Leech/O'Malley Salon El Zaguán on YouTube

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

ABOUT THE SALON PARTNERS
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.

Profundo Heritatge Archive: An Interview with Harry Vasile

Nuevo Mexico Profundo started on an oral biography/heritage archive project last year, and completed forty plus interviews, conducted by Frank Graziano. The folks recorded cover a cross-section of experience in New Mexico. Frank is ready to begin phase two of the project in April, 2021, interviewing and capturing the history of more New Mexicans over the course of this year.

We present today a fascinating interview with Harry Vasile at the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico. Harry, as you will discover, was instrumental in restoring the magnificent St. Joseph Apache Mission church at Mescalero. (This is the location of the Apache Christ altar painted by Robert Lentz, screen, a stunning depiction of Christ as an Apache shaman on the fourth day of the puberty ceremony.) He also worked with kids as a coach and counselor at the rehabilitation center, and instituted a job-skill training program by hiring young at-risk workers for the restoration project. “Historic restoration as self-restoration”, to quote Frank Graziano from his book Historic Churches of New Mexico Today.

We hope you enjoy listening to Harry tell his life story.

More on Nuevo Mexico Profundo here.

Grill-Lucero House on the Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation

Intro to Grill-Lucero House
658 Granada Street, the Grill-Lucero House, is a notable example of a Spanish Pueblo Revival bungalow and its history illustrates the importance of middle-class contributors to Santa Fe’s architectural development.  The home was built in Don Gaspar in 1928 during a building boom that marked the Spanish Pueblo Revival bungalow’s popularization and its eclipse of other competing bungalow styles.  Fred Grill, an overlooked but pivotal local builder, constructed the house.  This project helped launch his career, which went on to include significant collaborations with John Gaw Meem.  He became perhaps Santa Fe’s most active builder and architect during the 1930s and early 1940s.  Blanche Lucero (née Cadman) and her husband Antonio Lucero Jr. were the first owners and inhabitants of the home.  While Antonio soon died in 1932, Blanche continued to own the house for decades.  She spent her career working for the New Mexico State Treasurer’s Office, ultimately becoming the highest-ranking female state employee.  Her ownership of the house illustrates that the adaptation of the Santa Fe style was contingent upon the tastes of not just artists and tourists but also the city’s burgeoning professional population.  The house that is the namesake of Grill and Lucero is thus testament to their impact on Santa Fe’s cultural development.

The Grill-Lucero House is a fusion of the craftsman bungalow with Santa Fe’s local vernacular style.  Structurally, 658 Granada is an archetypal craftsman bungalow in its construction.  Made out of pentile bricks, the house is a simple square design with an open floorplan.  Grill added six-pane, light wooden casement and hopper windows throughout the house, arranging them in double and triple sets to adhere to the craftsman style’s preference for balanced asymmetry.  At the same time, however, Grill masterfully incorporated features of the Santa Fe style into the design of the house.  He installed a flat rather than pitched roof with raised parapets and projecting canales.  To make the walls resemble adobe and give the house simplified, rounded massing, he covered the pentile with brown stucco. Along the raised front porch, he installed wooden trim, exposed vigas, and corbels to make it resemble a recessed portal.  The result was a house that maintained the ethos of bungalow functionality while also adhering to the key elements of the city’s Spanish Pueblo Revival style.

Biography
Oliver Horn and Robynne Mellor both received PhDs in History from Georgetown University. They have experience teaching at Georgetown University and Western Carolina University. Oliver is the co-author of The Roque Lobato House (Schenck Southwest, 2014) a New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards Finalist in 2015 and Robynne contributed a chapter about uranium mining in Grants, New Mexico to Mining North America (University of California Press, 2017).

Currently, Oliver and Robynne run Sunmount Consulting in Santa Fe, where they are working with the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division to develop and write the ten-year state historic preservation plan. Among other services, Sunmount Consulting also helps clients navigate the process of obtaining tax credits for historic properties. To learn more, please visit www.sunmountconsulting.com.

Book Review: A Pageant Truly Play’d by Tessa West

Reviewed by Pete Warzel

I received an email several months ago from the UK author, Tessa West, asking if I might be interested in her new biography about Constance Smedley and Maxwell Armfield, a British couple, she a writer and playwright and he a painter. The interest might be their employment by the Santa Fe Railway Company during 1920.

I say the book is about Constance and Maxwell, Connie and Max, but it is a bit more than that. While Tessa was researching their lives and histories, she and her brother found several paintings in their father’s belongings given to him by Max. Letters between the two men also were recovered and the book that was to be a biography of man and wife now became much more personal through this serendipitous link with her father. Ms. West uses the relationship to draw a portrait of her father, David, as well as present the biography of these two adventurous artists.

