7 The Mexican Murals of Marion and Grace Greenwood James Oles INTRODUCTION Between 1933 and 1936, two American women, sisters Marion ( l9O9-L970\ and Grace Greenwood (1902-1979) painted five separate murals in true fresco in Mexico, first working independently on relatively minor projects in the provincial cities ofTaxco and Morelia and then collaborating on the most spec- tacular commission of their careers, the decoration of an immense twin stair- well in Mexico City's new Abelardo L. Rodriguez Market. r This range of prac- tice distinguishes them from most of the other Americans who oeated murals in Mexico in the 1930s (Howard Cook, Ryah Ludins, Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish, Isamu Noguchi), each of whom worked on only a single proj- ect and none of whom achieved equivalent fame within the Mexico City art world.2 Only Pablo O'Higgins (bom Paul Higgins in Salt Lake City in 1904) had a greater impact as an American-born muralist, but he was a true expatri- ate: After arriving in 1924 to serve as an assistant to Diego Rivera, he remained in Medco until his death in 1983.3 The Mexican frescos of the Greenwood sisters have never been fully dis- cussed, mainly because they do not fit within standard views of 1930s mural painting, which privilege the New Deal projects, the historical epics of the Re- gionalists, or the prolific careers of Mexico's "tres grandes" (Diego Rivera, Jos6 Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros). But for these same rea- sons, they provide important insight into the broader processes and meanings that shaped public art during the Depression years. Their story not only high- lights the dependency of certain New Deal muralists on the Mexican model, but also confirms that Mexican muralism itself was more than just a monolithic "renaissance" led by a few heroic figures under the aegis of the Ministry of Public Education. By the 1930s, it was a heterogeneous force (rather than a