Maxine Albro (January 20, 1893 – July 19, 1966) was an American painter, muralist, lithographer, mosaic artist, and sculptor. She was one of America's leading female artists, and one of the few women commissioned under the New Deal's Federal Art Project, which also employed Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. Biographical sketch Ethel Maxine Albro was born in 1893 in Ayrshire, Iowa, the daughter of Frank Albro, a grain buyer and piano salesman, and Cordelia Mead. She had an older brother, Francis, and a younger brother, Harold. She spent part of her youth in Estherville, Iowa. She grew up in Los Angeles. Her father's family came from England and settled in Rhode Island before moving west, and her mother's ancestors were of Irish-English descent. The famed photographer Imogen Cunningham took a hauntingly intimate portrait of a shrouded Albro in 1931, adding her to a collection of notable painters that she had photographed, which included Frida Kahlo, Miguel Covarrubias, and Lyonel Feininger. On March 28, 1938, Albro married fellow artist Parker Hall in Pima, Arizona. They moved to Carmel, California, and together they would return to Mexico numerous times throughout their lives. Albro was a member of the American Artists' Congress, California Society of Mural Artists, California Art Club, and the Carmel Art Association. Albro was 73 years old when she died in Los Angeles in 1966. Career In 1920, she moved to San Francisco after graduating from high school and worked as a commercial artist, then traveled to Paris to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière for a year. After she returned, Albro studied at the California School of Fine Arts from 1923 to 1925. A year later, she enrolled in the Art Students League of New York. In the early 1920s, she lived in Burlingame, California. In 1927, she first visited Mexico, where she would study fresco painting with Pablo O'Higgins, one of Diego Rivera's assistants, and eventually made the acquaintance of Diego Rivera. Starting from 1925, Albro exhibited her works at the annual San Francisco Art Association show and influenced other artists to travel to Mexico, winning local fame as "a little Diego Rivera" and leading to numerous private commissions in 1929 and 1930, including the Spanish Farm fresco for the Allied Arts Guild in Menlo Park, California. In 1931, Albro had a major exhibition in New York City, in accord with the modern