Alice

Mary Sully (nee Susan Mabel Deloria), born on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota, was a little-known, somewhat reclusive, Indigenous artist, producing highly distinctive work informed by her Native American and Euro-American ancestry. As a great-granddaughter of the successful 19th-century portraitist Thomas Sully (1783-1872), Susan Deloria expressly adopted, in the 1920s, the name of her mother, Mary Sully (1858-1916), daughter of Alfred Sully (1820-1879), son of the celebrated painter, and the Dakota woman Susan Pehandutawin (dates unknown), from an eight-year union when Sully was stationed on the Great Plains, before and after the Civil War. In addition to this artistic pedigree, Deloria grew up in a distinguished family of Dakota leaders at Standing Rock. Her sister Ella Cara Deloria (1889-1971), with whom she primarily lived, was a linguistic ethnographer trained by the esteemed Columbia University pioneer of modern anthropology, Franz Boas.




Mary Sully’s striking, self-titled triptych “personality prints” reveal much about the hybrid cultures in which she lived. Sully traveled extensively with her sister Ella Deloria, both during the latter’s fieldwork and residency in New York. Together, they documented, in both written and visual form, aspects of early-20th-century life in the United States as they experienced it. Working without patronage, in near obscurity and largely self-taught, Sully produced more than 130 intricately drawn and vividly colored three-panel drawings—as well as several detailed single-panel “ethnographic” thematic images to accompany her sister’s studies—that captured the culture of her Dakota community and other Native nations. These images, rarely exhibited in her lifetime or posthumously, also represent scenes she likely observed while living in New York City as well as clever vignettes of popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Sully primarily drew with colored pencil, graphite, and occasional ink on mid-grade paper. A commitment to creatively exploring her life and times, combined with her Dakota-influenced cultural and artistic sensibilities, resulted in an unconventional body of work unlike anything produced before or since.




Mary Sully, like many of her contemporaries as well as her talented great-grandfather, had a fascination with celebrities. She and her sister were avid entertainment fans and frequented many theaters during their long-term stays in New York. Sully was also exposed to numerous popular publications (such as Time magazine), using stories and images as inspiration for her own art. The public figures who attracted her interest included star athletes (Babe Ruth), stage and film performers (Lunt and Fontaine, Claudette Colbert), authors (Eugene Field), charismatic thinkers (Gertrude Stein), and tastemakers (Walter Winchell). Like her Dakota ancestors who worked with beads and quills, Sully was able to translate what she knew of these personalities into a unique graphic language. The subtlety and poignancy with which she layered her experiences as a Dakota woman and an intensely creative artist offers a fresh and complex lens through which to consider American life in the first half of the 20th century.