Gate of Heaven Cemetery in East Hanover, New Jersey. Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson. Artistic and literary work For Ryan, the relationship between artmaking and writing was very permeable, though she favored the latter for most of her life. She wrote a series of poems in the late 1930s and 40s called Lines to a Young Painter, and her circle of friends included artists and writers of all kinds. Her artistic work first took the form of printmaking—she made prints with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17, a hub for the American and European avant-garde—followed by oil painting, and by the mid-1940s she was designing costumes and backdrops for ballet performances. It was in collage, though, that Ryan found her primary voice. She incorporated all kinds of papers and textiles into her collage compositions, including silk, netting, handmade rag paper, and Japanese rice paper. Most were small in scale, averaging roughly eight by six inches. Many of the works were mounted on handmade paper by Douglas Morse Howell, who frequently collaborated with New York artists in the 1950s and 60s and often made paper from re-purposed textile fibers like blue jeans, or from flax grown in his backyard. Ryan's collages distilled and expanded upon this sensibility by juxtaposing small squares of different materials against one another to highlight the distinct textures and densities of each. Their small scale and her use of pastel colors provoked varying critical responses in the early 1950s; many writers commented on the works' "feminine" qualities. Ryan had three exhibitions of her work at the Betty Parsons Gallery in the 1950s that solidified her reputation in the art world. Parsons was well known for showing abstract artists like Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin. After her death in 1954, an exhibition of her collage was shown at the Brooklyn Museum and traveled to the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, DC; the Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; and the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. Her daughter Elizabeth McFadden is also an artist. Selected solo exhibitions: 1941: The Pinacotheca, NY (paintings); Marquie Gallery, NY (prints) 1942: New York School for Social Research, NY (prints) 1946: The Philadelphia Art Alliance, PA (prints) 1947: Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield, MI (prints) 1948: Gallery Denise Severin, Paris (first European exhibition of prints) 1950, 1954,