In 1942, Sheeler joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a senior research fellow in photography, worked on a project in Connecticut with the photographer Edward Weston, and moved with Musya to Irvington-on-Hudson, into the gardener's cottage that was the remaining building on what was the Lowe estate, some thirty-two kilometres north of New York.

[9] Edward and Charis Weston visited them in 1942,[10][11] Frederick Sommer in 1944, and also, as befitting Musya's interest in dance, Martha Graham and Barbara Morgan.

Visiting a convent in Tarrytown, N.Y., she found an opportunity to make more than portraits and to exploit her particular interest in figurative imagery that later was to catch the eye of editors at Condé Nast.

[16] The result was ‘Nuns at Play’,[17] a Life magazine essay on the religious novices in moments of relaxation from their training as teachers.

For Vogue, in 1951, with journalist Edna Woolman Chase, Musya produced a slower-paced photoessay on a sleepy, conservative rural hamlet; classically illuminated with the available light, the series illustrates the timeless traditions and attitudes of small-town life.