The Dakota Sioux artist who called herself Mary Sully is having an enchanting first survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but she came close to being swept off the stage of history. When she died in Omaha, Neb., in 1963, at age 67, her primary output of around 200 color-pencil-and-ink drawings lay hidden in a cardboard box kept by her older sister, with whom she had lived most of her adult life.
When that sister herself died a few years later, the box ended up among piles of ephemera waiting to be sorted through. Time passed. More than once the box came close to being tossed until one of Sully’s nieces, who happened to be a librarian, opened it and transferred the contents to a suitcase, which was then tucked away under a staircase.
More time passed. In 2006, the drawings resurfaced and came to the attention of Sully’s great-nephew, Philip J Deloria, who happened to be a history professor at Harvard, and who documented them in a terrific 2019 book called “Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract.” Last year the Met acquired much of the work. And now we have this rich, strange show, “Mary Sully: Native Modern.”
Organized by Patricia Marroquin Norby, the Met’s associate curator of Native American art (of Purépecha descent), and Sylvia Yount, curator in charge of the American Wing, it includes 25 drawings along with a smattering of documentary material (family photos, examples of traditional Native American art) for context, not that context is needed to bring her art to life. Visually, with its vivid coloring and fine-cut coloratura patterning, it sings.
Still, the music is complicated. Each “drawing” actually consists of three separate, different-sized vertical drawings, or panels, on paper. Many of the top panels are illustrational — some topically narrative, even implicitly political — and refer to elements in American popular culture as Sully knew it the early 20th century.
