Born in Philadelphia and educated at Moore Institute of Art, she began as a painter in the style of the American social realist school, before turning to Abstract Expressionism through her pioneering work in silk screening and sculptural collage.

[3] Working in the "social realist" tradition, she specialized in scenes of proletariat American life, which she then contributed to populist and Marxist journals of the period, including The New Masses.

[8] Eventually she would come to be seen as a pioneer of the movement, especially for her innovations in silk screening, a technique she adopted in 1941 after observing Harry Gottlieb in Louisville, Kentucky, while on assignment with her first husband, a medical practitioner.

[11] She often worked with paper, which she treated with the same sense of experimental abandon as she had previously brought to silk screening—dying, folding, twisting, ripping the material in search of new possibilities of expression.

After the death of her first husband in 1963, and her mother several years later, her sculptural work became even more experimental through the incorporation of more diverse materials, including wire, string, bamboo, and plaster.