After graduating from college, she taught at Washington Square College, the University of California, Berkeley, and Mills College. She was appointed the first full-time professor of American art at Stanford University in 1980. Over her tenure at Stanford she served as chair of the departments of art and art history. She also served as the director of the Stanford Humanities Center before becoming acting of the Stanford Museum of Art, now known as the Iris &amp; B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts. After the 1989 Loma Pieta earthquake, she led the reconstruction of the museum after it had been badly damaged.