Back in New York, in 1935 Walinska became an exhibit curator for the
Federal Art Project and founded the Guild Art Gallery at 37 West 57th Street, where she gave
Arshile Gorky his first New York solo show. When Walinska's work was exhibited alongside Gorky at the Guild,
ARTnews reviewed the show and chose a painting by Walinska as the illustration. In 1937, Walinska was represented in the American Artists' Congress first annual membership exhibition. Subsequent group shows included: Artists for Victory,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1942; Paintings of the Year, 1946,
National Academy of Design; Recent Drawings USA,
Museum of Modern Art, 1956;
Baltimore Museum of Art (with
Fernando Botero and
Wifredo Lam), 1959. Her work was shown at the
Bodley Gallery, the Monede Gallery, Buecker & Harpsichords, and in numerous exhibitions in the U.S., the U.K., and France with the
National Association of Women Artists, the
Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, and the Silvermine Guild. her work was included in the
American Federation of Arts exhibition titled "God & Man in Art," which toured the U.S. in 1958. From 1954 to 1955, Walinska journeyed around the world by herself on prop planes, keeping a diary which is now in the collection of the Smithsonian
Archives of American Art. The six-month trip began in New York City and continued to Honolulu, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Burma, New Delhi, Karachi, Cyprus, Israel, Istanbul, Athens, Rome, Perugia, Florence, Venice, Pompei, Naples, Sorrento, Capri, Nice, Barcelona, Madrid, Toledo, Lisbon, and finally to Bermuda, where she noted in her diary that the single room rate at the Elbow Beach Surf Club ran from $14–25. The high point of the trip was a four-month sojourn in Burma, where her brother Louis Walinsky was serving as economic advisor to Prime Minister
U Nu. While in Burma, Walinska instructed local craftsmen on the art of building an easel and stretching canvas. The Burmese artists took her out to paint
en plein air, and she shared with them her knowledge of what was happening in the art world. U Hla Shein, Minister of the Shan States and an artist himself, wrote of her influence in
The Guardian: "The vast majority of artists in Burma follow the realistic approach. They have now for the first time seen and heard a modernist, who appears entirely different from the only brand they had known." While in Burma, she painted the portrait of Prime Minister
U Nu. Later, Walinska became a teaching artist in residence at the Riverside Museum (then located at the
Master Apartments), where she exhibited with sculptor
Louise Nevelson, among others. In 1971 the Riverside collection, including two of her paintings, moved to the
Rose Art Museum at
Brandeis University. Walinska created a large body of work on the theme of the Holocaust, some of which were included in her one-woman retrospective at the
Jewish Museum in 1957. They were subsequently shown as a group of 122 works at the Museum of Religious Art at the
Cathedral of St. John the Divine in a 1979 retrospective. Posthumously, Walinska's Holocaust work was shown in Eastern Europe for the first time in 2000, at the Ghetto Museum at the Theresienstadt Memorial in the Czech Republic. Works from this group went on to the permanent collections of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
Yad Vashem in Israel, the
Clark University Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the
Judah L. Magnes Museum, and elsewhere. In 2015, Walinska began to receive posthumous recognition, with exhibitions in East Hampton and New York City. Walinska's work was auctioned for the first time in March 2017 by Weschler's in Washington, DC. == References ==