Later that year the critic, Margaret Breuning, called it a "startling" canvas that "hits you between the eyes at first viewing, but has nothing to say after this first violence of onslaught." Hutchinson showed the painting twice more over the next few years and it attracted enough attention to be reproduced in art journals and newspapers. In a 1940 interview Hutchinson said people failed to see the message she intended it to give. In showing a young couple studying a sheet of music—the man being an African American and the woman a white person—she hoped to convey that "through the arts racial barriers are eliminated." Hutchinson was working in a federally-funded neighborhood center in Harlem at the time she painted "The Duet." While employed at the center she made other portraits of African Americans as well. These included "The Composer" and "The Composer at His Keyboard" with Luke Theodore Upshure as the model; "Shine Boy" and "George Griffiths" and "George Griffiths Sleeping" with George Griffiths as the model; and one, "Night," where the model's name is not known. In 1938 Hutchinson was elected to the board of directors of An American Group Inc. and showed in a thematic exhibition that group put on at Maison Française called "Roofs for 40 million." The following year she was one of 250 members of the American Artists Congress to show work in an exhibition called "Art in a Skyscraper" put on at 444 Madison Avenue. Reporters interviewed Hutchinson in 1937 and 1940. Both times she made light of her career, explaining in the first of them that her great success when young was in playing singles tennis rather than in painting, mentioning her failing grade in a college art course, and lamenting that a prize for work in sculpture while at the National Academy led merely to work "painting flowers on waste baskets." In the second she explained that she could not abide the rigid technical discipline imposed by her college and academy instructors and wanted the freedom to paint portraits from life. During the first half of the 1940s Hutchinson continued to exhibit with three membership organizations—the National Association of Women Artists, the New York Society of Women Artists, and the Society of Independent Artists—and she joined and exhibited with a fourth, the League of American Artists. In 1945 the Studio Gallery produced a duo-artist exhibition of drawings by Hutchinson and watercolors by her mother and during the rest of the 1940s she continued to show with membership organizations but did so at a distance since, following the death of her father that year, she had moved from New York back to Atlanta to live with her mother.