Becoming Mary Sully: Reclaiming a Modern Native American Artist
Philip Deloria
Harvard University
Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Time: 5:00 - 6:30pm
Location: Gasson Hall 305
Reception following in Gasson Hall 306
Co-sponsored with the American Studies Program, the Institute for the Liberal Arts, the History Department, the Art History Department, the Provost's Office, and Women's and Gender Studies.
“From a cardboard box to the Met”: that’s how the New York Times described the current Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Mary Sully: Native Modern, on display through early January 2025. In this talk, Sully’s grand-nephew Philip J. Deloria will describe the work of this transformative Dakota artist, which boldly mixes Great Plains women’s aesthetics, early twentieth-century modernist traditions, 1930s popular culture, and ethnographic anthropology into stunning and intelligent visual art. The newspaper was correct: Sully’s work has moved from complete obscurity to the galleries of major American museums, and Deloria will detail the process behind its surprising journey.
Philip J. Deloria (Dakota descent) is the Leverett Saltonstall 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. He is the author of several books, including Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1998), Indians in Unexpected Places (University Press of Kansas, 2004), American Studies: A User’s Guide (University of California Press, 2017), with Alexander Olson, and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (University of Washington Press, 2019), as well as two co-edited books and numerous articles and chapters. Deloria received the Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1994, taught at the University of Colorado, and then, from 2001 to 2017, at the University of Michigan, before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018. Deloria was a long-serving trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. He is former president of the American Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for American History, an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of numerous prizes and recognitions.