Margot E. Yale
Art historian, curator, writer, and educator
Margot Yale is a Provost Fellow and PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California, as well as a recipient of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. She studies American art in the twentieth century, with particular interests in printmaking, histories of the Left and organized labor, and pedagogy and community-oriented practice. Her dissertation “From Red Feminism to the Blacklist: Labor Schools and the Work of Art, 1935–1957,” considers how women artists surveilled and blacklisted by the federal government under McCarthyism built solidarity with multiracial working-class audiences through pedagogy and reproductive media. Her project thinks expansively about the latter—inclusive of fine art prints, newspaper illustrations, photography, cast jewelry, and commercial sewing patterns. Her dissertation is supported by a 2024–2025 Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, as well as the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, Special Collections at the University of Michigan, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the Visual Studies Research Institute at USC.​
Her book chapter, “‘A Healthy Tonic’: Lucienne Bloch’s The Cycle of a Woman’s Life and the Value of the Artist at Work,” which examines the therapeutic dimensions of mural painting for incarcerated women under the New Deal welfare state, was published in Modernism, Art, Therapy, eds. Suzanne Hudson and Tanya Sheehan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024). Her research on the gendered labor of state-sponsored artistic demonstration at the Golden Gate International Exposition is forthcoming in Source: Notes in the History of Art (spring 2025), as part of a special issue on the contemporary legacy of the New Deal. Her writing has also appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and MoMA Magazine, among others. She has presented her research at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the College Art Association, and the Yale American Art Graduate Symposium.
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Margot has held positions at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Norman Rockwell Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, where she was a cataloguer of drawings and prints and an integral member of the permanent collection reinstallation team. She is the founder of the USC Graduate Student Curatorial Working Group, which connects art history PhD students with Los Angeles-based curators for intimate conversations on curatorial practice. She was a 2024 participant in the Center for Curatorial Leadership’s Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice, and has curated exhibitions at Equity Gallery, Kings County Hospital (with the No Longer Empty Curatorial Lab), and the Princeton University Art Museum.
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She received her B.A. summa cum laude in art history and American Studies from Princeton University, where she was awarded the Irma S. Seitz Prize in the Field of Modern Art and the David F. Bowers Prize in American Studies.