Mary Sully—born Susan Mabel Deloria on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota—was a little-known, reclusive Yankton Dakota artist who, between the 1920s and 1940s, created highly distinctive work informed by her Native American and settler ancestry. This first solo exhibition of Sully’s groundbreaking production highlights recent Met acquisitions and loans from the Mary Sully Foundation, works that complicate traditional notions of Native American and modern art.

Largely self-taught, Sully produced intricately designed and vividly colored drawings that captured meaningful aspects of her Dakota community, mixed with visual elements she observed from other Native nations as well as the styles and aesthetics of urban life. Celebrities and subjects from Euro-American popular culture influenced her striking works, which she called “personality prints,” designed as abstract and metaphoric portraits arranged in vertical triptychs. Featuring 25 rarely seen Sully compositions—primarily, her “personality prints”—as well as archival family material and other Native items from The Met collection, Mary Sully: Native Modern offers a fresh and complex lens through which to consider American art and life in the early 20th century.

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