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https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Loop01-1.mp4
Jill Radsken
Harvard Staff Writer
July 11, 2019
long read
Philip Deloria’s family had never taken his eccentric great-aunt Mary Sully’s art seriously. He remembered thinking, back when he was a kid, that her pencil drawings were “elaborate doodles,” judging them “cool, but weird.” Deloria first unpacked them with his mom in the 1970s, and though he carried three favorites with him as he moved along in his life, the full set of drawings were not given another look until two decades later.
That’s when the professor of history discovered Sully (given name Susan Deloria) was an artist of two worlds. On one side of her family she was descended from American portrait painter Thomas Sully (“The Passage of the Delaware” and Andrew Jackson’s portrait on the $20 bill) and on the other, members of the Dakota Sioux tribe.
In his new book, “Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract,” Deloria couples her personal story — a life battling anxiety and possibly synesthesia, as well as her complicated relationship with her sister, the anthropologist Ella Deloria — with an examination of her art, which defied categorization in the early 20th century. Core to her collection are 134 “personality prints,” three-panel pieces inspired, in many cases, by artists and celebrities including Babe Ruth, Gertrude Stein, and Amelia Earhart. Three of Sully’s works appear in “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists,” which recently opened at Minneapolis Institute of Art. Deloria talked to the Gazette about Sully’s modernist mind, his family’s past, and how he hopes to elevate his great-aunt’s work.
. . .
Top panel for “Indian Church.”
More:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/07/in-sioux-aunts-work-historian-finds-art-on-fringes-of-modernism-tradition/
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Loop01-1.mp4
Jill Radsken
Harvard Staff Writer
July 11, 2019
long read
Philip Deloria’s family had never taken his eccentric great-aunt Mary Sully’s art seriously. He remembered thinking, back when he was a kid, that her pencil drawings were “elaborate doodles,” judging them “cool, but weird.” Deloria first unpacked them with his mom in the 1970s, and though he carried three favorites with him as he moved along in his life, the full set of drawings were not given another look until two decades later.
That’s when the professor of history discovered Sully (given name Susan Deloria) was an artist of two worlds. On one side of her family she was descended from American portrait painter Thomas Sully (“The Passage of the Delaware” and Andrew Jackson’s portrait on the $20 bill) and on the other, members of the Dakota Sioux tribe.
In his new book, “Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract,” Deloria couples her personal story — a life battling anxiety and possibly synesthesia, as well as her complicated relationship with her sister, the anthropologist Ella Deloria — with an examination of her art, which defied categorization in the early 20th century. Core to her collection are 134 “personality prints,” three-panel pieces inspired, in many cases, by artists and celebrities including Babe Ruth, Gertrude Stein, and Amelia Earhart. Three of Sully’s works appear in “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists,” which recently opened at Minneapolis Institute of Art. Deloria talked to the Gazette about Sully’s modernist mind, his family’s past, and how he hopes to elevate his great-aunt’s work.
. . .
Top panel for “Indian Church.”
More:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/07/in-sioux-aunts-work-historian-finds-art-on-fringes-of-modernism-tradition/
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