Kloss's etchings remain one of the most sustained printed records of the twentieth-century Southwest — a body of work made largely from memory in a small Taos studio, drawn from a working life spent in close, attentive contact with both the landscape and the people of northern New Mexico.
Kloss came to art at one of the strongest moments in California-based printmaking. Berkeley's art department in the 1920s was a serious teaching environment for both painting and the print disciplines, and her studies under Boynton gave her the painterly foundation that would inflect her later etchings, while Nahl's printmaking instruction set the technical course of her career. Nahl reportedly predicted, after seeing the first proof she pulled from the press, that she would be an etcher; the next sixty years bore him out.
Her marriage to Phillips Kloss — a poet, philosopher, and lifelong companion of unusual intellectual independence — turned out to be the structuring relationship of her working life. The couple honeymooned in the Southwest, and the trip became the basis of their joint commitment to the region. Through the 1930s they spent summers working in Taos, and at the end of the war they made the move permanent.
The body of work she produced over the next several decades concentrated on a particular set of subjects: the New Mexican landscape under particular qualities of light and weather, the architecture of the Pueblo and Hispanic villages of the upper Rio Grande, the religious processions and dances of the Pueblo peoples, and the small details of working life across the high desert. She drew, by her own account, largely from memory, working out compositions and effects of light in her studio rather than from notes or sketches in the field. Her technical innovation — painting acid directly onto the plate to produce gradient effects unavailable through conventional bath-etching — gave her prints their distinctive combination of high contrast, sharp linear definition, and tonal subtlety.
Her tenure as the sole etcher of the Public Works of Art Project placed her work in the public schools and federal buildings of New Mexico and beyond, and the recognition that followed was substantial within the print world: gold medals from the California Society of Etchers, election to the National Academy of Design, and inclusion in the major American print exhibitions of the period. The 1938 exhibition of her prints in Paris alongside Georgia O'Keeffe and Ernest Blumenschein registered her standing within the broader Southwestern art community of her generation.
She continued to work in Taos through the postwar decades, completing her last prints in the early 1980s. Her position today is that of one of the great American printmakers of the twentieth century and the principal visual chronicler of the New Mexican high country in the medium of intaglio. Her work has been the subject of dedicated retrospectives and exhibitions at the Harwood Museum of Art, the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center, and other regional institutions, and her place within the long tradition of American etching is securely established.