McAfee's career rests on a single deep subject, the horse, the working landscape of the American West, and the human and animal life that moves across it, and the discipline she brought to it across more than seventy working years produced one of the most consistent regional bodies of work in twentieth-century American art.
McAfee's path into art ran through a childhood among working horses on a Colorado cattle ranch. The drawings of horses she made as a girl set the basic subject of her career before she had any formal training, and the visual literacy she developed in those years, the anatomy, gait, and bearing of working ranch animals, the postures of the horse at rest and in motion, would underlie everything she subsequently painted.
Her formal training brought her into contact with several of the leading American art teachers of the period. Her years in Los Angeles, at Western State, and especially her Chicago apprenticeship with the muralist James McBurney gave her a thorough grounding in the academic disciplines of drawing, composition, and large-scale wall painting. The exposure to Lorado Taft, the leading American sculptor of the Beaux-Arts tradition then working in Chicago, deepened her understanding of figure construction in three dimensions, and the subsequent stints in New York completed her formal education.
The decisive turn came with her marriage to Elmer Turner and their joint visit to Taos. The couple's decision to settle there placed McAfee within one of the most active American art colonies of the period, and the construction of their White Horse Studio gave them a permanent working base. Taos in the late 1920s and 1930s was a community that took working artists seriously, and McAfee's combination of academic training, Western subject matter, and unusually disciplined working habits made her a respected presence among the painters of the colony from the start.
Her career through the Depression years was sustained in part by the federal mural programs of the New Deal. The Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture commissioned a series of post-office murals from her, works that placed her painting in the daily life of small Western towns, and that translated her studio language of horses, ranchers, prospectors, and Native American figures into a public, civic register. The most ambitious of these depicts a cattle drive across the Gunnison River, with a prospector and a fly fisherman alongside the cattle in a single composition meant to gather the various working economies of her native Colorado country.
Across the postwar decades she continued working steadily, producing easel paintings, illustrations, and designs for fabrics, paper goods, and household items, and accumulating the more than thousand-painting body of work for which she is now remembered. The Taos honor of 1981 recognized her place within the city's working art community, and she remained in her Taos studio until late summer 1993, when she returned to Colorado for her final years. Her death in Pueblo in 1995 closed one of the longest working careers in twentieth-century Western American art.