Marion Greenwood

Marion Kathryn Greenwood (April 6, 1909 – August 20, 1970) was an American social realist artist who became popular starting in the 1920s and became renowned in both the United States and Mexico. She is most well known for her murals, but she also practiced easel painting, printmaking, and frescoes.

She traveled to Mexico, Hong Kong, Burma, and India, depicting peoples of different cultures and ethnicities and paying special attention to oppressed people in underdeveloped locations, which has at times resulted in critical reception in the modern-era due to issues of ethnic and racial stereotypes.

Early life and education Marion Greenwood was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1909, to Walter Greenwood and Kathryn Boyland. She was the second daughter and last of six children. Her father was a painter and her older sister, Grace Greenwood Ames, was also an artist.

She exhibited artistic talent at a very young age and left high school at the age of fifteen to study with a scholarship at the Art Students League of New York. In 1929, both of the Greenwood sisters participated in the famed Bohemian event, the Maverick Festival (1915–1931) at the Maverick Art Colony in Woodstock, New York.

Still in her teens, Greenwood used the proceeds from a portrait of a wealthy financier to begin her travels through Europe.

Career She returned to New York in 1930, but continued to travel extensively over the next four decades, mostly throughout the United States, Mexico, and China. In her work she employed multiple mediums: oil paint, fresco, lithography, etching, charcoal, and ink. Between 1933 and 1936, Greenwood and her sister painted five separate murals in Taxco and Morelia, Mexico.

There she met the artist Pablo O'Higgins, who introduced and taught her fresco painting. As a result, she began focusing her efforts on fresco-mural painting. Greenwood's first fresco mural was Mercado en Taxco (1933), located in the stairwell in the Hotel Taxqueño in Guerrero.

Commissions, murals, and other work Greenwood was the first woman to receive a mural commission from a foreign government. Shortly after these projects, she returned to the United States to create a mural for the social hall of the Westfield Acres Housing Project in Camden, New Jersey. In 1937 she was hired to teach fresco painting at Columbia University, and a year later was commissioned by the Section of Fine Arts to paint an oil mural, The Partnership of Man and Nature for the post office in Crossville, Tennessee.

Greenwood's murals were often large dramatic scenes with groups of people engaged in cultural practices or in the case of a social works project, workers in their environment. Often the murals had themes of optimism, democracy, and diversity. For example, Rehearsal for African Ballet depicts a group of African-Americans playing music, singing, and dancing together. In Blueprint for the Living, workers are laying bricks and building while a family looks upon the construction.

In 1937, she married British-born Charles Fenn.

In 1940, she was commissioned by the Federal Art Project to paint frescoes for the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn. This project, titled Blueprint for Living, was meant for low-income citizens in government housing and expressed optimism for a more harmonious future. During this time she painted the reconditioning of wounded soldiers. This sometimes involved being present at surgeries to sketch and following the patient through to occupational therapy. The paintings, drawings, and etchings from this series are in the official archives of the United States War Department. Greenwood taught art courses at the university while she worked as an artist-in-residence on the mural, which took a year to complete.

The mural was designed to depicted the folk traditions and music of Tennessee. In 2013, the University Center building that held the mural was removed and the mural was restored and put into storage.

Later life She was exhibited in numerous solo shows at the American Contemporary Artists Gallery in New York City. She also exhibited her work at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the New York World's Fair.

She died on August 20, 1970, in Kingston, New York after a long illness and a cerebral hemorrhage. the Library of Congress, New York Public Library (NYPL), Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Currier Museum of Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), Indianapolis Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Wichita Art Museum (WAM), Maier Museum of Art, Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art amongst others.

Her work is also in the private collections of Maurice Wertheim, Joseph Hirshhorn, and Marc Sandler. 1946 – Lithography Prize from John Herron Art Institute 1951 – First Walter Lippincott Prize at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts 1952 – First Altman Prize for figure drawing from the 127th Annual National Academy of Design 1956 – Second Purchase Prize at the Butler Institute of American Art, for the painting, Elegy 1959 – The Grumbacher Prize from the National Association of Women Artists (NAWA) 1959 – Election to the National Academy of Design organization.

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