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.

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.

"[7]: 4 [12] Albro was one of the few women who were part of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, a program initiated under President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

Due to the high rate of joblessness during the Great Depression, these art programs were required to employ female artists, making this period the first time in history in which women were hired without discrimination in the United States.

[13] Throughout the 1930s, Albro executed many commissions under the federal program, including a mosaic at San Francisco State Teacher's College in 1936,[7]: 12  over the entrance to Woods Hall at the southeast corner of Haight and Buchanan.

[11] The mosaic is no longer visible, having either been stored and then lost, or destroyed during removal when the campus was moved[11][15] and the Teacher's College building was renamed to Anderson Hall at the University of California Extension in San Francisco.

[16] Outside of artwork commissioned for public buildings, Albro painted frescoes for many private homes,[7]: 3  including the entrance and courtyard of the Seldon Williams House in Berkeley, California, designed by Julia Morgan and completed in 1928.

[17]: 85, 165 A work of four nudes that Albro painted at the Ebell Women's Club in Los Angeles, titled Portly Roman Sybils, offended the organization's members, and was destroyed in 1935.

[7] The San Francisco News of May 25, 1935, printed the following: Speaking of murals, Maxine Albro moved right up in line with Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Clifford Wight last month, when the Ebell Club of Los Angeles, after two years of internal squabbling, finally destroyed frescoes of the four Sybils which Miss Albro had painted in the loggia of its more or less Italian Club House.

[7]Albro's artistic style is described as "clean, bright and clear with the strong rounded forms of this era, often depicting the women of Mexico, in particular those of the Tehuantepec region in Oaxaca.

With the possible exception of one canvas, 'First Communion,' we fail to discover any marked Rivera influence in Albro's work ... because she has so successfully avoided imitating his technique.