After graduation, she lived and worked in New York where in 1985 she was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
[12][13] Early in her career she also collaborated with her late sister, the writer Margaret Weatherford, on performance art and worked as a bookkeeper for the artist Mike Kelley.
[17] Weatherford used neon in the Bakersfield Project and later series of paintings, such as Manhattan (2013), Los Angeles (2014) and Train Yard (2016–2020) to recreate the sensations of specific places or moments.
[17] In an interview for Gagosian Quarterly she once said, ‘I try to depict or deliver not only a visual translation of a place in time, but with that, the scent, the sound, and the feeling.
[23] Three examples of her early work combining acrylic, ink and screen print are held by the Brooklyn Museum: Madame Butterfly (1989), Violetta (1991), and First Riddle (1991).