Anna Walinska was a woman ahead of her time. At the age of 19, she left NYC for Paris to study painting, lived around the corner from Gertrude Stein, and hung out with Poulenc and Schoenberg. In the WPA era, she founded a gallery on 57th Street, gave Arshile Gorky his first NYC one-man show, danced flamenco at Town Hall to benefit the Spanish Loyalists, and served as Assistant Creative Director of the Contemporary Art Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. In the fifties, she traveled around the world ... by herself... on prop planes. Her diary of that six-month journey now resides in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and includes stories about her adventures with journalist Joseph Alsop, Burmese Prime Minister U Nu, and many other writers, artists, and diplomats. A number of her works were shown during the artist's lifetime at the Jewish Museum in NYC (1957 one-woman Retrospective), MOMA and the Metropolitan Museum, NYC, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Museum of Religious Art at St. John the Divine, NYC, including works inspired by Walinska's extended stay in Burma in 1954-55.