Santa Fe anthropologist had major zest for life

May 13—Those who knew Susan McGreevy won't soon forget the bold path she blazed as a mother of three in the suburbs of Chicago who chased a passion for academics all the way to Santa Fe at a time when women often were encouraged to drop their studies and take on a life of domesticity.

McGreevy, a world-traveling, dog-loving, Southwestern art-supporting anthropologist and former director of the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, died May 9 at age 88.

Born in the 1930s, McGreevy was raised the single child of a stockbroker and stay-at-home mom on Chicago's South Side, where she attended the University of Chicago Lab Schools.

After graduating, she studied at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts but didn't finish her schooling there. Instead, she got married and raised three daughters — Patricia Leigh Brown, Lori Alyn Brown and Cindy Brown — in the Highland Park area outside Chicago.

McGreevy eventually earned her bachelor's degree at Roosevelt University. She separated from her husband and later applied to study at Northwestern University, where she earned a master's degree in anthropology and got her first taste of fieldwork in the Gallup area, studying a Pentecostal church on the Navajo Nation.

"After years of domestic suburban life, my mom had the gumption to go back to school," said McGreevy's daughter Patricia Leigh Brown. "Especially in that era, it was quite a feat for a woman to pursue long-held goals and change her life."

Her youngest daughter, Cindy Brown, was 11 at the time and tagged along for part of the journey, which spanned three months. Brown said her mother was nearly denied admission to the school — because women were expected to be moms and housewives and were considered more likely to drop out.

"She was very dynamic," Cindy Brown recalled. "She had a thirst for a life of adventure and was very intellectually curious. ... She was kind of a force of nature."

McGreevy went on to marry Thomas J. McGreevy, a stockbroker from Missouri. He died in a scuba diving accident in 1991.

Susan McGreevy was a curator at the Kansas City Museum from 1974-77. The couple moved to Santa Fe in the late 1970s so she could take a job at the Wheelwright Museum.

She served as director at the Wheelwright from 1978-82 and later worked as a research associate there, at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and at the Museum of International Folk Art.

She also was a research associate at the Santa Fe-based School for Advanced Research.

McGreevy published several books and research papers on Navajo culture and basketry and on other Native American communities in the Southwest, including the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe of Arizona.

In 2001, she published Indian Basketry Artists of the Southwest: Deep Roots, New Growth, a work with vivid photography inspired by a basketry convocation she helped organize through the Indian Arts Research Center, based at the School for Advanced Research. The book details the materials, processes and perspectives of basket-makers who gathered in Santa Fe from across the U.S.

After Thomas McGreevy's death, Susan McGreevy married Herb Beenhouwer, who was recognized as a Santa Fe Living Treasure in 2015 for his volunteer work.

The pair traveled, and Susan McGreevy spent her free time showing Irish wolfhounds, her favorite breed of dog. Beenhouwer died in 2020.

McGreevy, who fittingly lived near Museum Hill for the last several decades, also was an emeritus trustee of the local branch of The Nature Conservancy, an avid birder and a member of Audubon New Mexico's board of directors.

"Birding is the perfect love affair with feathered friends, with nature and with conservation," she said in a 2008 interview with the Environmental Education Association of New Mexico.

That love affair once took McGreevy as far as Antarctica to observe penguins, Patricia Leigh Brown said. A boat ride across the famously rocky Drake Passage between Chile and Antarctica's Shetland Islands never shook McGreevy along the way.

That's no surprise to the people who loved her.

"She never got seasick. Never," her daughter said.