Over her forty-year career, Halpert showcased such modern art luminaries as Elie Nadelman, Max Weber, Marguerite and William Zorach, Stuart Davis, Peggy Bacon, Charles Sheeler, Marsden Hartley, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, William Steig, Jacob Lawrence, Walter Meigs, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and many others.

Shortly after the deadly pogroms of October 1905, Halpert immigrated to New York City in 1906 with her mother and sister (her father died in 1904 of tuberculosis).

[5] They initially settled on the west side of Harlem, then a predominantly Jewish immigrant neighborhood, and Halpert attended the progressive Wadleigh High School for Girls.

[6] She was also a member of the Whitney Studio Club and John Weischel's People's Art Guild, a radical artists' cooperative for which she served as treasurer.

The following summer, the Halperts stayed at the artist colony founded by Hamilton Easter Field in Ogunquit, Maine.

They rented a cottage from Robert Laurent, and mingled with other American artists who were residing there that summer: Stefan Hirsch, Bernard Karfiol, Walt Kuhn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Katherine Schmidt, Niles Spencer, and Marguerite and William Zorach, all of whom would later join her gallery.

While staying in France, Halpert noticed that French artists had more opportunities to sell and display art than their American counterparts.

[6] Flush from bonuses earned in her business dealings, in the fall of 1926, Halpert used that money to open Our Gallery in Manhattan at 113 West 13th Street with her friend Berthe Kroll Goldsmith.

Called the Daylight Gallery, it emphasized art and sculpture displayed in diffuse natural light, and featured elaborate iron silhouette doors Halpert had commissioned in 1929.

[12] Halpert also used marketing and advertising, and worked to get her artists included in museums and public collections to increase their exposure.

[5] Halpert served as organizer and director of the First Municipal Exhibition of American Art, Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1929.

Halpert served as curator of the art section of the American National Exhibition, sponsored by the United States Information Agency and the U.S. Department of Commerce; she traveled to the Soviet Union with the exhibition, installed the show, and gave daily gallery talks in Russian.

Its activities included assisting universities to fund scholarships for the study of contemporary American art and championing the rights of artists to control the sale and reproduction of their work.