Born in New York City, modernist painter Adelaide Lawson Gaylor studied at the Art Students League and with Kenneth Hayes Miller. She was a member of the Society of Independent Artists, the Salons of America, and the New York Society of Women Artists. She was married to artist Wood Gaylor, who studied with Walt Kuhn at the National Academy of Design and exhibited with him in the Armory Show of 1913. The Gaylors were active in the New York art world and the list of their colleagues -- from Marsden Hartely, William and Marguerite Zorach, Peggy Bacon, Mrs. Harry Paine Whitney, and Jospehine Baker -- reads like a Who's Who of early twentieth-century New York culture.

Gaylor exhibited at the Society of Independent artists, the Salons of America, the Whitney Studio Club, the Whitney Museum, and in several New York galleries. She was particularly close to John Dos Passos, to whom she taught painting, and who was known to refuse to exhibit in all-male venues that would not also not show her work. Gaylor came from an affluent and well-educated family. Her brother John Howard Lawson was a successful screenwriter and playwright until his career was de-railed by the infamous Red Scare of the 1950s.