Walter Winchell (1897–1972)

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 is among Sully’s most formally dynamic and evocative of its subject. A vaudeville performer turned journalist, Walter Winchell reached the height of his popularity in the late 1930s, when his syndicated column for Hearst appeared in more than two thousand newspapers worldwide and his radio show reached twenty million listeners. His electric, fast-paced delivery of entertainment news and gossip soon extended into political critique; he was among the first in show business to denounce the rise of Nazism. In Sully’s imaginative rendering, three panels of vigorous designs seem to radiate sound waves in dialogue with Indigenous patterns. The geometries of diamonds and triangles are rendered in a patriotic red-white-and-blue color palette.