Norma Greenwood
Norma Greenwood · Source: New York Artists Circle · Rights retained by the original rights holders
- Medium
- Oil Paint
- Based in
- New York
- Practice
- Painting
Norma Greenwood is a New York–based artist whose work has developed through a lifelong engagement with drawing, painting, and close observation of the world around her. She began her art education attending Saturday morn… Full biography
Biography
Norma Greenwood is a New York–based artist whose work has developed through a lifelong engagement with drawing, painting, and close observation of the world around her. She began her art education attending Saturday morning children’s drawing classes at the Brooklyn Museum and then high school art classes at Pratt Institute. She earned a graduate degree in Fine Art and Education from Hunter College, New York.
Greenwood is a 2025 LMCC grant awardee. She was awarded a permanent public art commission by the Jacksonville Florida International Airport, and a finalist for an MTA Arts
In Transit project, she won an Abby Austin mural arts residency at The National Academy or Design
Additional awards include a Rauschenberg award. three grants from the Ny State Council on the Arts, the Ludwig Vogelstein grant, a George Sugarman award, a NYFA award. She was awarded an art residency from BAU in Otranto, Italy.
Norma Greenwood’'s work has been exhibited In the Queens Museum, the Katonah Museum of Art, the Islip Art Museum, GE Corporate Headquarters in Fairfield, CT, New York University Kimmel Gallery, NY Foundation for the Arts, and The Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Queens, NY. Greenwood is represented in private and public collections including the Museum of American Folk Arts, AT&T, City University of NY Art Gallery, Citicorp, and Columbia Pictures. She exhibits and works in New York City
Artist statement
My work moves between representation and abstraction, using familiar forms as a way to slow down looking. I’m interested in how weight, balance, and contact are felt rather than described. In this painting, the rock forms are treated less as landscape and more as held shapes —stacked, pressed, and resting against one another. What matters to me is the tension between mass and stillness, and how light and shadow create rhythm across the surface. I work primarily in oil, often combining painting with drawing and subtle surface interventions. My process is deliberately slow and attentive. I photograph the work after each session and use those images as reference, allowing distance to guide the next layer. Small adjustments accumulate over time, rather than pushing toward a resolved image. The influence of Robert Motherwell, one of my instructors at Hunter College is present in my attention to structure and restraint— particularly his understanding of form as something that carries meaning through balance, repetition, and pressure rather than depiction.
