Margot van Voorhies Carr

Margot van Voorhies Carr (; c. 1896 – 26 July 1985), professionally known as Margot de Taxco, was an American jewelry designer and workshop proprietor active in Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico. She was the principal early designer for the Los Castillo workshop and in 1948 established her own workshop, Margot de Taxco. She became particularly known for handwrought silver jewelry and colored champlevé enamel, including designs derived from Japanese art, Mexican and pre-Columbian imagery, animals, flowers, and geometric forms.

De Taxco was one of the comparatively few women to direct a major workshop during the mid-twentieth-century Taxco silver movement. Her work is held in museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

Early life and arrival in Mexico De Taxco was born in San Francisco to a Dutch father and a French-Canadian mother.

Her best-known enamel work used champlevé, in which recessed compartments in the silver were filled with enamel and fired. The Fowler Museum catalogue dates her significant use of the technique from approximately 1955. The enamel provided intense fields of red, blue, green, black, white, and other colors while raised silver lines defined the design.

De Taxco's workshop assigned inventory numbers to its designs. Surviving pieces are commonly marked "Margot de Taxco", together with silver-fineness marks, Mexico or Taxco origin marks, inventory numbers, and, on some objects, the Mexican eagle assay mark.

Later life and death De Taxco continued to live in Taxco after the closure of her workshop. Original molds, patterns, and design drawings were dispersed, and some of her designs continued to be produced by other Taxco silversmiths.

After a fall in April 1985, she was hospitalized. She died in Taxco on 26 July 1985.

Legacy De Taxco is recognized as a significant designer of the Taxco School and as one of the few women to establish and direct a major silver workshop in Taxco. Morrill and Berk place her among the women designers and business owners whose workshops combined creative direction, specialized craft production, and extensive commercial distribution.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art holds a group of her jewelry in its Latin American art collection, and its records distinguish work made under her own mark from designs she supplied to Los Castillo. A silver Fish and Waves Necklace and a matching bracelet, both of about 1940, are catalogued as her designs made for Los Castillo, while the Large Shell Necklace of about 1940 is catalogued with Los Castillo as maker and De Taxco as designer, and is shown in the museum's presentation of modern Mexican and Peruvian silver. Work from her own workshop includes a silver and enamel Fish and Waves Bracelet of about 1955, which LACMA describes as returning to the motif she had developed at Los Castillo, and an enameled Diamonds and Dots set of necklace, cuff and earrings of about the same date.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum holds two complete ensembles: the Butterfly Swirls parure of about 1955, in champlevé enamel on sterling silver, and the Trapezoid parure of about 1950, both given by Carol Jean Schoelkopf Boss. The brooch, bracelet and earrings of the Butterfly Swirls set are each stamped with the workshop design number 5750, and the set retains a pouch bearing a Margot de Taxco seal. The Cincinnati Art Museum holds a sterling silver bracelet of about 1948 that it catalogues with De Taxco as designer and her workshop as manufacturer.

The Fowler Museum at UCLA included examples of her silver-and-enamel jewelry in the exhibition and catalogue Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio Pineda, where she was presented as one of the principal designers of the broader Taxco School.