Elizabeth Olivia Malmgren

February 14, 1921 - March 5, 2022

Ebby Malmgren died March 5 at Ginger Cove Health Center. She had just celebrated her 101st birthday on Valentine’s Day. She was born in Davenport, Iowa on February 14, 1921. She spent her childhood in rural Plymouth, Iowa. Her father was a traveling linen salesman and farmed 5 acres of strawberries and her mother was a prolific gardener and skilled seamstress. Ebby displayed an early love of learning and especially of reading, which opened a world of imagination and adventures well beyond the rural midwestern farming town. Her early hopes were to be a writer, but her practical side took her to Iowa State University to study nutrition. When she graduated, she moved to New York state to work as head dietitian at Grasslands Hospital, where she met and fell in love with a handsome Navy doctor, Richard (Dick) Malmgren. They were married in August 1946 and lived briefly in several midwestern states before moving to Bethesda, Maryland, where Dick accepted a job as a Public Health Service officer at the National Institutes of Health. Ebby was a devoted “at home mom” while their two children, Betty and Rick, were growing up. When the children were older, Ebby sought new avenues to again explore her passion for learning and creativity. In 1960 she went back to school to study linguistics, but as luck would have it, a fellow student in her first course invited her to a pottery class. Ebby had found the first of what, in the coming years, would be a series of artistic callings. Her first pottery studio was between the furnace and the washing machine in the basement of her home. In 1973 she and her husband moved to the Saefern community in Annapolis, where she built her own studio. She studied pottery at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine. She and her son, a potter, showed together at her first craft fair in Frederick, Maryland, in 1975. She went on to show her pottery in several galleries in the region, including the Massoni Art Gallery, Maryland Federation of Art and St. John’s College Mitchell Gallery. She was a founding member of the Annapolis Potters’ Guild and a member of the Founding Committee for Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts. Ebby developed a love for the landscape and sense of adventure in the Southwest, where her husband had done medical research in Los Alamos, N.M. They built a house in Taos and spent 20 summers there. On a lark she went to a printmaking class, which opened a new vista of creative exploration that combined her pleasure in rolling slabs of clay with imagery that she coaxed from ink and impressions in paper. In 2005 she and her son had a show in the Cade Gallery at Anne Arundel Community College titled “Genes, Generation and Gender,” where she showed both her prints and clay. The following year she won the Lifetime Achievement Annie Award from the Arts Council of Anne Arundel County. In 2014 she had a show with both her daughter, who is a photographer, and her son at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts titled “Three Views of Four Dimensions.” In her early 90s she taught classes in making books as an art form at the Academy Art Museum in Easton. An avid reader who took great pleasure in writing, Ebby published poems in several poetry journals, including “Deus Loci,” “Antietam Review,” “Plum Review,” “Potato Eyes” and most recently, on her 100th birthday, a poem published in “Passager.” Two collections of her poetry, "Common Ground" and "Stone Dream," were published in handbound limited editions by Joan Machinchick's Lake Claire Design Studio. For more than 25 years, Ebby was an important and loyal participant in the artistic and intellectual life of the Mitchell Gallery at St. John’s College, where she received a master’s degree. She was one of the original twenty-eight members of the Mitchell Gallery Board of Advisors, when it first convened in 1989, serving as an active member on the Education Committee. Ebby also led seminars, poetry and writing workshops, and sessions on bookmaking, often collaborating with noted poets, artists and St. John’s College tutors. Her husband, Dick, passed away in 2020. Ebby is survived by her daughter, Betty Wallace (Doug), son, Rick Malmgren (Judy Burke), grandchildren Lisa Jacobs (Paul) and David Wallace and great-grandchild Ian Jacobs.