Born Flora May Spore in 1878, Marion Spore Bush began her professional career as a dentist in Michigan. In the 1920s, she left her successful practice for a Bohemian art studio in Greenwich Village in the 1920s, teaching herself to paint.

She claimed that her hypnotic, surrealistic works were the result of deceased artists communicating with her from “beyond the veil,” though she was emphatic she was not a spiritualist or medium. Her interest in paranormal communication extended beyond her artwork, and she was an early participant in the field of extrasensory perception in collaboration with Dr. Walter Franklin Prince of the Boston Society for Psychical Research.

In the late 1920s, she started a breadline in the Bowery. At first she funded the endeavor herself, and then with the financial assistance of other benefactors, she personally dispensed such things as meal tickets, clothing, spectacles, false teeth, and wheelchairs. For her generosity, she became known to the press as Lady Bountiful of the Bowery or the Angel of the Bowery.