Philip Deloria

  • Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies and Chair, Committee on Degrees in History and Literature at Harvard University

Oct 30, 2019  |   7:30 p.m.
Kane Hall, room 120

  • This event is free and open to the public, advance registration required
  • Online ticket sales/registration for this event is closed, as it is at capacity. As a courtesy, the Graduate School will offer standby seating on a first-come, first-served basis beginning at 6:45 p.m. in Kane Hall. Stand-by seating will begin at 7:15 p.m. for any unclaimed reserved seats. You must appear in person to claim stand-by seats. And no stand-by seating is guaranteed.

Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract

Between the late 1920s and the mid 1940s, Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully created a unique portfolio of art, completely unknown to contemporary American or American Indian art history.  Deeply engaged with modernist art and design, and with indigenous women’s expressive traditions of the northern Plains, Sully’s work is both aesthetically pleasing and conceptually challenging.  In this talk, Deloria will offer close readings of several images in order to make the case that Sully’s art belongs in, and alters, the canon of American and American Indian arts of the twentieth century—and that its engagement with “culture and personality” anthropology helped produce a politics visible in both form and content.

Philip J. Deloria is Professor of Native American and Indigenous History at Harvard University.  His research focuses on the social, cultural, and political histories of the relations between American Indian people and the United States. His prizewinning 1998 book Playing Indian traced “Indian play” from the Boston Tea Party to the New Age movement, while his 2004 book Indians in Unexpected Places examined the ideologies surrounding Indian people in the early twentieth century and the ways Native people challenges them through sports, travel, automobility, and film and musical performance.  Co-authored with Alexander Olson, American Studies: A User’s Guide offers a definitive treatment of the history and methods underpinning the field. Deloria is a former president of the American Studies Association, a trustee of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Sponsoring Departments

  • University of Washington Press
  • Department of American Indian Studies
  • School of Art + Art History + Design
  • Department of History
  • Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies
  • Services and Activities Fee (SAF)
  • wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House
  • Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity
  • UW Tribal Relations