Career
After WW2 ended she moved to the United States where she worked as a fashion illustrator in New York City. lieutenant was there that she met Lorser Feitelson who founded the Los Angeles based Hard Edge art movement. Slater’s hard edge paintings are characterized by smooth, meticulously painted surfaces with elegant colors.
Her unique contribution to the Hard-edge movement was the use of intricate small triangles that would flow across the painting in irregular patterns.
She referred to them as being much like “cells” which interlocked and helped to define the structure of the painting. The triangles concept was abandoned in the early sixties and she went on to make a small number of pure hard edge landscapes with large areas of flat color.
She stopped painting in the late 1960s and became a scholar and collector of American Indian basketry, writing the book Panamint Shoshone Basketry, an American Art Form.