Having no need for the money that art sales would provide, Brumback rarely exhibited her paintings in private galleries and never competed for prizes. She preferred group shows to solo ones, and chose for the most part to participate in exhibitions held by clubs, societies, and other institutions of which she was a member or exhibitions held by museums and other public institutions. The first show of her professional career was a group exhibition held in 1902 at the Art Club in
Kansas City, Missouri, where she and her husband made their home. The two landscapes she contributed displayed her skill in creating atmospheric effects. The subject of the first, a peach orchard, was described as "rich with the hues of blossom time and bathed in a bright spring atmosphere", while the other, a forest scene called
The Beeches, was seen to possess "the same luminous atmospheric effects". In the early years of the twentieth century, she frequently traveled to New York City, and in 1905 she provided a painting called
Moonrise to a group exhibition at the National Academy of Design. Over the next fifteen years, she would exhibit another ten times at the National Academy. About 1909 Brumback began spending most of the cooler months of the year in Manhattan and the warmer months in the seaside resort and artists' colony in
Gloucester, Massachusetts. Brumback at first rented studio space in both locations but, while continuing to rent in New York, in 1912 she and her husband bought land and built a house in East Gloucester which they called the "House on the Hill". That year, she showed three landscapes at the Twenty-third Annual Exhibition of the
New York Watercolor Club. She also contributed a picture, called
Little Red Boat, to a group show of contemporary American painting at the
Corcoran Gallery. The critic for a local paper called her work "sincere, frank and sympathetic", and said Brumback, although "by no means well known", was "rapidly gaining recognition". The following year, her work appeared in one of her few solo appearances in a New York gallery when she contributed 29 landscapes and marines to a show at the Folsom Galleries. In 1914, after a decade of few appearances, Brumback began to place her paintings in group, duo, and solo exhibitions. That year, she showed at the National Academy of Design and the
Art Institute of Chicago, as well as another Corcoran show; a solo show at the Fine Arts Institute, Kansas City, and a dual-show with M. Bradish Titcomb at the
Copley Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts. The trend continued during the next few years, with a solo show at the Petrus Stuyvesant Club, New York, in 1916 and group shows over the next three years: (1) in 1915 at the National Academy of Design, Macbeth Galleries in New York, the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors exhibition at Arlington Galleries in New York, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Fine Arts Institute, Kansas City, (2) in 1916 at the Gallery on the Moors, Gloucester, and the Art Institute of Chicago; and (3) in 1917 at the National Academy of Design, the National Arts Club, the Gallery on the Moors, the First Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, Grand Central Palace, New York, and the Chatauqua Institution in the city of that name (New York). By this time her paintings were becoming famous and she was credited with being one of the best women painters of the time. Her work drew praise for its strong brushwork, excellent composition, and rich, glowing color, clean palette and vigorous handling, and clear, straightforward presentation of its subjects. Although two critics said draftsmanship of her work was crude and the "tone" needed refining, most gave her unreserved praise and one, obliquely suggesting why a conservative critic might withhold find fault, said she belonged to "the left wing of New York's feminine talent". In 1918 and 1919 she embarked on the first of several trips to California where she painted Pacific Coast scenes. Writing in July 1919, a critic said of these and earlier paintings that Brumback's work was virile and energetic. In 1921, when the West Coast pictures appeared in a show at Buffalo's
Albright Art Gallery, a local critic said they were "characterized by her great versatility and variety of subject matter — still life, the seashore, clouds, snow, forests, mountains—each treated in a different manner" and of one in particular, "a daring essay...there is movement, even excitement, in the canvas, brought out by the opposition of the lines, but chiefly by the opposition of the complementary colors". With the exception of some floral arrangements, Brumback did not paint interiors or urban scenes. Working out of doors in rural settings, she sought to capture the subjective feeling of a scene, its "mood of nature," as she put it, however much time and effort it might take to achieve that goal. While praising the "strong, clean palette and vigorous handling" in her landscapes and marines, one critic noted that her success derived from knowing what to leave out of a picture as well as what to put in it. In 1927, when Brumback turned 60, her skill and her appetite for hard work remained undiminished. The art reporter for the
New York Evening Post praised a solo exhibition of that year for the subtlety and rhythm of the flower paintings and landscapes in oil and watercolor that it contained, and the reporter for the
Times drew attention to the painting
Gloucester in Winter in this show for its success in evoking a mood: the charm of a coastal resort that "flees with the opening of the Summer hotels". ==Art activist==