Mary Sully: Neurodivergence and American Indian Art

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The geometrical triptychs American Indian artist Mary Sully (1896-1963) crafted on paper, crayon, gilt, and ink render early twentieth-century American celebrities into arresting synesthesia. In one of her works, Sully represents the famous dancer and movie star Fred Astaire through his tapping shoes. Their green, blue, and yellow soles vibrate off the white paper, the suggestion of sound waves conveyed through overlapping boomerang shapes. Sound, motion, and sight are depicted simultaneously in Sully’s drawings, offering insight into how the Lakota artist experienced sensory stimuli: as a riot of overlying rhythms, colors, and shapes.

Mary Sully was born Susan (Susie) Mabel Deloria on May 2, 1896, on the Standing Rock reservation in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Her father was the resident Episcopalian white preacher at St. Elizabeth Mission; her mother was Soldier Woman, a Lakota tribe member also known as Mary Sully. In the 1920s, Susie adopted her mother’s English moniker as a professional handle and began creating art. The decision to take on the Sully surname likely stemmed from a desire to capitalize on the artistic connection with Thomas Sully, a revered nineteenth-century portraitist and Susie’s great-grandfather.

Unknown for decades, Mary Sully’s artworks were disseminated posthumously by her descendants, including Harvard historian Philip Deloria. In 2019, Deloria published the monograph Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract, championing his great-aunt’s place in American art history as an outsider artist. Exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Minnesota Institute of Art followed in 2024 and 2025, respectively.

So little is known about Mary Sully’s process because her artwork never broke out from the small circle of influence dictated by her identity: an unmarried, self-taught, Indigenous midwestern woman without means who, throughout her adult life, depended on her older sister, Ella Deloria, for economic and emotional support. Ella was a prolific American Indian anthropologist who, like Mary, moved precariously between white and Native cultures.

Mary Sully’s artwork, however, reflects a unique way of looking and feeling about the world. The artist did not leave any personal papers, but family members describe her as withdrawn and excessively anxious, a person whose fears and fatigue rendered her unable to hold down a job or pursue higher education. According to Philip Deloria, Mary Sully’s family saw her drawings as recreational and nearly discarded them after the artist’s death. It was Deloria’s mother, Barbara, who found them nestled in an old suitcase and kept them safe until he took them on as his own curatorial/academic project.^[1] Most information regarding Sully’s personality and mental health is thus intimately tied to a family narrative. Rather than a retroactive diagnosis, familial commentary on Sully’s neurodivergence functions as an added layer that fleshes out the intersectional artist behind the striking art.

Growing up, Mary Sully and her sister Ella attended the St. Elizabeth’s Mission School on the reservation, where proficiency in Lakota handcrafts, like sewing and beading, coexisted with the Christian teachings of their father’s ministry. Companions throughout their lives, the sisters eventually enrolled in a residential school, All Saints High School For Girls in Sioux Falls, where they completed their secondary education among well-off, non-Native peers. Academically gifted, Ella went on to Oberlin College in Ohio, and later to the Teachers’ College at Columbia University in New York City.

Mary, however, struggled with what Ella described in a personal letter as an “abnormal shyness.” The “conflicting influences” of being “plunged into the cultured atmosphere of [the non-Native boarding] school, and then thrust back into [the reservation] each vacation” seemed to have made twenty-something Sully exceedingly “bashful […], a maidenly virtue among Indians” that did not translate well into the self-sufficient life where Ella found academic employment and validation. Ella surmised that her sister quietly “suffered agonies” that made her withdrawn and, at times, debilitated to the point of shutdown.^[2]

Mary Sully produced most of her work in the years following high school. From the 1920s into the 1940s, she handcrafted over one hundred “personality prints” – her term for triptychs inspired by singular public figures. Most of the figures were Americans in the performing arts (Shirley Temple, Billie Burke, Eddie Cantor), although Sully also drew politicians (New York City Mayor and New York Representative Fiorello La Guardia, J. Edgar Hoover), sportsmen (Babe Ruth), writers (Gertrude Stein, Edna St. Vincent Millay), foreign religious leaders (Evangelical Christian activist Toyohiko Kagawa), scientists (Alfred Einstein), and dancers (Anna Pavlova), as well as ensembles, like the popular Broadway troupe, the Ziegfeld Follies. During this creative period, Sully also produced prints inspired by “ideas” rather than people, such as “The Red Cross,” “Easter,” and “Greed.” She rarely dated her works, so clues to identify time of creation hinge on contextual details, such as a subject’s fashion or popularity.

