Alma Reed (born Alma Marie Sullivan, also Mrs. Goodfellow)

Alma Reed, one of the first promoters of Mexican modern art in the United States, founded the Delphic Studios Gallery in New York. Serving as the gallery’s financial and program director from its opening in 1929 until it closed in 1940 due to financial difficulties, Reed organized exhibitions and sales for the work of José Clemente Orozco and other artists primarily from North and South America, including many women painters and photographers. Besides authoring Orozco’s first biography in 1932, Reed also financed several books dedicated to Mexican and Latin American art that were published by the Delphic Studios in the 1930s.

Born in San Francisco to a family of Catholic Irish immigrants, Reed did not receive a formal education due to her household duties as the oldest of ten siblings and her job as an assistant at her father’s real estate business. To gain financial independence from her family, Reed turned to journalism in 1911, becoming a columnist for the San Francisco Call under the pseudonym “Mrs. Goodfellow,” often using her articles to raise funds for charities and call attention to issues of social injustice in California. While reporting from San Quentin Prison around 1915, she met her future husband, Samuel Payne Reed, a volunteer teacher there.

Reed’s interest in Mexico was sparked by her 1921 report on the U.S. criminal justice case against an underaged Mexican migrant worker who was sentenced to death by hanging; Reed’s reporting led to a successful public lobbying effort against the death penalty for those underthe age of eighteen. The case made Reed a national celebrity and led to her invitation to Mexico City as the personal guest of President Alvaro Obregón. During her first, three-month visit to Mexico City in the fall of 1922, Reed encountered Mexico’s flourishing artistic life in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution and was introduced to José Clemente Orozco.

In 1927, after several years of archeological reporting for the New York Times in Mexico and North Africa, Reed traveled to Greece, where she reconnected with Eva Palmer, a childhood acquaintance from San Francisco. In Athens Reed became part of the cerebral and artistic circle known as the Delphic Society, organized by Palmer and her husband, the Greek poet Angelo Sikelianos. With the goal of raising funds in the United States for the organization and its mission to promote ancient Greek culture and traditions, Reed and Palmer moved to New York in 1928 and established an intellectual and spiritual salon known as the “Ashram” in their apartment at 12 Fifth Avenue. In addition to literary events and philosophical discussions, the Ashram also held dialogues on contemporary art. The first such event with sixty invited guests in September 1928 was dedicated to the work of Orozco, who had installed his recent works on the walls of the apartment.

Committed to supporting Orozco’s career in the United States, Reed opened the Delphic Studios Gallery on October 14, 1929, in Manhattan’s burgeoningmidtown gallery district. The gallery, likely located on the top floor of 9 East 57th Street, had multiple rooms where concurrent exhibitions could be mounted. According to contemporary advertisements, Orozco’s paintings, drawings, and mural studies were “always on view” and available for sale. In addition to the permanent display of Orozco’s work, the gallery opened with a temporary exhibition, The South, featuring recent drawings and watercolors by Thomas Hart Benton that would later form the basis of his monumental mural work America Today (1930–31; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Orozco and Benton contributed to the gallery’s interior, Orozco designing its modernist black-lacquer furniture and Benton producing a large circular wool rug. As part of her continued advocacy on behalf of the artists, Reed arranged for both to receive large-scale mural commissions in the recently completed building of the New School for Social Research in 1930.

While the Delphic Studios Gallery quickly became known in New York for representing artists from Mexico such as Orozco and Carlos Mérida, Reed gave exhibition opportunities to a wide range of American and international artists, including many women, such as Dora Lust, Violette Mège, Suzanne Ogunjami, and Doris Ulmann.

Despite its prominence the gallery suffered constant financial difficulties and changed its location several times. Reed was forced to close Delphic Studios Gallery in 1940 but managed to open a short-lived, eponymous gallery at 46 West 57th Street, the Alma Reed Gallery, which operated until circa 1942. During World War II she moved to Alabama to serve as the art correspondent for the Mobile Press Register and in 1950 relocated to Mexico City, where she worked as a journalist and writer until the end of her life.