Lecture Title: Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract

Between 1920 and 1940, Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully created a unique portfolio of art, unknown to contemporary American or American Indian art history. In this talk, Philip J. Deloria, professor of Native American and Indigenous History at Harvard University, will offer close readings of several images to make the case that Sully’s art belongs in, and alters, the canon of American and American Indian arts of the twentieth century — and that its engagement with “culture and personality” anthropology helped produce a politics visible in both form and content.