Alma Reed

While working in Mexico in the 1920s, she fell in love with the Governor of Yucatán, Felipe Carrillo Puerto; however, he was assassinated while she was home in San Francisco preparing for their wedding.

Reed was a promoter of the career of Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco[1] and wrote the first monograph on the artist in 1932,[2] as well as a biography about his life.

While traveling through the Yucatán, in 1923, she wrote another series of articles on the thefts and plundered of Mayan artifacts for the Peabody Museum at Harvard University by US diplomat, explorer and archaeologist Edward Herbert Thompson.

By 1928, she settled in New York City and dubbed her apartment "the Ashram" to honor the Hindu hermitage where sages lived in peace among nature and to pay homage to Mahatma Gandhi's pacifism.

Not long after her solo Orozco exhibition, Reed rented a portion of the top floor of the building on East 57th Street and established a formal gallery called "Delphic Studios."

[7] She promoted many Mexican artists, including Roberto Cueva del Río, but she remained the principal patron for Orozco.