[5] As a child she visited the "Midget Village" at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, a rather surreal experience that had a strong impression on her as an artist.

[6] She attended Hyde Park High School and during this time held a part-time job as an artist in the foundry where her father worked, drawing machine parts.

[8] It was her experience there – including her work at the Museum for the Contemporary Arts and the Department of Prints and Drawings – which inspired her to pursue painting and printmaking.

[8] Lanyon subsequently competed her MFA at the University of Iowa in 1950[4] and did postgraduate work at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, UK while on a Fulbright Fellowship.

[10] In 1976, Lanyon received a commission from the Department of the Interior to work in the Everglades, which she says "awakened [her] to the environmental crisis" and led to art with a heavier focus on flora and fauna.

[11] Toward the end of her life, she began depicting objects from her collection of curios, many of which were inherited from relatives, such as a tobacco jar which once belonged to her grandfather.

Over the course of three years (2001–2003), Lanyon created numbered, pen and ink drawings of each artifact and compiled them into five encyclopedic books: Personae, Folly Animale, O.J.

In 2002, Index became a long-distance collaboration between Lanyon and Kip Gresham, a master printer and owner of The Print Studio in Cambridge, England.

This relationship became clearer as Lanyon began creating Curiosity, a series of works that overlaid Index prints with Poyet's engravings.