teaching art in the 1940s at Ripley House in Houston where, according to Candice Hughes, writing in Houston Breakthrough, "she also directed plays, taught dance, repaired the cabinetry and even called a few square dances."[1] For ten years, from 1950 to 1960, she directed the fine arts program for the City of Houston's Parks and Recreation Department, and she taught art in various settings for much of her life. Along with a friend, Charlene Carpenter, she founded Murals, Inc. in 1955 — it was later renamed Mural Originals — commissioning leading local artists to produce original murals for homes, businesses, and building exteriors. Dreyer herself received several commissions to do large mosaic murals on building exteriors in Houston and San Antonio. Robert V. Haynes wrote that "Maggie Dreyer was largely responsible for encouraging an interest in murals in the Houston area." She and her husband Martin ran Dreyer Galleries, an art gallery in Houston, from 1959 to 1975. Dreyer Galleries exhibited the work of leading Texas artists as well as artists from Mexico and South America, and also showed "museum-quality collections of pre-Columbian and African artifacts. Maggie Dreyer became known for her support and mentoring of young local artists. Kendall Curlee wrote, "Dreyer had perhaps her greatest impact promoting the work of young artists in the Houston area. She ran Dreyer Galleries [during] a period when few Houston galleries exhibited local artists. She showed particular support for African-American and young female artists." Though the family was not wealthy, Dreyer frequently offered financial stipends to young artists, hired them to work at her gallery, and bought paintings from their shows, sometimes anonymously. There was often an artist living rent-free in a converted kitchen at the gallery, and a portrait artist from Uruguay lived there for months, adapting an old bathtub into a bed. One of the young artists Dreyer encouraged was Charles Arthur Turner, now a prominent and widely exhibited artist and a long-time teacher at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's Glassell School of Art. Claudia Feldman wrote in the Houston Chronicle that "[Arthur] Turner was 19 and attending North Texas [State University] when he met Houston gallery owner Margaret Dreyer. He was clutching his portfolio. 'Darlin', come in, would you like a drink?' he remembers her greeting him. 'Three hours later, [he told Feldman], I had a show.'" Social activist Ann Holmes wrote in the Houston Chronicle, "The Saturday