She was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, and the Founder and Dean Emeritus of the New York Studio School.

[3] Matter's father was the American modernist painter Arthur Beecher Carles who had studied with Henri Matisse.

Subsequent studies included at Bennett College in Millbrook, NY with sculptor Lu Duble, and in New York City with Maurice Sterne, Alexander Archipenko and Hans Hofmann.

Close friends included Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Alexander Calder and Willem de Kooning.

in which she criticised the phasing out of extended studio classes which served "that painfully slow education of the senses," which she considered essential.

The article prompted a group of Pratt students, as well as some from Philadelphia, one from Cooper Union, to ask Matter to form a school based on her ideas.

The school was originally housed in a loft on Broadway and gained almost immediate support from the Kaplan Fund, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III and the Ford Foundation.

Early teachers, chosen by the students, included the artists Philip Guston, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Charles Cajori, Louis Finkelstein and Sidney Geist; the art historian Meyer Schapiro; and the composer Morton Feldman.