Bishop experienced a succession of personal and professional milestones during the middle years of the Great Depression. In 1933, she was given her first one-woman show in New York City. A few years later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased her painting Two Girls, the same year she was asked to return to Art Students League to teach. A decade later, she became the first woman to hold an executive position as Vice President of the National Institute of Arts & Letters. Among her many awards over her long career, in 1979, she received an Outstanding Achievement in the Arts which was presented to her by President Jimmy Carter. Bishop joined the Fourteenth Street School, a group of New York artists who all worked in the vicinity of Union
