In his inaugural lecture as the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor in History and American Culture, Philip J. Deloria will explore the works of the Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully.
Deloria will deliver the lecture “Toward an American Indian Abstract: Art, Anthropology and Politics in the Work of Mary Sully” at 4:10 p.m. Tuesday in the Rackham Amphitheater. A reception will follow the lecture, open to the public.
Photo courtesy LSA.
“Mary Sully was an unknown, impoverished Dakota Sioux artist, who produced complex images of the ‘personalities’ of the 1930s, both famous and obscure,” says Deloria, also a professor of history and professor in the American Culture Program, LSA.
In a combination of close readings and rich contextualizations, Deloria explores her wide-ranging intellect and makes a case for her place in the canon of 1930s art.
“Although Sully never wrote a word, her images offered a deep and often beautiful meditation on the concept and the decade,” Deloria says. “They are a complicated expression of cross-cultural traffic, translated through the field of anthropology and offering a sense of the aesthetic possibilities attached to the politics of American Indian sovereignty at a critical moment of transformation.”
