In 2024, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art launched a reclamation of the artistic career of Mary Sully, a reclusive, previously unacknowledged Dakota artist active between the late 1920s and mid-1940s. The processes of conservation, curation, and exhibition revealed new dimensions of the work, reinforcing not only its cosmopolitan character but also its deep personal and tribal roots. That combination has held great appeal for the curators and reviewers who have embraced Sully’s work. In his Allan Martin Lecture, Philip Deloria—great-nephew of Mary Sully—will use the experience of bringing Sully’s work to the museum world and a general public to discuss some of the cultural politics surrounding Native arts at a moment that has either ignored or transcended the usual cycles of attention and disregard.

Philip J. Deloria (Dakota descent) is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States. He is the author of several books, including Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1998), Indians in Unexpected Places (University Press of Kansas, 2004), American Studies: A User’s Guide (University of California Press, 2017), with Alexander Olson, and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (University of Washington Press, 2019), as well as two co-edited books and numerous articles and chapters.

Deloria received his PhD in American Studies from Yale University in 1994, taught at the University of Colorado, and then, from 2001 to 2017, at the University of Michigan, before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018. Deloria was a long-serving trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. He is the former president of the American Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for American History, an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of numerous prizes and recognitions.