Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract by Philip J. Deloria (review)

“how shall we read, and with what stakes and structures” (95)? Like his 2004 book, Indians in Unexpected Places, Phil Deloria’s Becoming Mary Sully endows what may seem to be a modest group of documents with radical potential. Moving through biography, formal analysis, art criticism, ethno-graphic and psychological theory, and Oceti Sakowin history and values, he offers an extended argument for seeing the work of this self-taught artist as engaging modernity from a deeply Indigenous perspective. Sully’s oeuvre, particularly the 134 pieces the artist called “personality prints,” demonstrates her engagement with American mass culture of the 1920s and 1930s. But the book’s subtitle, Toward an American Indian Abstract, aligns Sully’s disciplined use of symmetry, repetition, and color with the artistic traditions given the Dakota by Double Woman. Nesting his analysis within the broader narrative of “modern” Indian art rooted in the complex institutional contexts of the prison, education, and reservation infrastructures that shaped the work of the Kiowa Six, Deloria argues that her lack of patronage allowed her a less compromised artistic development. The book is a welcome contribution to the growing field of modern Native American art history that breaks out of the critical binds of autoethnography and strategic essentialism, asserting that Sully’s work offers “an opportunity for—and perhaps requires—contemporary viewers to consider alternative histories of American Indian artistic thought and production. Primitivism did not offer the only route into a Native modernism” (12).

Sully is the author’s great-aunt; she was born Susan Deloria, the younger sister of the better-known Vine Deloria Sr. and Ella Cara Deloria and thus a member of a family with complex relationships to the Indian Office, the Episcopal Church, and the Boasian tradition of anthropology. Her pseudonym calls back to artist ancestors Thomas Sully and his son Alfred, whose posting at Fort Pierre in 1857 resulted in her mother’s birth. Due to what appear to be extreme introversion and bouts of mental illness, Susan Deloria / Mary Sully was a recluse, living with her sister her entire life. The book grew out of Deloria’s examination of a suitcase full of the “prints” that had been saved by his mother. Each of these colored-pencil-on-paper triptychs follows the same format: a stylized representational work at the top, a middle piece with a repeated decorative motif, and a smaller bottom drawing that utilizes geometric abstraction. On the back, Sully penciled the titles for each, most of which refer to celebrities (Loretta Young, Gertrude Stein, Charles Lindberg, The Dionne Quintuplets), but some refer to classes of people (Children of Divorce, Titled Husbands of America) or events (Easter, Leap Year). Some of these subjects have been of enduring interest in the United States, while others were flashes in the pan. Others, Deloria argues, are deeply political.

Currently, three of the personality prints are on view as part of Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, a traveling exhibition curated by Jill Ahlberg Yohe of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and Kiowa artist Teri Greaves. Seen in person, it is possible to understand the attraction Deloria’s mother had to the orphaned work. The drawings demonstrate a mastery of color and design and a confidence in the artist’s unique perspective that make them worth viewing. Yet the task of making sense of this archive is nearly overwhelming. Leading lives marked by poverty and frequent relocation, the Deloria sisters left few records, and those that remain can be contradictory, reflecting the shifting tactics used to respond to changing circumstances. Deloria’s chapters break the pieces apart. While it can be frustrating to have very few opportunities to encounter reproductions of the entire pieces in the way that Sully clearly meant them to be seen, this strategy gives some structure to an analysis that might otherwise seem largely speculative. He proposes a logic for each section of the triptychs, which he puts into a narrative moving from top...