According to Art Historian Michele Greet, Egas, full of new perspectives and insights on the European art styles, returns to Quito to start an Ecuadorian avant-garde movement of his own. He creates the country's first artistic journal "Hélice" and opens the first private owned gallery focusing on modern artwork. Nonetheless, these new artistic enterprises did not elicit enough local attention nor support, and therefore Egas decided to end both of his ventures. Greet surmises that the unsuccessful artistic endeavors, as well as his recent marriage to the North American dancer Margaret Gibbons perhaps encouraged Egas to move overseas; he subsequently established himself in Greenwich Village, New York. In 1927 at the time of his arrival, the United States was going through The Great Depression. The artistic focus was that of social content rather than the previous extravagant and luxurious representation of The Roaring 1920s. The United States, transfixed in redefining its national identity, became focused on depicting the reality and the disparity amongst the social classes. In 1932, Egas recently appointed a teaching position at The New School of Social Research in New York City, was commissioned by Alvin Johnson, the Director at the time, to begin work on a mural in front of the dance school titled, "Ecuadorian Festival." For Camilo Egas, his mural was only a depiction of Ecuador’s cultural distinctiveness; however, Johnson reacted as if it was meant to be a societal message. Johnson’s interpretation of Egas’s choice of style, being Indigenism, similarly resonated with the American public, associating his indigenous subject matter as the similar plight of the social lower classes. Egas thus began painting the affected American workers and the homeless, subsequently accepting the recognition and the label of a social realist. In 1939, Camilo Egas was responsible for decorating and painting a mural for the Ecuadorian Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair. The Museo Jijon y Caamano de Arqueologia y Arte Colonial in Quito commissioned him to paint a series of work in oils exploring Andean Indian life. Word got sent back to Ecuador of the Americans’ public recognition of Camilo Egas’s artistry in Social Realism. He was thus invited and contracted to design the Ecuadorian exhibition and its interior mural. However, the partnership and negotiations between Ecuador’s General Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United States Directory of Foreign Participations would be troubled from the start.