Receiving a small government grant, she travelled to New York City in the summer of 1924 and began six months of study at the Art Students' League.

[2][3] Pelaez moved to Paris, accompanied by Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera, after she received a grant from the government in order to pursue art.

She then began studying with Russian painter Alexandra Exter, whose friendship and classes in color theory and design were an important influence.

In response, Pelaez departed from earlier vanguard strategies and turned to new approaches that involved depictions of Afro-Cuban and guajiro (peasant) subjects, while representing them in the adoption of European modernism.

The treatment of these drawings differs than her previous oil works, by distorting and exaggerating the figure with "sinuous line and light shading" that reference Cubism and European Modernism.

[4] Peláez received a prize in the National Exposition of Painters and Sculptors in 1938, and collaborated on several art magazines in Cuba, such as Orígenes, Nadie Parecía, and Espuela de Plata.

In 1950 she opened a workshop at San Antonio de los Baños, a small city near Havana, where she dedicated herself, until 1962, to her favourite pastime of pottery.

Her most important works of this type are a ceramic mural at the Tribunal de Cuentas in Havana (1953) and the facade of the Habana Hilton hotel (1957).