Sully’s personality prints capture the neurodivergent experience of sensory overwhelm that underpinned her reclusive life. Structurally, all of the personality prints consist of three individual drawings stacked vertically on the wall and capped at the bottom by an identifying name tag. The top portion of the artwork is typically the most figurative, the second provides abstract patterns similar to a fabric swatch, and the last conveys a geometric reiteration of the figurative top panel, often drawing on American Indian iconography. Though all linked together thematically, the strict organizational display of the three separate drawings creates a sense of controlled chaos, of explosions of liveliness, movement, and charisma distilled and restrained into geometric shapes.

As Philip Deloria suggests, “the personality prints [likely] functioned as a kind of personal therapy or coping strategy” for Mary Sully as she struggled to make her way in the world. In 1925, Ella remarked that, at twenty-nine years of age, her sister “has made, all roughly speaking, a dozen or more attempts to train for something and has never carried a thing through. She is, therefore, not qualified to hold the humblest position and is today working for her room and board in a modest home in Lawrence, Kansas.” ^[3]

Likely created in the 1920s, the Ziegfeld personality print exemplifies how Sully found order, clarity, and self-expression in her creative practice.^[4] This print illuminates how art-making can help a neurodivergent mind make sense of the sensory extravaganza of modern life – in this case, a Broadway revue known for its orchestrated musical numbers with complex constellations of white girls scantily clad in sparkling costumes.

The top panel, flanked by stage curtains, shows the female dancers arranged by hair color, their heads like lightbulbs stringed in concentric circles within the containing shape of a six-pointed star. The young female bodies, the draw of the Follies act, are absent. So are their names – the performers are defined by the impresario who employed them, the legendary Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. Further, the shapes look controlled, the lines clean, the staging clear: the star made of girls resembles an enclosed ornament or a cog.

A commentary on the objectifying nature of female stardom, the bald heads of the men gazing up at the girls peek at the bottom of the panel. Faceless, the male audience clashes with the disembodied, interchangeable faces of the female dancers, a trenchant takedown of the fungible artificiality and transactional gender politics subtending Ziegfeld’s trademark act.

The theme of black-and-white dichotomies reappears in the middle panel where white stars cluster in front of rows of black flea-like shapes, a repeated motif that echoes stage performers and their paying customers. The last panel depicts a square in beige, black, yellow, and purple that restrains an abstracted view of the Follies as a stained-glass window of five overlapping stars. Eighteen flea-like shapes congregate around them as possible stage lights, worshippers, spectators, guards, or prowlers.

This distillation of public personae into symbolic visual components permeates Sully’s oeuvre even when the thematic suggests fan admiration, like the personality print of Claudette Colbert. Likely inspired by the star’s 1944 Christmas film, Since You Went Away, the print reimagines the leading woman as a tree ornament: colorful, youthful, and doll-like. Like with the Ziegfeld composition, this work can be read as a feminist critique of how classical Hollywood transacted female actresses as packaged commodities.

The doll-in-a-box motif may also refer to Colbert’s paper dolls, commercialized in a booklet the year prior. The use of this motif evinces Sully’s savvy engagement with Hollywood’s transmedial industry and commercial print culture writ large. Colbert’s picture personality also includes visual traces of Lakota handcrafts, the bottom panel citing Indigenous beading and weaving practices.

Despite laboring in solitude with little training, Sully had professional ambitions for her art that did not materialize in her lifetime. She showed a handful of compositions once or twice in small local settings, but sometime in the 1940s seems to have stopped creating altogether. Sully died at sixty-seven, an artist in obscurity. However, her legacy remains alive due to familial care, especially Barbara Deloria’s curatorial efforts to protect and organize Sully’s portfolio when it languished in an old suitcase, vulnerable to posthumous oblivion or destruction.

In the end, Mary Sully’s life, like her artworks, communicate a particular way of experiencing the world. It is one that is defined by a sensation of separateness, of observational distance and inner narrative richness, a reined-in fullness of feeling and meaning that lingers under clean lines and crayon colors. Although almost a century old, that way of looking continues to resonate with viewers to this day. Sully’s artwork hence shows how significant intersectionality is for diversifying perspectives. Her Indigeneity and neurodivergence not only dilate conversations on gender, race, disability, and class in American art history, but also remind us that people cannot fit in one representational box: identity is plural, and mental health shapes creative production across time periods and walks of life.

 

Notes

1. See Philip J. Deloria, Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019). ↑
2. Deloria, Becoming Mary Sully, 69. ↑
3. Deloria, Becoming Mary Sully, 199. ↑
4. The aesthetics of this work, including the women’s fashion, suggest it is from the 1920s, the last decade when the Follies were popular. The theatrical revue wrapped up in 1931, with minor revivals in the 1940s. ↑

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Featured image caption: “Mary Sully: Native Modern” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Photo by Paul Lachenauer, © the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.)