A transfixing pattern repeats throughout “Mary Sully: Native Modern,” which is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through Sept. 21. Each work manifests in triptych form, where a given subject — whether a person or a concept — unfolds in three distinct treatments. From graphic explorations that embrace both symbolism and figurative elements to dizzying structures of geometric shapes and Native American design motifs, the triptychs burst with creativity and create a fascinating play of pattern, abstraction and meaning.
Born in 1896 at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, Sully (born Susan Mable Deloria) was the great-granddaughter of artist Thomas Sully, whose portrait of Andrew Jackson appears on the $20 bill. Her sister, Ella Cara Deloria, was among the first Native women anthropologists in the U.S., and Sully often accompanied her on fieldwork trips to Native communities nationwide.
Sully is also the aunt of author and scholar Vine Deloria Jr., who wrote the brilliant and biting “Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto” in 1969. Vine Deloria Jr.’s son, Philip J. Deloria, meanwhile, wrote about Sully’s work in “Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract,” published in 2019. He gave a talk at Mia earlier this year that you can watch here.
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In his talk, Deloria noted that Sully only showed her work three times during her lifetime, with two of the occasions being day-long exhibitions at Indian schools in Pipestone, Minnesota, and Flandreau, South Dakota. But in recent years, the art world seems to be paying attention to the artist, with Sully’s work being included in the groundbreaking “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists” exhibition at Mia in 2019, as well as in an exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 2024.
In the “Hearts of Our People” exhibition catalogue, Jill Ahlberg Yohe wrote in an essay that Sully transformed the field of Native art theory and practice by making connections between art nouveau, abstraction and Native art — all of which were beginning to be shown in U.S. galleries in the early part of the 20th century. “Sully’s work reveals a cosmopolitan view of both Native and non-Native worlds, coupling traditional designs in Native art with contemporaneous design, cityscapes, and celebrities,” Ahlberg Yohe wrote.
“Mary Sully is having a moment that’s quite extraordinary,” Deloria said in his talk at Mia, noting that besides “Mary Sully: Native Modern,” which first opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before coming to Minneapolis, Sully was also featured as part of “Reverberations: Lineages in Design History,” an exhibition at the Ford Foundation Gallery earlier this year.
The Met first opened “Mary Sully: Native Modern” a year ago, drawing on its own collection of Sully’s work as well as loans from the Mary Sully Foundation. The Minneapolis version of the exhibition, in turn, features eight works Mia acquired in 2023.
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Mary Sully, “Ziegfeld” c. 1920s-40s. Colored pencil, black ink, gilt, white paint and pastel crayon on paper. Credit: MinnPost photo by Sheila Regan
One of Mia’s acquisitions is called “Steinmetz,” named after mathematician and electrical engineer Charles Steinmetz. Sully’s personality portrait of Steinmetz begins at the top of the triptych with a diagram of sorts. Using curves and arrows, it captures the essence of Steinmetz’s ideas, which led to the development of alternating current (AC), using a graphic aesthetic.
The middle drawing takes more of a birds-eye view, seeing a system of electrical currents, perhaps, from above. It also reminds me of intricate stitch work. The bottom drawing, finally, is the most simple of the three, with colors and shapes explored in the top two drawings pared down to bare-bones elements.
Sully takes a similar approach in other of her triptychs, where the top, middle and bottom take different stylistic approaches, but ultimately get at the same essential ideas, perhaps with different sides of the brain. I find it interesting that the triptychs often employ differently sized paper for the top, middle, and bottom as well. Each drawing is contained in a shape that fits what Sully is trying to say.
In some cases, she’s capturing the spirit of a celebrity. She makes triptychs of Ziegfeld’s Follies, Shirley Temple, or ballet superstar Anna Pavlova. In “Fred Astaire,” Sully again consolidates her ideas developed in the top two frames, stripping down her notion of “Fred Astaire” into a simplified design.
Mary Sully, “Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present,” c. 1920s-40s. Colored pencil, black ink, gilt, white paint and pastel crayon on paper. Credit: MinnPost photo by Sheila Regan
Besides her “personality portraits,” Sully also explored larger ideas, with works like “Indian Church,” “Titled Husbands in USA” and “Children of Divorce,” possibly responding to a Lady’s Home Journal article of the same title from 1934.
In “Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present,” Sully uses her triptych approach to critique colonialism, using narrative scene-making to look at pre-contact communities in contrast to the coercive control of institutions like boarding schools, reservations and prisons, which she then flattens through abstraction and pattern in the subsequent panels.
The work feels profoundly conceptual and rather subversive. Sully seems to have thought deeply about her world, about current events and popular culture, and themes around history and her Native identity. To guide that process of thinking, her drawings help sort out different ways to categorize and hold ideas, and in so doing, hold emotion and calculations in a balance of beautiful order.
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” runs through Sept. 21 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2400 Third Ave. S., Minneapolis. Admission is free. More information here.
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