Marion Greenwood was an American social realist painter, printmaker, and muralist. Born on April 6, 1909, she was the youngest of Walter J. and Kathryn Boylan Greenwood’s six children. She left school as a teenager to study at the Art Students League of New York and was soon offered a spot at Yaddo, a well-known artist residency in Saratoga Springs, NY. After painting a commissioned portrait of the community’s founder, Greenwood used the proceeds to travel to Paris to study at the Académie Colarossi, where her distinctive style began to develop.

Greenwood traveled to Mexico in 1932, where she met several well-known artists including José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Pablo O’Higgins, and Diego Rivera, who became a friend and mentor. Her sister Grace Greenwood Ames joined her soon after, and the sisters were contracted to produce several large public murals for the Mexican government between 1932 and 1936. Sizeable mural commissions for the United States government soon followed for Greenwood, including for the Westfield Acres housing project in Camden, NJ between 1936 and 1938; a mural titled “The Partnership of Man and Nature” for the post office in Crossville, TN in 1940; and “Blueprint for Living” at the Red Hook Housing Project Community Center in New York City, also completed in 1940.

As Greenwood had been working for the US government, she was chosen to present a petition by a group of women artists asking to be hired as art war correspondents. This led to Greenwood being granted a post at an Atlantic City army hospital, where she recorded the realities of the war’s casualties from 1944 to 1945. The artwork from this series is in the official archives of the United States War Department.

In early 1946, Greenwood traveled to England and Hong Kong with her husband, British-born writer Charles Fenn, an American agent for the US Marine Corps in China during WWII. She returned alone to the US in 1947, and the two divorced in 1950. She soon met Robert Plate, the brother of New York artist Walter Plate. Plate supported himself as a short story writer for pulp magazines and the “Gabby Hayes Western” comics, occasionally selling tv scripts. He later wrote several historical biographies for young adults. The two lived together until her death.

In 1954 the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, hired Greenwood to paint a 30-foot-long mural on the west wall of the ballroom in the Carolyn P. Brown Memorial University Center; this commission included teaching courses as Visiting Professor of Fine Art. She worked on the mural from the fall of 1954 until its unveiling in June 1955. Unknown vandals defaced the mural over two consecutive nights in May 1970 during a period of campus unrest, first smearing it with paint and then slashing the canvas. The damage was repaired, but the mural was kept under guard until the decision to cover it with paneling in 1972 to protect it from further harm. UT uncovered the mural in 2006 for a forum on its history and future within UT and Tennessee. It was then enclosed in plexiglass and covered with curtains, and finally removed to the Knoxville Museum of Art in 2013 before the planned demolition of the University Center to make way for the new Student Union.

Greenwood completed her final mural, “Tribute to Woman”, during the summer of 1965 on the first floor of Syracuse University’s Slocum Hall. She used figures inspired by past works, drawing from her travels in the American Southwest, Haiti, China, Mexico, and Europe. Marion Greenwood died at the age of 60 in February 1970, several months after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. Her art continued to be featured in shows after her death, including an official memorial show in 1972 arranged by Robert Plate.

Among the distinguished awards Greenwood won are Second Prize for Painting in the United States at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1944; the 1946 John Herron Art Institute Lithograph Prize; the First Walter Lippincott Award of Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1951; the First Altman Prize for figure drawing from the 127th Annual National Academy of Design in 1952; Second Purchase Prize at the Butler Institute of American Art, 1956; and the 1959 Grumbacher Prize from the National Association of Women Artists. She was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1959. She also completed illustrations for two children’s books in 1942 and 1963. Her artwork hangs in several major galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art.