![]() ![]() The drawings have since passed through the family with little attention until recently. While these attempts to enter the patronized art world proved unsuccessful, Sully’s project, begun first in South Dakota, continued in Kansas and New York City as she traveled with her sister, who later inherited a box containing the personality prints upon Sully’s death in 1963. Sully also indirectly sought patronage from at least one personality print subject when she wrote to actress ZaSu Pitts asking permission to use her name under an image. Deloria was a lifelong advocate and financial lifeline for her sister, seeking patronage for Sully under New Deal initiatives and from artists whom she contacted under the guise of seeking advice on her sister’s behalf. Taped together with the name of the inspiring personality affixed to the bottom of the three drawings, Sully’s work was displayed as a collection in these venues where her sister and companion, anthropologist Ella Deloria, would contribute lectures on the content of the images and their relationship to Sioux life. While intended for widespread consumption in the art market, Sully’s drawings were exhibited only sporadically in small venues such as vocational and Indian schools in South Dakota and Minnesota. Sully’s work was largely unknown outside the Deloria family. ![]() 2 Sully’s preoccupation with celebrity was in step with that of her more conventionally successful peers-among them Marius de Zayas, Francis Picabia, and Charles Demuth-who engaged with an American modernity that encompassed celebrity, machinery, advertising, and popular culture. Drawn in colored pencil or graphite on paper of idiosyncratic sizes, these triptychs take as their subject contemporary celebrity figures, ranging from baseball star Babe Ruth and literary icon Gertrude Stein to the South Dakota Episcopal church leader, Bishop Hare. Free from the constraints imposed by the settler-colonial marketplace (but also from the attendant advantages), Mary Sully’s long-unseen work offers an opportunity to consider an alternative progression of Native American modernism-one Deloria argues is antiprimitivist in its formal preoccupation with Indian futures.īeginning in the late 1920s, with her largest output in the 1930s, Sully completed 134 sets of what she called personality prints. 1 These artists found success within the limitations of white patrons’ expectations of what Indian art should look like through formal education and patronage networks under those such as Elizabeth Willis DeHuff’s private tutorship in Santa Fe and the advocacy of Oscar Jacobson in Oklahoma. It was this demand that enabled the first Native American modernists, among them the Kiowa Six and Awa Tsireh, to gain traction in the art market. But, more than a precondition for or antithesis to modernity, the disavowed native was simultaneously embraced through an enduring primitivist nostalgia for native life. The modern was necessarily conceived in opposition to the so-called premodern native foil. There was no choice but to be native-in a doubled sense-to modernity, for autochthony granted presence but not belonging. Deloria insists that modernity was not a bright marker of progress for Indigenous people, but instead, an enforced colonial state of being. She was not only a Native person exploring early twentieth-century American modernism, but also native to its very conditions of possibility. A commitment to multiple modernisms is alternatively alert to the ways in which artists who embrace tradition (especially those disempowered by colonial regimes) and those who refuse modernist forms are in fact equal and synchronous practitioners of modernism.ĭeloria’s book, Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract, turns on the idea that Sully-a Dakota Sioux artist unknown to art history until now, and the author’s great-aunt-is in fact “native to modernism” (21). Recent scholarship cautions against the unquestioned binary approach that results between tradition and modernity, often expressed through the exclusion of the so-called native or tribal from the modern. ![]() Those barred often experience modernity differently as subjects of colonial and imperial politics. For while modernism most simply describes the range of cultural responses to the experience of modernity, the term’s art-historical deployment has infamously excluded many non-Euro-American artists. Deloria does for Mary Sully (1896–1963), necessitates an attentiveness to terminology that avoids reinscribing the Eurocentrism embedded in the very category itself. Paperback: $34.95 (ISBN: 9780295745046)Ĭlaiming an artist for the canon of American modernism, as historian Philip J. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. ![]()
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