Margaret Webb Dreyer (29 September 1911 – December 17, 1976) was an American painter, muralist, mosaic artist, educator, gallery owner, and political activist who spent most of her career in Houston, Texas. Though she worked in a number of styles and media over the years, she was best known as an abstract expressionist painter. Her work won numerous awards in major juried shows and was exhibited widely in museums and galleries. Dreyer is listed in the University of Texas at Austin's compilation of "women who have helped shape the history of Texas." and in 2013, Houstonia Magazine included her in a feature on "the most influential Houstonians of all time." Early life and education Born in East St. Louis, Illinois, USA on 29 September 1911, Margaret Lee Webb was the eldest of two daughters and a son born to Elmer E. and Eula Richie Webb. She moved to Houston when she was 11. Her father, Illinois attorney Elmer Webb, came to Texas to run a string of 34 furniture stores with his brother. She studied fine arts at Westmoreland College in San Antonio, at the University of Texas School of Architecture in Austin, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Personal life In 1941, she married writer Martin Dreyer and became Margaret Webb Dreyer. They were married for 35 years, until her death in 1976. Martin Dreyer was a fiction writer published in Esquire, Prairie Schooner, and the university-based "little magazines" of the 1940s, and whose work was "starred" in several editions of the Best Short Stories of the Year. He was a reporter, feature writer, and editor at the Houston Chronicle, serving for a number of years as the paper's travel editor. Martin Dreyer was a winner of the national Big Story award for "investigative journalism in the interest of justice," and his story was dramatized on network radio and television. The couple first met at a Houston literary party. They had one son, Thorne Webb Dreyer, a journalist and political activist who was a pioneer in the Sixties underground press movement and a founding editor of The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston.. He now lives in Austin where he is a director of the New Journalism Project, edits The Rag Blog, and hosts a syndicated weekly radio show. Early career Margaret Webb Dreyer began