In 1981, she moved to the Bowery and became a fixture of the East Village art scene. In the spring of 1987, she married Paul Monroe, the owner of Einsteins, a clothing and jewelry store on East Seventh Street, which she used as her studio and exhibition space, making sketches and pictures in a back room and creating eerie, lifelike dolls for the window displays out of coat hangers, toilet paper and other cheap materials. Their relationship, which was marred by heroin use, ended, by most accounts, around 1991. (Lankton filed for divorce in 1992.) She returned to Chicago and went to rehab but eventually fell deeper into drug addiction. Despite her declining health, in 1995 she was included in the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale; in a review of the former, the critic Holland Cotter, writing for The Times, noted that Lankton’s “exquisitely painted mannequinlike figures suggest a meld of Egon Schiele and Hans Bellmer, though they can be surprisingly funny.” Her final show, in 1996, “It’s All About ME, Not You,” at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, was also her first solo exhibition in a museum; it featured a detailed reimagining of her small Chicago apartment, the same apartment where her parents would soon find their daughter’s body.