Leech/O'Malley Salon El Zaguán on YouTube
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Historic Santa Fe Foundation and the New Mexico History Museum hosted a discussion with Cormac O'Malley and Tom Leech on March 24, 2021. This conversation was presented on the occasion of publication of the limited-edition handmade book 'I Call My Soul My Own: Ernie O'Malley and Dorothy Stewart in New Mexico' featuring the writings of Ernie O'Malley and the artwork of Dorothy Stewart.
Contact: Melanie McWhorter at melanie@historicsantafe.org or call 505.983.2567 for more information.
Recording now available on HSFF’s YouTube page
ORDER THE ARTIST BOOK THE GIFT SHOP ONLINE
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Cormac O’Malley is the son of Ernie O'Malley, Irish author of his autobiographical memoirs, On Another Man’s Wound, and The Singing Flame, military historian and militant nationalist from the 1916-1924. Cormac’s mother was Helen Hooker from Connecticut. Cormac was born in Ireland but came to the USA at age 14 to live with his mother after his father died in 1957.
Tom leech inside the Palace of the Governors Gates, 2021.
Over the last 30 years Cormac has helped preserve his father's literary and historical image by republishing his earlier works including the well-known books and newly discovered manuscripts. He has co-edited two volumes of his father’s letters from 1922-1957 and in recent years has published a multi volume series of his father’s military interviews with survivors of the War of Independence and the Civil War, entitled The Men Will Talk to Me: Ernie O’Malley Interviews. These now include Kerry, Galway, Mayo, West Cork, Clare and the Northern Divisions. His 2015 book was Western Ways, a book of photographs by his parents on Mayo in the 1930s. In 2016, he edited Modern Ireland and Revolution, Ernie O’Malley in Context. In 2017, he published Nobody’s Business: Aran Diaries of Ernie O’Malley. In 2019, he helped put on a joint exhibit of his mother’s photographs in the National Library of Ireland and the Gallery of Photography Ireland and publish A Modern Eye: Helen Hooker O’Malley’s Ireland. In 2020, he produced a documentary film on his parents’ artistic journey in Ireland, A Call to Arts.
Cormac now lives in Stonington, Conn.
Tom Leech is the Director of the Press at the Palace of the Governors, and has more than 40 years’ experience in printing, paper-making, and related book-arts. A curator at the New Mexico History Museum since 2001, Tom has organized a number of successful exhibits, including The Saint John’s Bible; Jack Kerouac and the Writer’s Life; Gustave Baumann and Friends: Artist Cards from Holidays Past; Out of the Box: The Art of the Cigar; and Album Amicorum, which also traveled to Spain, Germany, Switzerland and Turkey.
In 2019 at El Zaguán, Tom exhibited fifty Palace Press poetry broadsides, and in 2020 he and Patricia Musick showed their marbled paper and calligraphy collaborations in the exhibit Something Wicked this Way Comes. A number of Tom’s marbled and handmade papers are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Palace Press titles include award-winning Jack Thorp’s Songs of the Cowboys and O’Keeffe Stories, and also Doctor Franklin and Spain, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and most recently, Gustave Baumann’s Indian Pottery Old and New.
Tom is a 2013 recipient of the Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the 2014 Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design, and the 2015 Edgar Lee Hewett Award from the New Mexico Association of Museums. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in painting and sculpture from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was a member of the 1990 and ’92 Everest Environmental Expeditions, and in 1994 co-founded the Paper Road/Tibet Project that reintroduced the ancient art of papermaking to Lhasa and rural areas of Tibet.
More historic presses fill the shop, and while each one has seen years of service in the noble art of printing, they all stand ready if called on to get out the news.