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Harvard historian Philip Deloria discovered the colored-pencil drawings of his great-aunt Mary Sully, a mostly self-taught Dakota Sioux artist, in a suitcase in his parents’ basement when he was a high-school student in the 1970s. Without the internet, he wasn’t able to get far in discerning what they were. Thirty years later, though, he looked at them anew, and embarked on a journey of scholarship that resulted in a book, Becoming Mary Sully, and a solo exhibition for his aunt last year at the Met, where it garnered positive press. (Holland Cotter called the show “rich” and the book “terrific.”)

The exhibition, conceived by Met curator Sylvia Yount and then-Minneapolis Institute of Art curator Jill Ahlberg Yohe, featured 25 of Sully’s drawings alongside Native items from the Met’s collection and archival family material. The show then traveled to Mia, where it’s on view through next month. It’s an unusual art world success story, given that no galleries have been involved—at least not yet—but that’s not for lack of trying.

Sully was born Susan Deloria, but took the moniker Mary after her mother, and added the surname Sully after her great-grandfather, the portrait painter Thomas Sully. Altogether, the Deloria family found 134 of the drawings she called “personality prints.” Each depicts a celebrity of her day, like Babe Ruth, Amelia Earhart, and Fred Astaire, or an idea, like Husbands in the USA and Gossip. When the Ford Foundation Gallery wanted to include a work by Sully in its show Reverberations earlier this year, they called up the Mary Sully Foundation and were thrilled to discover she had done a piece based on Henry Ford. According to the foundation, Alice Walton has also shown interest in buying Sully’s works based on figures in medical history—perhaps Clara Barton or Florence Nightingale—to display at her eponymous medical school near Crystal Bridges.

Each of Sully’s works followed a vertical format of three horizontal panels atop one another—the widest 19 inches, the tallest about 13 inches. The top panel is the most representational; the middle panel abstracts the forms and colors of the top panel into modernist geometric patterns; and the bottom panel derives from patterns found in Native art forms like quilting and beadwork. They were all executed between the 1920s and 1940s on Sully’s long drives back and forth between New York, where she lived with her anthropologist sister, and their home state of South Dakota.

Philip Deloria’s wife, Peggy Burns, who established the Mary Sully Foundation, told me that she has heard from a half-dozen gallerists interested in representing Sully’s works. Instead of pursuing a traditional commercial model, however, the foundation has been selling works at $250,000 a pop to museums like the Whitney and the Toledo Museum of Art. (Several more sales to institutions, some overseas, are nearing completion.) That income has supported the foundation’s work of promoting Sully’s legacy, as well as scholarships and grants for emerging Native artists.

In addition to the show on display in Minneapolis, about 10 of Sully’s works will be on view at the ICA Boston, in October, as part of the show An Indigenous Present, co-curated by the artist Jeffrey Gibson. Her drawings will open the exhibition alongside works by Ojibwe painter George Morrison. The ICA describes the artists as “two important forebearers in the development of contemporary Indigenous art.”

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Henry Pearlman was a successful mid-20th century entrepreneur who built a marine refrigeration business in Brooklyn, then a major shipping entrepôt. Early on, he began collecting Old Master and American realist paintings, until 1945, when he bought his first work by Chaïm Soutine. Around the same time, he met Oskar Kokoschka, the Austrian expressionist painter, who became a friend and advisor.

In the 1950s, the Pearlmans were lending some of their artworks to museums—which, in turn, led to them establishing the foundation, and a tradition of circulating the Pearlman pictures throughout American museums. Although successful, Pearlman did not have endless resources to buy anything that became available, and he had richer competitors among his contemporaries. He assembled his collection through focus, patience, determination, and dealmaking. “My grandparents had populist values,” Edelman told me this week, explaining why his grandfather had given his art to a foundation and wanted the works to move around and be seen.

When Pearlman died unexpectedly in 1974, he was in the middle of planning a large touring exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum that would end up traveling through the Northeast. Rose, Henry’s widow, discovered that the foundation didn’t have the resources to maintain the collection and keep shouldering the expense of making loans. The collection ended up at the Princeton University Art Museum, where conservators, scholars, and generations of art history students have had access to the works for 50 years.

Princeton was a great steward of the foundation’s collection, but squirreling it away at an Ivy League school in a central New Jersey town didn’t square with the Pearlman legacy. “It’s not our audience,” Edelman said. “By geography and the nature of the university, it was less accessible.” In recent years, the Princeton art museum has been closed while a new building has been under construction, giving Edelman the impetus to find a solution that would better fulfill his grandparents’ goals as collectors. “Engagement with audiences is changing,” he told me. “The whole issue of owning art is changing.”

One irony of the current museum landscape is that more art is being concentrated in the few museums that have the infrastructure and funding to maintain and manage the lending of the works. Edelman found that if he wanted to get his grandfather’s art in front of people who would otherwise never have a chance to see it, he would have to donate it to museums in the richest cities. “The public doesn’t realize how much lending we do, or how much we tour our exhibitions,” Pasternak pointed out to me on a call this week. “Insuring these artworks costs a fortune. Few museums have the teams, the know-how, and the financial wherewithal” that a place like Brooklyn does.

Edelman also wanted to find stewards who had the same commitment to diversity. “We’ve had a great opportunity to expand access to these works,” he said. “We’ve gotten these works in front of people who don’t normally get a chance to see them.” He wanted to see that continue. “You walk into the Brooklyn Museum, and it is the most diverse audience you will see in any museum.”

The Brooklyn Museum, Pasternak said, “is a meeting point of class, race, and a wide range of cultures.” Yes, that’s a function of Brooklyn’s astonishing diversity, but it’s also something Pasternak and her predecessor, Arnold Lehman, cultivated. The museum pioneered free access more than a quarter-century ago, and it’s one of the few museums that maintains a pay-what-you-wish policy—which means half of the visitors to the Brooklyn Museum are getting in for free. “It is truly the worst business model,” Pasternak admits.

At LACMA, Edelman recognized the museum was developing a real facility and strategy for getting its art in front of communities that might not travel to the center of Los Angeles. And, of course, director Michael Govan, who is opening his new building next year, has become a leading voice in how museums can cooperatively share art. Finally, for Edelman, there was the fact that both Los Angeles and Brooklyn are communities where many artists—established and aspiring—live. Having his grandfather’s art easily accessible to artists seemed like a big win. And, of course, if you want your art seen, the endless parade of tourists at MoMA certainly helps.

I don’t think the choice was easy for Edelman. After all, he’s been working on this project with real effort and interest for some time. But rather than create too many restrictions on the use of the foundation’s art, he hopes he has found museum directors who share his family’s vision. Notably, he’s not trying to control the future of these artworks. “I’m much more excited by the many different stories you can tell with this art,” he said. “Art needs to keep changing and moving.”

There’s a slow-motion remaking of the art world taking place this summer. This week we got news that Kasmin Gallery is becoming Olney Gleason, and Clearing Gallery will be closing. Few in the art world can find any of this surprising, coming amid a long two and a half years of downshifting sales. I say “downshifting,” because it’s not clear that the number of sales is diminishing, so much as the value of sales. Put another way, costs are constrained, because buyers are interested in lower-priced works. And, as Magnus Resch reminded me this morning, rent is the single biggest cost for most small- and medium-sized galleries. (It’s my understanding that Kasmin’s main space is rented.)

As the dollar volume of sales decreases, rent—including for art fairs—becomes a larger issue. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the rest of the summer and into the fall.

More on Sunday,

M

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