Timothy Cole (1852–1931)

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 celebrates the esteemed American wood engraver and illustrator Timothy Cole. The doubled profile faces of the “carved wood” on the top panel suggest an optical exercise known as Rubin’s Vase (developed by Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin in 1915). In this type of “bi-stable” imagery, forms—usually two profiles flanking a vase—share common borders; a viewer can focus on only one form at a time. The motif extends to the middle panel, where the faces are miniaturized into chain-like patterns, which then shift into stitched embellishments on a Native American–style fringed leather pouch at the bottom. In this way, Sully brings together three aesthetic practices—wood engraving, bi-stable imagery, and leatherwork—to explore the psychological intersections between subject and texture, figure and ground.