{"id":81610,"date":"2025-08-14T07:19:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T07:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/81610\/"},"modified":"2025-08-14T07:19:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T07:19:11","slug":"mary-sullys-transformational-repetition-minnpost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/81610\/","title":{"rendered":"Mary Sully’s transformational repetition – MinnPost"},"content":{"rendered":"

A transfixing pattern repeats throughout \u201cMary Sully: Native Modern,\u201d which is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through Sept. 21. Each work manifests in triptych form, where a given subject \u2014 whether a person or a concept \u2014 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Sully is also the aunt of author and scholar Vine Deloria Jr., who wrote the brilliant and biting \u201cCuster Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto\u201d in 1969. Vine Deloria Jr.\u2019s son, Philip J. Deloria, meanwhile, wrote about Sully\u2019s work in \u201cBecoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract,\u201d published in 2019. He gave a talk at Mia earlier this year that you can watch here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s work being included in the groundbreaking \u201cHearts of Our People: Native Women Artists\u201d exhibition at Mia in 2019, as well as in an exhibition<\/a> at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the \u201cHearts of Our People\u201d 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 \u2014 all of which were beginning to be shown in U.S. galleries in the early part of the 20th century. \u201cSully\u2019s work reveals a cosmopolitan view of both Native and non-Native worlds, coupling traditional designs in Native art with contemporaneous design, cityscapes, and celebrities,\u201d Ahlberg Yohe wrote.<\/p>\n

\u201cMary Sully is having a moment that\u2019s quite extraordinary,\u201d Deloria said in his talk at Mia, noting that besides \u201cMary Sully: Native Modern,\u201d which first opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before coming to Minneapolis, Sully was also featured as part of \u201cReverberations: Lineages in Design History,\u201d an exhibition at the Ford Foundation Gallery earlier this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Met first opened \u201cMary Sully: Native Modern\u201d a year ago, drawing on its own collection of Sully\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"ArtworkMary Sully, \u201cZiegfeld\u201d c. 1920s-40s. Colored pencil, black ink, gilt, white paint and pastel crayon on paper. Credit: MinnPost photo by Sheila Regan<\/p>\n

One of Mia\u2019s acquisitions is called \u201cSteinmetz,\u201d named after mathematician and electrical engineer Charles Steinmetz. Sully\u2019s 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\u2019s ideas, which led to the development of alternating current (AC), using a graphic aesthetic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In some cases, she\u2019s capturing the spirit of a celebrity. She makes triptychs of Ziegfeld\u2019s Follies, Shirley Temple, or ballet superstar Anna Pavlova. In \u201cFred Astaire,\u201d Sully again consolidates her ideas developed in the top two frames, stripping down her notion of \u201cFred Astaire\u201d into a simplified design.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ArtworkMary Sully, \u201cThree Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present,\u201d c. 1920s-40s. Colored pencil, black ink, gilt, white paint and pastel crayon on paper. Credit: MinnPost photo by Sheila Regan<\/p>\n

Besides her \u201cpersonality portraits,\u201d Sully also explored larger ideas, with works like \u201cIndian Church,\u201d \u201cTitled Husbands in USA\u201d and \u201cChildren of Divorce,\u201d possibly responding to a Lady\u2019s Home Journal article of the same title from 1934.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In \u201cThree Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present,\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cMary Sully: Native Modern\u201d runs through Sept. 21 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2400 Third Ave. S., Minneapolis. Admission is free. More information here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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