After graduating from high school, she moved to Washington, D.C.[1] Although she drew constantly as a child, as a teenager poetry became her principal means of creative expression.

The university had an experimental program that allowed her to create her own study plan; her senior thesis, written under advisor Uruguayan artist and critic Luis Camnitzer, explored the intersection of art and politics.

She also learned offset printing at the alternative publishing house “The New England Free Press.”[1] Throughout her adolescence Rippey had considered herself a poet, but finding herself in a Spanish-speaking culture after moving to Chile she was motivated to set writing aside and return to her constant childhood activity of drawing and its variations.

[1] Together with Pascoe she participated in the leftist political group Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria or MIR, once again making silk-screened posters.

On September 11, 1973, during the coup against Salvador Allende, Rippey and her now husband Pascoe met with MIR militants and were beaten by the military police after receiving an order to disperse.

[1] Rippey continued her work in printmaking and started to make woodcuts in the collective studio at the “Molino de Santo Domingo” in Tacubaya.

[3] In 1976 at the Benjamin Franklin Library of the Anglo-Mexican Cultural Institute, Rippey held her first individual show, Serigrafías, aguafuertes y monotipos.

Armando Cristeto, Alberto Pergón, Xavier Quirarte, Ángel de la Rueda, Alejandro Arango, and Lola Muñoz-Pons were also members.

Rippey met fellow student from Old Westbury Ricardo Pascoe in 1969 and married him in Santiago de Chile in 1972, during the presidency of Salvador Allende.

[1] I asked Rippey, “Do you have an artist that you feel has been an influence on the type of art work that you create?” She said, “When I was young I identified with Mary Cassatt and Käthe Kollwitz.