Caporael's first exhibition was staged at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (currently the Orange County Museum of Art) when she was thirty five. Having been awarded a National Endowment grant in painting in 1986, she has worked as a visiting professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara and at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2009 Caporael was chosen to serve as guest artist-in-residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
Major museums include her work in their permanent collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Legion on Honor, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Honolulu Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.
Her subject matter is based on observation of the natural world. She has investigated trees, water, ice, chemical elements as well as time and place memories.