Here's a portrait of artist Mary Sully as a young Dakota woman. She was born Susan Mabel Deloria on the Standing Rock Reservation. (Courtesy of The Mary Sully Foundation/The Mary Sully Foundation)

Yankton Dakota artist Mary Sully opened a solo exhibition at the Met Museum in New York last summer, and right now she has a solo exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Not bad for a reclusive artist who died in relative obscurity more than 60 years ago.

Harvard professor Philip Deloria, who is also her great-nephew, brought her work back, but it wasn’t an easy road.

“I went to my curator friends and I was like, ‘Hey, I’ve got my half-crazy great-aunt’s box of stuff from the basement,’” Deloria said.

No one was interested. But Deloria became fascinated by his great-aunt’s “personality prints.” These abstract vertical-style triptychs had designs inspired by her Dakota heritage and other Native tribes, as well as popular culture from the 1920s and 1940s and observations of New York City. He kept researching, writing and talking about it.

In 2019, the University of Washington Press published Deloria’s book “Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract,“ and her work was included in the groundbreaking Native women’s art exhibition “Hearts of Our People” at Mia.

"Shirley Temple" was one of Mary Sully's many "personality prints," drawn between the 1920s and 1940s.

Now, she’s got her own show at Mia, on Dakota land.

“Mary Sully: Native Modern” features 18 of her “personality prints,” drawings, memorabilia, photographs and even a beaded stole and Bible cover ― Sully belonged to the Sioux Episcopal Church.

The show offers some surprises, too, like a looped clip of the cameo Mary Sully had in the 1944 Paramount Pictures film series “Unusual Occupations.” It identifies her as artist Mary Sully, exotifies her, and wrongly gives her tribal affiliation as the Zuni tribe of New Mexico.

"Mary Sully: Native Modern" is on view at Mia through September 21.

Native Modern life

Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota in 1896, Sully was a mostly self-taught artist with mixed European and Native ancestry. She was the granddaughter of watercolorist and oil painter Alfred Sully — who was also a military officer notoriously known for commanding troops against Native people, particularly the U.S.-Dakota War — and the great-granddaughter of English American portrait painter Thomas Sully.

She traveled with her sister Ella Deloria, a linguistic ethnographer, on trips to Native communities. They also frequently went to New York City.

This was a starting point for her “personality prints,” which bear recognizable names like Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire and Ziegfeld.

“Usually the top, in many instances, is the most representational statement of the subject, the personality print or the theme,” said Sylvia Yount, curator of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “The center panel, she’s finding some feature and kind of abstracting it and repeating it…the repetition that you see in design work. The bottom panel has more of a direct reference to either Dakota iconography, or, in some instances, actual representations of rawhide or beaded work.”

Mary Sully's drawing "Spring," circa 1920s-1940s.

The exhibitions at the Met and Mia share some of the same prints, but are different shows. Both museums acquired Sully works in the process.

Not everything is about celebrity and modern American glamour. In the drawing “Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present,” she illustrates the painful history of imprisonment, boarding schools and forced assimilation. She also made some thematic drawings, about Easter and spring, among others. She had a wry sense of humor as seen in “Titled Husbands in USA,” making fun of men who marry rich American women through a drawing of men sucking milk out of a milk bottle covered in dollar signs.

Bringing Sully’s work to the public was a co-curatorial effort beginning in 2020 involving Phil Deloria, Yount, Toledo Museum of Art Consulting Curator of Native American Art Johanna Minich, Met Associate Curator of Native American Art Patricia Norby and Jill Ahlberg-Yohe, former Minneapolis Institute of Art Associate Curator of Native American Art.

Sully’s design and composition can be attributed to her Dakota ancestry, but there’s more.

“There’s also this kind of dynamism and playfulness and fascination with the modern world that’s definitely coming from her alone,” Minich said. “[Mary Sully was] a woman living in the early 20th century that is seeing and recording and remembering and being absolutely astounded with that visual feast of early modern America.”