Unidentified III Green/Red Road

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 triptych, unusual in Sully’s oeuvre, features ambiguous subject matter that invites viewer interpretation. The artist’s technical skill and facility with composition, line, and color are enhanced by a highly individualized creative vision. Sully’s inclination toward abstraction is evident in the patterns of the middle panel that reappear as more minimal shapes on the bottom panel—a demonstration of the ways her aesthetic sensibilities were influenced by both her Dakota and her settler-European roots.