for the $20 banknote and for his 1838 portrait of Queen Victoria. Unlike these predecessors, Sully was reclusive and suffered from anxiety disorders that stunted her own professional pursuits.
As an adult, Sully was primarily supported by her sister, Ella Cara Deloria, a linguist and scholar who worked with the anthropologist Franz Boas and is known as the first Native American woman ethnographer. Sully’s sister is represented in the Met’s show with her 1944 book Speaking of Indians, which examines the assimilation of the Dakota people and features cover art by Sully. Although the sisters struggled financially, they travelled and lived throughout the US—including New York, where Sully began her Personality Prints series, which make up the majority of the approximately 200 works in her surviving archive.

The aforementioned series comprises 134 vertical triptychs that show an abstracted version of a subject like Babe Ruth, Gertrude Stein or Fred Astaire. The top panels all have some metaphor to the subject, the middle have abstract geometric patterns (some with the markers of commercial prints) and the bottom panels vary widely—some have layers of Native American designs while others are purely abstract. In this series and other works, Sully explores the syncretism of her heritage and her contemporary influences, sourcing many subjects from mass media.

Mary Sully