Lanyon was born in Chicago to Howard and Ellen Lanyon. As a child she visited the "Midget Village" at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, a rather surreal experience that had a strong impression on her as an artist. She attended Hyde Park High School and during this time held a part-time job as an artist in the foundry where her father worked, drawing machine parts. She credits her careful rendering of line to this experience. In 1948, she completed her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. That same year she married classmate and fellow artist Roland Ginzel. Lanyon subsequently competed her MFA at the University of Iowa in 1950 and did postgraduate work at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, UK while on a Fulbright Fellowship.
Career
Lanyon's art has been characterized as Surrealist or Magical Realist, and she sometimes used the term "dreamscapes" to describe it. Her fantastical compositions often feature animal, vegetal, and floral motifs. Later works frequently depict everyday objects imbued with both domestic and menacing overtones and have been compared to the metaphysical art of the 1910s and ‘20s. Lanyon spent the early years of her career in her hometown, where she was often identified with the Chicago Imagists. Her works from this period include portraits of relatives and the rooms they inhabited. In the 1970s, Lanyon moved to New York and became a member of the Heresies Collective, which created . In 1976, Lanyon received a commission from the Department of the Interior to work in the Everglades, which she says "awakened to the environmental crisis" and led to art with a heavier focus on flora and fauna. Toward the end of her life, she began depicting objects from her collection of curios, many of which were inherited from relatives, such as a tobacco jar which once belonged to her grandfather. The jar, which is shaped like a toad wearing a red waistcoat, appears in several of her works. Lanyon has had over seventy-five solo gallery exhibitions and eleven museum exhibitions, including three major traveling retrospectives. Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Museum of American Art; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; the Walker Art Center; the Milwaukee Museum of Art; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, among others. Lanyon has also taught art at several institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper Union and the School of Visual Arts. Her mural, Nine Notable Women, is featured on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.