Constance Smedley was born to wealth in 1877, Birmingham, England. (One of her father’s ventures was the world’s first company to produce “movies”, and filmed four, one minute scenes from King John by Shakespeare, to show before live performances of the play.) By all accounts she was a pistol, in spite of her physical disability – most likely polio. She attended the Birmingham School of Art and began writing novels after leaving the school. In all she published twenty novels, and another twenty books of non-fiction and children’s literature. Connie also started, extremely successfully, a bricks and mortar club as a creative and business environment for women – the Lyceum – having been dismissed by the Writer’s Club when she proposed there be a special section for women.

Maxwell Armfield was born into a Quaker family in 1881, in the south of England. His family also was well-off, due to the founding and expansion of Armfield Iron Works. Max attended Sidcot, a Quaker School, and then the Birmingham School of Art, several years following Connie. The school was affiliated with William Morris, the multi-faceted and talented artist at the heart of the British Arts and Crafts movement.

About two thirds of the slim book relates their individual family lives, education, and accomplishments. Then, in 1907, never knowing each other despite having attended the same school, they meet. The artistic duo becomes a force in 1909 with their marriage, within an atmosphere of the suffrage movement in England, and the storm clouds appearing in Europe for the Great War. While they lived in the countryside and worked on their individual painting and writing projects in different parts of the house, they also collaborated on “design, illustration, text and theatre.” The Greenleaf Theatre, an endeavor that “…was to bring all the arts together with the intention of using them to project the central concept of a play,” was a successful venture founded by the couple.

But 1914 and the onset of war steered them to America. Here they developed their creative strategies, Max had success in selling his paintings, and they were invited to stage a play at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California, at the university. The Santa Fe Railway extended them an invitation to travel the southwest and depict the striking geography and native scenes for use as promotional material by the railroad as it expanded tourism during this vibrant part of American history. (Although not mentioned by Ms. West, the train car they had for their own *, the meals at stations along the route, and the El Tovar Hotel at the Grand Canyon, were all part of the tourism expansion by the Fred Harvey Company in association with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway).

This is a set piece in a larger arts movement, isn’t it? British intellectuals finding each other, sharing an adventurous spirit and a calling for the arts, turning out books and paintings, plays and stage sets. Then…coming to America. Visiting the center of the tourism boom in the southwest and Santa Fe, and so fitting the pattern being established by artists from everywhere drawn to the beauty and exoticism of New Mexico. (Within the same ten year period, our friend Cormac O’Malley tells us about his father, Ernie, IRA Commander, poet, adventurer, traveling to Santa Fe, directly to El Zaguán, and befriends Dorothy Stewart, writes poetry, keeps magnificent diaries, and explores with Dorothy and her friends, the southwest and Mexico).

The title of Ms. West’s book comes from Shakespeare, As You Like It. Reference is to The Historical Pageant of Progress, a 1911 production in rhyming verse, that the married Armfields were involved staging. In the end, it is a fitting epigram of the lives of these two artists. The book is a look at two very British artists, representative of their time, and a part of the trend of history in the southwest and Santa Fe in the 1920’s, as the city also was discovering itself.

A Pageant Truly Play’d
By Tessa West
Brewin Books, UK
Softbound, 172 pages

Buy the book by contacing Tessa West in the UK

News of the World: A scene from the film and the transformation of El Zaguán

One day in early 2019, I received a phone call at Historic Santa Fe Foundation’s offices from location manager Clay Peres about a film shoot in Santa Fe. They needed a property that was reminiscent of a late 1800s house in Texas. During the scouting, he visited HSFF’s offices and home on Canyon Road, El Zaguán, along with his location assistant. This was the start of the relationship with the production team for the upcoming, and newly released in 2020, film directed by Paul Greengrass and starting Tom Hanks called News of the World. The timing for the event was perfect for HSFF as one of our residents had just moved out of an apartment, and we had an empty space to store all the furniture and contents of the HSFF offices that the crew removed to prepare the space for the one-day of shooting. The photographs that HSFF Preservation Specialist Mara Saxer and I snapped during the installation and filming, do not fully chronicle the many changes made to El Zaguán for the shoot (all changes had to be reversible with no damage to the this historic house). Saxer was the on-site contact for filming and she also maintains the building on Canyon Road. Here she shares a few comments on the transformation during the three weeks that the crew as around our space. – Melanie McWhorter

