Margot E. Yale

Margot Yale is an art historian and curator. She 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 the structural logic of the multiple. Her project 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.

 

Margot's research and writing has been published by Yale University Press, Panorama, the Brooklyn Rail, MoMA Magazine, and AWARE Magazine. She has held positions at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, where she was a cataloguer of drawings and prints. 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. She received her B.A. summa cum laude in art history and American Studies from Princeton University.