Lawler's work, in its diverse manifestations (installations, events, publications, souvenirs...) addresses or confronts prevailing systems of establishing art, taste and style.

The piece has been nicknamed “Patriarchal Roll Call.”[12] During her time working at Castelli Gallery, Lawler was making paintings, artist’s books, prints, and photographs of her own.

To highlight her appropriation, she installed two spotlights: one above the picture and another pointed out the window, at the building next door, hinting to sidewalk passersby that there was something of note going on upstairs.

The artist has reprised the piece on a handful of occasions, including in 1983 at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York City (using the 1961 film The Hustler and the 1957 Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s Opera, Doc?)

as part of a show organized by Robert Barry at the downtown alternative space Franklin Furnace called “In Other Words: Artists Use of Language” and, in 1987, in the C.W.

[5] Lawler's greatest coup came in 1984, when she was granted full access to the New York City and Connecticut residences of twentieth-century collectors Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine.

[17] In this series of work, Lawler photographed Jackson Pollock's Frieze (1953–55) and the filigree of a Limoges soup bowl in the Tremaines' New York dining room.

[18][19] In Living Room Corner, Arranged by Mr. & Mrs. Burton Tremaine, New York City (1984), Robert Delaunay's Premier disque (1912) hangs above a television and a Roy Lichtenstein bust, Ceramic head with blue shadow (1966), which has been turned into a lamp, and seems to stare up and outward.

[22] In Foreground (1994), a gelatin silver print showing an open-plan living area in the Chicago apartment of art collector Stefan Edlis, Jeff Koons' Rabbit (1986) can be seen next to a refrigerator.

The image printed on it was a stretched-out version of some of her earlier photographs of artworks in bland white-box settings; here, pieces by Edgar Degas, Richard Serra and Gerhard Richter, among others, were distorted beyond recognition[28] into unrecognisable streaks of colour.

[29] For the 15th installation in a series of artist-designed 25-by-75-foot billboards at the High Line, Lawler created Triangle (adjusted to fit) (2008/2009/2011), an image photographed in a room at Sotheby's auction house in New York, and itself featuring works by artists Donald Judd, Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt.