Celebrating Women Who Built BYU Preview

You are listening to BYU’s first official school song whose lyrics were written by Annie Pike Greenwood while she was a student at Brigham Young Academy (BYA). The music is by John J. McClellan, a BYA music instructor and long-time organist of the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Greenwood went on to become a respected poet, author, journalist, farmer, and professor of English at BYU. [1]

Before diving into the rest of the tour, stop for a photo at the big blue BYU sign, which was installed in 2024!

Directly beneath you is The Alice Louise Reynolds Auditorium, named after the woman who moved mountains to establish BYU’s library. Each year, the library hosts a commemorative lecture in her honor, The Alice Louise Reynolds Women-in-Scholarship Lecture Series. You’ll learn more about Reynolds soon. Down two flights of stairs, you can walk around the auditorium’s entrance and reflect on her impact, while admiring other temporary exhibits.

Adjacent to The Reynolds Auditorium is the L. Tom Perry Special Collections. It hosts many valuable books, objects, and manuscripts, including collections that once belonged to people significant to BYU. For example, the Helen Foster Snow papers were donated to BYU after Snow’s death in 1997. Snow was a traveler, humanitarian, and journalist who documented many of the political changes in China in the 1930s. Her papers and materials continue to be an invaluable resource for political research.

In Special Collections, you can also find some of the original swimsuits designed by acclaimed designer Rose Marie Reid. Reid built a fashion empire from her glamorous swimsuits, and in 1954 she designed a white, latex, sequined “Relief Society Suit” to help fundraise for the Los Angeles California Temple. She enlisted the help of hundreds of local Relief Society sisters to sew on the sequins, and the suit was featured in TV shows and magazines. [2]

Here on the east side of the Harold B. Lee Library, low to the ground, lies a plaque honoring Marigold N. Saunders. Can you spot it?

Few notice this plaque as they walk by, and fewer realize that the entire walkway that stretches between the Wilkinson Student Center and the HBLL past the engineering buildings all the way down to Campus Drive is named Marigold Mall. This stretch of campus is named after Saunders, who donated $500,000 to BYU in 1977 to establish an endowment for student scholarships. [1]

Saunders was inspired by a visit she made to BYU with her friend Adelaide Underwood Eldredge Hardy, a former member of the Relief Society General Board. Saunders said that she “was tremendously impressed by what she saw and learned about the University, what it stood for, and what it was doing with young people.” [1] BYU President Dallin H. Oaks and the BYU Board of Trustees decided to name this pedestrian mall Marigold Mall in Saunders’s honor and to have it landscaped with none other than marigold flowers.

With its construction finished in 2026, the Arts Building is one of the newest buildings on campus and home to the College of Fine Arts and Communications. At this stop, we’ll talk about the departments of Theatre and Media Arts (TMA) and Design. Since the early days of Utah, women have been instrumental in promoting the arts, and that’s certainly true at BYU as well.

The mural featured in the stairwell at the Wilk’s entrance, Refining Host for Brilliant Stars by BYU student Madeline Card, was the 2025 winner of the Dean of Students Office’s first Digital Mural Competition. Here, Card commemorates BYU’s 150th anniversary with bright geometric patterns inspired by the stained glass windows found in many Latter-day Saint temples.

Read the plaque to the left of the mural to learn more about her inspiration for this beautiful addition to this space.

Walk through either set of the west doors of the JRCB. To your left is the entrance to the Howard W. Hunter Law Library. If the library is open, walk to the back of the room and look for the Women’s Suffrage in Utah display hanging on the wall on the right. Utah was the very first state in which women exercised the right to vote under an equal suffrage law. Here, you can read fun facts about historic figures like Zitkála-Šá, Martha Hughes Cannon, Seraph Young, and Emmeline B. Wells, among others, all of which were illustrated by BYU alumna Brooke Smart.

Once you’ve entered the Music Building from the west side, walk straight down the main hallway in front of you, past all of the instrument lockers, until you reach the wood-paneled lobby. Find the large risers beneath the windows, and keep an eye out for Y mountain as you learn about the history of music at BYU

Looking north from this spot, you can see the Centennial Carillon Bell Tower built in 1975 to commemorate 100 years of BYU. Look to your right to see Heritage Halls, one of BYU’s on-campus housing complexes.

In Utah and at BYU, women have been a driving force for the arts. The university’s art collection, started in 1909, was initially displayed in buildings across campus. However, over time, $4 million worth of BYU’s art went missing due to space constraints and management issues, a problem which BYU solved by opening its first Museum of Art in 1992. Today, the FBI is still searching for some of the museum’s missing art! [1]

The MOA has been shaped by many generous donors, museum staff, faculty members, and students. It serves as a significant meeting point on campus, a space where the university and public come together to appreciate and learn about art.

Today, the collection includes over 18,000 American and European works of art, including some by famous women artists like Utah painter Rose Hartwell; English pop artist and current Utah resident Jann Haworth; German expressionist Käthe Kollwitz; narrative quilt artist Faith Ringgold; Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange; 19th-century French animal painter Rosa Bonheur; and neo-conceptualist, text-based artist Jenny Holzer. The museum exhibitions are always changing, so come back in a few months to see something new!

Look west toward the N. Eldon Tanner building, home of BYU's School of Business, which was founded in 1891 and has gone by several different names. In 1988, the husband-wife founders of Marriott International, J. Willard and Alice Sheets Marriott, made a significant donation to the school, and it was renamed for the both of them. You can read more about Alice and J. Willard here.

In 2019, Brigitte C. Madrian made history by being appointed the first woman dean of BYU’s Marriott School of Business. Coming from prestigious teaching positions at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Madrian felt called to return to BYU. [2] Recognizing the Marriott School’s potential, she spent a year collaborating with college faculty and leadership to create new vision, mission, and values statements focused on “Christlike leadership” and building “leaders of faith, intellect, and character.” [1] As the school has unified under this new strategy, they’ve experienced a nearly 50 percent increase in undergraduate enrollment. [3]

Historically, the field of business has been male-dominated [4], and this has been true at BYU as well. [3] Since Dean Madrian has taken the reins, however, more women have been inspired to join the business school. In fact, the percentage of women students in business at BYU has increased from 30 percent in 2018 when Dean Madrian began her tenure [3] to 38 percent in 2024. [5] That’s inching close to the US average of 43 percent. [4]

Enter through the north-facing door of the JKB.

Welcome to the home of the humanities and social sciences at BYU! The Joseph F. Smith Building (JFSB) was designed to represent light and knowledge. The stone pattern on the ground in the Mary Lou Fulton Plaza replicates Michelangelo’s Campidoglio Square in Rome; the classical arches recall those of ancient churches and places of learning; and the fountain signifies a springing forth of truth. [2]

At this stop, we highlight BYU-affiliated women in the humanities who have embodied the pursuit of truth, knowledge, and lifelong learning.

This concludes the North Campus edition of the walking tour Celebrating Women Who Built BYU. We hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about many of the women who have made BYU what it is today, and that you’ve been inspired to follow their example and BYU’s motto to “go forth and serve.”

To experience the second half of the tour, look out for the BYU walk entitled Celebrating Women Who Built BYU: South Campus, to be published later this year.