She met her husband, Colin Campbell Cooper in the Netherlands and the two traveled, painted and exhibited their works together.

She then returned to New York City to study at the Art Students League and Cooper Union under William Merritt Chase.

From 1891 to 1893, Cooper taught painting and was the Art Director at the Clifton Springs, NY, foster school opened between 1876 and 1885.

For her painting Breadwinner, Cooper was given an award at the Chicago's World's Fair in 1893[11][12] and the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895.

[11][14] Cooper's paintings were exhibited with her husband' in shows in Rochester, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, and Buffalo between 1902 and 1910.

[15] In 1915 she showed paintings of India alongside works by Alice Schille, Adelaide Deming and Helen Watson Phelps in New York.

[18] The emerging women artists created works with a different perspective than men, challenged the limited concepts of femininity and created a genre of floral-female landscape paintings, in which "the artist placed one woman or more in a flower garden setting and manipulated composition, color, texture and form to make the women look as much like flowers as possible."

These artists were among the educated, sophisticated "New Women" beginning in the late 19th century, whose influence was largely ignored by art scholars.

[4] Cooper's paintings are held in private and public collections, including the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester;[19] Strong Museum in Rochester, New York;[20] Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina;[21] and Wells College in Aurora, New York.

[4] In January 1940, a retrospective exhibition of her works was held at George H. Brodhead Fine Arts in Rochester.

[4] Her and her husband's papers are held in the manuscript collection of the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester.

[30] Works made in India in 1913 and exhibited in the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester and Milwaukee in 1915 include:[34][35]