Marion Kathryn Greenwood

Place: Brooklyn

Born: 1909

Death: 1970

Biography:

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. 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. There she studied with painters John Sloan and George Bridgman. She also studied lithography with Emil Ganso and mosaic with Alexander Archipenko. At age eighteen, she made multiple visits to Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. There, she painted portraits of intellectuals-in-residence and gained experience and knowledge through conversation. In the mid-1920s, Greenwood studied with Winold Reiss, a German-born artist and designer who had contributed to the Harlem Renaissance movement. 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. While she was there she studied at the Academie Colarossi in Paris.