Leap Year

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.



Subjects that involve romantic expectations—engagement, marriage, divorce—were of particular interest to Sully. These topics featured regularly in the popular magazines and newspapers she read, just as they do today. Media coverage of the Celtic tradition of women proposing to men on the extra day of a Leap Year, which occurred on February 29 of 1932, 1936, and 1940, likely prompted this piece. Amplifying the bright reds, yellows, and blues of painted parfleche imagery, Sully organized her composition as an aerial perspective on the glamorous hairstyles of women who competitively “fish for husbands” in a crowded pond. Eager to hook the biggest catch with the most dollar signs, the women overlook more accessible partners.