• On The Road With Mary Sully
• Flannery Burke (bio)

Philip J. Deloria’s Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract is a beautiful book and when you see it, you will likely want to hold it in your hands. The cover features a pattern design drawn from the middle panel of one of Dakota artist Mary Sully’s triptych personality prints: a rich red background hosts a series of beige, leaping, abstract figures, each with a wide, figure-eight belt tied with a red knot. The inside back cover shows another middle panel—this one with the look of a cutting-room floor—a flurry of off-white, irregular squares, perforated with arabesque curls, drift across a field of black. Open the book and one finds richly illustrated color reproductions of more of Sully’s work and that of artists who influenced her. The book’s design mimics a parfleche, a French catch-all term for the boldly painted carrying cases of Plains Indian people in the nineteenth century. Deloria packs a lot inside.

Deloria reads Sully’s personality prints, most executed in the late 1920s and over the 1930s, from top to bottom. A top panel typically abstracted a figure from popular culture. Sully was an ardent fan of radio and film personalities and appears to have drawn much of her subject matter from widely circulated magazines. The top panel for Henry Ford shows a world on wheels; Fred Astaire features a pair of vibrating feet or maybe a pair of feet atop a vibrating floor; Amelia Earhart portrays a compass with points stretching to all four corners of the canvas. Like other modern artists of the early twentieth century, Sully pondered the meaning of American identity and particularly the meaning of American celebrity. Her work suggests an engagement with the central questions of modern art, and Deloria describes these top panels as Sully’s “signifying abstract”—her most overt reference to the subject of each triptych.

He calls the middle panels the “geometric abstract” and notes their dialogue with contemporary discussion in design (p. 105). The first middle panel described above represents Hervey Allen, a poet and author of historical fiction who published a collection of poetry titled Wampum and Old Gold in 1921. The abstract figures in the middle panel of Hervey Allen may be outstretched [End Page 76] rawhide. The red knot at the center of each figure’s belt is, perhaps, a bead or an abstracted hide painting. The second describes Lowell Thomas, a radio broadcaster and movie maker who conducted a popular lecture tour in 1919 accompanied by film segments of T.E. Lawrence in Jerusalem. The shower of squares may be film strips. Sully trained, albeit briefly and erratically, in design, and while her images might have proven too demanding for the average interior decorator, they reflect her understanding of contemporary design trends.

The bottom panels “form their own category, abundant with overdetermined images that want to leap out of any categorical box that might try to contain them” (p. 114). They draw on Dakota women’s quillwork, parfleche painting, and quilting. All rely on ideas of abstraction executed with geometry and color that would have been legible to artists of her age as modernist. These bottom panels also draw from ethnographic illustration, which Sully sometimes provided for her sister, Ella Deloria, the author’s great-aunt, who worked for the groundbreaking anthropologists Franz Boaz and Ruth Benedict in the 1920s and 1930s. Sully included in her works small details, like how Dakota girls tied their braids, that required close observation and intricate execution. In short, the bottom panels are unequivocally Indian in design and intention.

If we follow Deloria’s reading of the triptych, then we move from the modern through modernist design to the future, and the future is Indian. “The triptychs begin in the contemporary moment, Mary Sully’s now, and look forward, beyond modern abstraction to something else, something new that emerges from the Indigenous cosmopolitanism of the bottom panels. We can...

• 与玛丽·萨利（Mary Sully）在路上
• 弗兰纳里·伯克（Flannery Burke）（生物）

菲利普·J·德洛里亚（Philip J. Deloria）的《成为玛丽·苏利（Mary Sully）：迈向美国印第安人摘要》是一本美丽的书，当您看到它时，您可能会希望将其握在手中。封面采用从达科他州艺术家玛丽·苏利（Mary Sully）的三联画个性印花的中间面板上绘制的图案设计：丰富的红色背景带有一系列米色，跳跃，抽象的人物，每个人物都有一条宽阔的，八字形的皮带，并用红色系结。内部封底显示了另一块中间面板，该中间面板看上去像是一间客厅地板，是一排白色的不规则正方形，上有蔓藤花纹的卷发，在黑色的田野上飘荡。打开书，可以找到插图丰富的彩色复制品，这些复制品涵盖了Sully的更多作品以及影响她的艺术家的作品。该书的设计模仿了parfleche，这是法国通俗的术语，指的是19世纪大胆绘制的印第安平原印第安人的手提箱。

Deloria从上到下阅读Sully的个性照片，大部分在1920年代末和1930年代执行。顶板通常从流行文化中抽象出一个人物。苏莉（Sully）是广播和电影界的热心粉丝，似乎从广为发行的杂志中汲取了她的大部分主题。亨利·福特（Henry Ford）的顶部面板显示了一个车轮世界。弗雷德·阿斯特（Fred Astaire）的脚是一对振动脚，或者可能是振动地板上的一对脚。阿米莉亚·艾尔哈特（Amelia Earhart）描绘了一个指南针，其点一直延伸到画布的所有四个角。像二十世纪初的其他现代艺术家一样，苏利（Sully）也在思考美国身份的含义，尤其是美国名人的含义。她的作品暗示着对现代艺术的核心问题的参与，而Deloria将这些顶部面板描述为Sully的“象征性抽象”，她最公开地提及每个三联画的主题。

他将中间面板称为“几何摘要”，并指出它们与当代设计中的对话（第105页）。上述的第一中间面板代表赫维艾伦，诗人和历史小说作者谁发表了题为诗集贝壳串珠和旧金在1921年在中间面板中的抽象的数字赫维阿伦可以伸出[尾页76]生皮。每个人物皮带中心的红色结点可能是珠子或抽象的皮画。第二篇讲述的是广播电台和电影制作人洛厄尔·托马斯（Lowell Thomas），他在1919年进行了一次颇受欢迎的演讲之旅，并陪同TE劳伦斯在耶路撒冷的电影部分。正方形的花洒可能是胶片条。尽管经过短暂而不固定的训练，但在设计上受到了严格的训练，尽管她的图像对于一般的室内装饰师来说可能要求过高，但它们反映了她对当代设计趋势的理解。

底部的面板“形成了自己的类别，其中充满了不确定的图像，这些图像想跳出可能试图包含它们的任何分类框”（第114页）。他们借鉴了达科他州妇女的羽毛笔，小雕像绘画和缝。所有这些都依赖于几何和色彩所执行的抽象思想，这对于她那个时代的现代主义者来说是显而易见的。这些底部面板也取自民族志插图，苏利有时为她的姐姐埃拉·德洛里亚（Ella Deloria）提供了作者的姑姑，埃拉·德洛里亚曾在1920年代和1930年代为开创性的人类学家弗朗兹·波阿斯和露丝·本尼迪克特工作。苏莱（Sully）在她的作品中包含一些小细节，例如达科他州女孩如何绑辫子，这需要仔细观察并执行错综复杂的动作。简而言之，底部面板在设计和意图上无疑是印第安人。

如果我们遵循Deloria对三联画的解读，那么我们将从现代设计过渡到现代主义设计，走向未来，而未来就是印度。“该triptychs开始在当代的时刻，玛丽苏利的现在，并期待着，超越现代抽象到别的东西，新的东西，从底部面板的土著主义应运而生。我们可以...