Marion Greenwood’s grandmother, father, and older sister, Grace A. Greenwood (Ames, 1905–79), were artists. Especially noted for her painting of native life on the islands of the Caribbean and murals in Mexico, Marion Greenwood served as artist in residence at UT in 1954–55 and was commissioned to paint a 30-foot-long mural on the west end wall of the ballroom in the Carolyn P. Brown Memorial University Center. She worked on the mural from fall 1954 until its unveiling in June 1955.
She began her art career as a student at the Art Students League in New York at age 15; studied with George Bridgman, Frank Vincent DuMond, and John Sloan for four years (1924–28); and then studied in Paris at the Academie Colarossi. She also took lessons in lithography from Emil Ganso (1929–30). She is one of the United States’ best known mural artists.
At the age of 22, she traveled to the Southwest to paint Navajo Indians. A year later she was living and working in Mexico. A 1932 small fresco she painted in Taxco, Mexico, at the Hotel Taxqueno, led to a commission from the Mexican government to execute a mural at the University San Nicolas Hidalgo in Morelia on the subject of Trascan Indian life. At the age of 23, she became the first American woman to receive a mural commission from a foreign government. She and her sister became legends in Mexico for their murals.
She participated in the WPA Federal Art Project in 1936–39, spending two years painting one mural in a New York housing project, and she painted a mural for the 1939 World’s Fair. During World War II she and another mural painter, Anne Poor, were the only two women hired as artist war correspondents. She painted canvasses depicting the treatment of the wounded and maimed in army hospitals and was cited for her work by the War Department. Her work is included in many museums and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Tel Aviv Museum of Israel, Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris, Yale University, Boston University, and University of San Nicholas Hidalgo in Mexico.
She painted the Crossville, Tennessee, post office mural “The Partnership of Man and Nature” in 1940 (it has since been moved to the new post office). This mural she painted in her New York Studio, and it was shipped to Crossville. She never saw it installed.
Among the distinguished awards her paintings have won are the First Altman Award of the 127th National Academy Annual of 1952, the Walter Lippincott Award of Penn Academy in 1951, the second prize at the National Carnegie Annual in 1944, and the John Herron Arts Institute Prize. She was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1959.