Mary Sully and the Women’s Arts of the Great Plains

The Donald Danforth Jr. Lecture on Native American Art will be given by Philip J. Deloria, the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History and the Chair of the Committee on Degrees in History & Literature at Harvard University.
Active between the late 1920s and early 1940s, Dakota artist Mary Sully created a series of “personality prints,” abstract portraits of American popular culture and its celebrities that drew upon modernist tropes and urban cosmopolitan styles. Yet Sully’s geometries, color choices, and ethnographic inclinations point just as strongly to Native women’s arts traditions of the Great Plains. Filtered through works in the Danforth Collection, this talk will read Sully’s eclectic and rangy visual vocabulary as an expression of her essential grounding in Plains aesthetics and material culture.

Event Type: Community Event
When: Saturday, September 14, 2024 at 11:00 AM
Location: Saint Louis Art Museum
Neighborhood: City-Wide
Ward: Many Wards
Admission: Free. Tickets for this free program may be reserved in person at the Museum’s Information Centers or through MetroTix. All tickets reserved through MetroTix incur a service charge; the service charge is waived for tickets reserved at the Museum.
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