Eugene Field (1850–1895)

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 is among Sully’s most distinctive “personality prints,” as it features two figural panels. The top pictures a group of children, in black silhouette, responding to an aural and visual sounding of colorful bells; in the middle, the motif of bells and profiles is abstracted in a dialogue between positive and negative space. The bottom panel, likely a drawing Sully produced to accompany her sister Ella Deloria’s ethnographic writing (possibly a book for children), shows a baby in a cradleboard near a Plains tipi. The writer Eugene Field is best remembered for his children’s poetry, such as “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” and “Little Boy Blue.” Here, Sully appears to be referencing his “Why Do the Bells of Christmas Ring?,” which was widely read in the 1920s and 1930s. Field was profiled in a 1939 issue of Time magazine that Sully may have encountered.