Margot Yale

Margot Yale is a Provost Fellow and PhD candidate in the Department of Art History, 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,” examines why working-class adult education centers in the United States became key sites of institutional support for leftist women artists in the 1940s and 1950s. Her dissertation considers how these artists used pedagogy and reproductive media to reach multiracial working-class audiences both in and beyond these institutions. Her project is supported by a 2025–2026 Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a 2024–2025 Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and grants from 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 politicization of artistic demonstration was published Source: Notes in the History of Art (spring 2025) in a special issue on the legacy of the New Deal edited by Erika Doss and Mary Okin, and her writing has also appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and MoMA Magazine.

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. 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, where she received the Irma S. Seitz Prize in the Field of Modern Art and the David F. Bowers Prize in American Studies. 

[myale@usc.edu]

• BA Princeton University, 6/2017