In The Farrell Auditorium

The Donald Danforth Jr. Lecture on Native American Art will be given by Philip J. Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History and Chair of Committee on Degrees in History and Literature, 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.