Morang's painting cannot be separated from her musical training: her work translates the structural and emotional logic of music, interval, color, rhythm, harmony, into the silent medium of paint, in close fidelity to Kandinsky's foundational arguments for non-objective art.
Morang's first art was music. She studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston in the 1920s, where Alfred Morang was studying violin and where the two met in 1925. She would teach piano for the rest of her working life, and the structural habits of music, phrasing, modulation, the relationship between tone and time, would underlie her later painting in ways she herself was explicit about in writing and interview.
The decisive change of life came with the doctor's recommendation that Alfred, by then suffering from tuberculosis, move to a higher and drier climate. The couple chose Santa Fe, then a small but exceptionally cosmopolitan art colony, and settled near Canyon Road. Their household quickly became a centre of the local cultural life, hosting Saturday night salons that drew the painters, writers, and musicians who passed through or lived in the city, and they supported themselves by giving lessons in music and painting.
Her own painting practice took shape rapidly in the new setting. Largely self-taught, she sought out the leading modernists of the local scene and absorbed the disciplined approach to abstract composition that the Transcendental Painting Group was then developing in opposition to the regional figurative idioms of the Taos Society and the broader Southwestern landscape tradition. As press secretary for the group, she became one of its most articulate spokespersons, even though she was never a formal member.
The body of work she produced from the late 1930s onward was unlike anything else being made in Santa Fe at the time. Drawing on Kandinsky's theory of an art freed from external reference and animated entirely by the internal life of color and form, she produced a long sequence of non-objective paintings, pastels, and smaller works on paper that brought the European abstract tradition directly into the southwestern American art world. The 1940 inclusion at the Guggenheim placed her in front of a national audience for that idiom for the first time.
Her parallel career as a museum professional was equally important. From the early 1940s onward she held a sequence of positions at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, and from that platform she shaped the institution's modern collections and exhibitions for more than two decades. She remained a central figure in the city's cultural life until late in her years, and the 1964 oral history that the Archives of American Art recorded with her remains one of the most substantial first-hand accounts of the New Mexico modernist scene of the WPA era.