Alice

Mary Sully, born Susan Deloria on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, was a little-known, reclusive Yankton Dakota artist who, between the 1920s and the 1940s, created groundbreaking works informed by her Native American and settler ancestry. Working without patronage, in near obscurity, and largely self-taught, Sully produced some two hundred intricately designed and vividly colored drawings that complicate traditional notions of Native American and modern art. They mix meaningful aspects of her Dakota heritage with visual elements observed from other Native nations and the aesthetics of urban life. Euro-American celebrities from popular culture, politics, and religion inspired some of her most striking works, which she called “personality prints”—abstract portraits arranged as vertical triptychs. Together, Sully’s works offer a fresh, complex lens through which to consider American art and life in the early twentieth century.



This work cleverly deploys the turtle symbol in a way that integrates Sully’s Dakota and settler heritage as well as her love for literature, film, and the imaginative world of childhood. In 1933 Paramount Pictures produced a popular film version of Lewis Carroll’s story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, first published in 1865. Sully’s depictions of turtles—in an abstract pattern and as intricately beaded amulets—refer to both the Mock Turtle character in the tale and the “life charms” of Dakota girls. These protective charms—shaped as turtles for girls and lizards for boys—hold a child’s umbilicus so that they never lose their way, as Alice did in Carroll’s fantasies.