For two weeks in the fall of 2019, El Zaguán's normally quiet atmosphere was infused with bustling energy. The News of the World crew transformed the office, zaguan, and front facade of the building into an 1870s San Antonio home. It was simultaneously a burst of modernity, with lights and cables everywhere, and a glimpse at what parts of the building may have felt around that time. Over the course of several days, light switches were camouflaged, radiators hidden inside faux furniture, newer style locks were changed out, the paved street and sidewalk became a dirt path. If they're looking for it, those familiar with the place will spot its cameo, which adds a fun little Easter egg in to an already enjoyable film. – Mara Saxer

In November of 2019 I was traveling in Europe, and missed the action at El Zaguán. The movie contains short, on screen appearances, outside and in, of 545 Canyon Road, as well as our former Delgado House, now owned by Victory Contemporary Gallery. It was a thrill watching News of the World, to catch a brief glimpse the buildings. The movie’s narrative is truly the story here, along with the great acting. I recently saw this review in The Guardian upon the UK release of the film and thought we should share it with you, along with photos we can now make public, taken by Melanie and Mara during the production, as well as their comments on the experience. There is no doubt El Zaguán has real presence, architecturally, historically, culturally. It now has screen presence and handles it very well. – Pete Warzel

Enjoy an articel in the Albuquerque Journal and in The Guardian.

Old Santa Fe Today Update February 2021

The Oldest House photographed by Simone Frances for Old Santa Fe Today, 5th edition

READ PREVIOUS UPDATES OR LEARN MORE ABOUT OLD SANTA FE TODAY, FIFTH EDITION

For the last year, Historic Santa Fe Foundation launched an effort to produce a new, expanded edition of Old Santa Fe Today. The process of creating this revised fifth edition was quite a long one with many valuable, and well-researched materials generated by a variety of knowledgeable voices in the architectural, preservation, and historic community. Dr. Audra Bellmore, John Gaw Meem Curator at University of New Mexico and oversees the John Gaw Meem Archives of Southwestern Architecture, wrote citations for 96 properties, and created essays addressing history of preservation in Santa Fe, and architectural styles in Northern New Mexico. We are delighted to also present an essay on the history of the built environment by Paul Weideman who has written about architecture, real estate, archaeology, art, and culture for Santa Fe New Mexican publications for 24 years and more recently authored ARCHITECTURE: Santa Fe, A Guidebook. HSFF’s Preservation Specialist Mara Saxer tells about HSFF’s mission-driven program of preservation easements and Executive Director Pete Warzel presents a state of the foundation along with a vision for the future of our nonprofit. This fifth edition of our classic publication will truly be monumental, informative, beautifully designed, and a wonderful addition to the previous editions of the Old Santa Fe Today.

We have a very strong and supportive publications committee composed of HSFF Board Chair Ken Stilwell, Board Director Nancy Owen Lewis, former Board Chair Mac Watson, and HSFF Development Coordinator Melanie McWhorter. Lewis and Watson also acted as reviewers for the contributors’ texts and volunteered many hours making suggestions in collaboration with the writers.

In 2020, Simone Frances completed the contemporary photography for most of the properties. These images will be supplemented by historic photographs and illustrations from the Palace of the Governors, the Center for Southwest Research, HSFF Archives, and other sources. We still have some loose ends to tie up with these materials, but we are pleased to state we sent the files to our publisher Museum of New Mexico Press in late January. We are on our way to an information-packed resource for Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico’s architecture and history. We could not have done it without all the contributors and our donors. We are truly grateful and send our warm thanks to all the sponsors of this project.

We are now progressing into phase 2 of the publication. This next stage includes the creation of touring maps with local Santa Fe mapmaker Deborah Reade who has worked with the Museum of New Mexico Press designer David Skolkin for many years. She has walked Santa Fe’s quirky streets and roads and is well-aware of our unusual layout and many of the city’s historic properties. Reade has started to create the maps for this book and a free-standing map publication. In addition to this paper map, we are starting to do research on an app-maker for easy touring of the 96 properties. We will continue to update our community in the next year about the new book.

As the publication date gets closer, we will start to sell the books on our website. Until then, we are starting our second fundraising campaign for the map and app and ask for your generous donation towards the supplemental materials. To give to Phase 2 for HSFF’s Old Santa Fe Today’s map and app, please donate below.

Thanks so much for all your support with Old Santa Fe Today.

Images below photographed by Simone Frances for Old Santa Fe Today, 5th edition: New Mexico Museum of Art, Stone Warehouse, Jose Alarid House, Gustauve Baumann House, New Mexico Supreme Court building, Olive Rush House and Studio, McKenzie-Irvine House, and Sheldon Parsons House and Studio.

READ PREVIOUS UPDATES OR LEARN MORE ABOUT OLD SANTA FE TODAY, FIFTH EDITION