After completing her graduate degree, she taught at Kent State University and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design before settling in New York City in 1982 to pursue her career as an artist.

Gralnick began making brooches from black acrylic sheet, using geometric forms described as recalling "machines and architecture" but that "also read as pure abstraction".

[7] Her black acrylic brooches maintained the connection to jewelry by contrasting matt and polished surfaces and the addition of precious materials like gold.

"Gralnick glued the broken vinyl pieces of the record into a small houselike structure that sat on her bench for about a year before she began her investigations into acrylic, which eventually led to this breakthrough series.

[9] Gralnick's turn to black fits within a larger aesthetic shift in the jewelry and fine art world in the 1980s and 1990s, where dark themes such as death, trauma and postindustrial decay were common as artists grappled with the end of the Cold War, the spread of AIDs, a worldwide economic recession, and the fin de siècle cultural fears of the coming new millennium.

[10] The collection garnered attention for its bold and surreal quality at the time,[11] and in 2002 the American Craft Museum included some of Gralnick's "black work" in an exhibition and catalog of jewelry from the 1980s called "Zero Karat".

[13] She began to use metal, such as silver and gold, and her jewelry became more machine-like, with some pieces incorporating moving parts such as gears, levers, pulleys and weights.

[19] The exhibition has been on view in different locations like the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft where it was noted as exploring our complicated relationship with precious metal.