Mary Sully, The Almost-Forgotten Indigenous Abstract Artist
A forgotten artist gets her due decades after her death.
A traditional survey of American art in the first half of the twentieth-century tends to cluster around a few groups: the Ashcan school, the Stieglitz modernist circle, the muralists of the New Deal, the abstract expressionists of the 1940s.
Efforts of the last few decades have tried to expand this traditional art history to find parallel stories that have gone frequently untold. Native American art movements underwent their own developments during the early twentieth-century, leading to the formation of various groups such as the Kiowa Six. Yet this story also tends to focus on the formation of schools, usually collected around institutions (five of the Kiowa Six attended St. Patrick’s Mission School in Anadarko, Oklahoma.) Some artists, unaffiliated with schools, have yet to had their stories properly told.
One artist has been receiving her due in recent years: a relatively unknown Dakota Sioux artist named Mary Sully. While the Ashcan school were portraying New York life and the Kiowa Six were expanding past the limitations of traditional ledger art, Mary Sully was producing her own revolutionary artworks that explored personality through abstraction.
