Page 20 - the NOISE February 2014

CoNTiNUeD FRoM 19
posed to moisture, it turns a blue-green called verdigris. Because of Arizona’s low humidity, copper will turn brown but not green.
These are just a handful of the interesting tidbits you will learn as you follow the copper inlay footsteps through Clarkdale’s newly opened and magnificently renovated Copper Art Museum. After 10 years renovating the 9,000 square foot building, formerly Clarkdale High School, the museum finally opened in December 2013. Rather than focusing on the mining aspect of copper, the museum show- cases the many uses of copper once it left boomtowns like Clarkdale and Jerome, from ornate building embellishments to cookware and ammunition.
The museum is divided into six spacious rooms of themed exhibits. The Kitchen and Cookware room is designed to feel like an ac- tual kitchen, replete with a hearth and pot- bellied stove. It is filled to the brim with every kind of copper kitchenware imaginable, in every condition from the freshly-polished to the old and patinaed.
The Beer and Wine Room features copper water pails, beer tankards, and vessels of all kind. The “trench art” in the Military Room is particularly interesting, its walls lined with shelves of huge artillery shells WWI soldiers hammered with designs, words and images.
The Distillery and Winery room — fitting considering the explosion of the Arizona wine industry — explains why copper is es- sential to making wine and spirits. The Infor- mation Room is filled with fun, interactive, and little known copper trivia.
Museum founder Drake Meinke and his family have always been in the copper retail business. The bulk of the original collection came from a family source and continues to grow with recent acquisitions.
A decorative gothic copper relief wall panel, measuring nine feet high, in one
hallway of the Copper Art Museum.
“Jerome was a mining town and produced the ore,” says Mr. Meinke. “But Clarkdale was where copper was made into something — it’s where the money was made. So when we were deciding on the best place in the United States to open a copper museum, we chose Clarkdale because it’s the return of the billions of pounds of copper that was exported from this town.”
Wandering through the museum mar- veling at the extensive collection (there are more items on display than in the Heard Mu- seum and Phoenix Art Museum combined), I had to ask Mr. Meinke how much of the cop- per in the museum can actually be traced back to Clarkdale.
Mr. Meinke answers with his best educat- ed guess, calculating a maze of figures and dates that only amount to a 10% accuracy. He explains copper is very difficult to trace because once it is refined out of its raw, nug- get form, it is nearly impossible to tell one piece of copper from another, even if it came from another part of the country or world.
“People are absolutely amazed by this museum,” says Mr. Meinke. “They can’t be- lieve how interesting it is — but copper is a very interesting metal. Every time you turn around there’s some new fascinating tidbit.”
Maybe it doesn’t matter that it’s inde- terminable how much of the copper in the museum came specifically from the prolific mines in the area. We do know that billions of pounds of the metal left Clarkdale, and the museum is a fascinating, in depth display of its many possible fates.
The Copper Art Museum is open 10AM- 5PM daily at 894 Main Street in Clarkdale. CopperArtMuseum.com. You can also visit the museum’s satellite store, Copper Moun- tain Antiques on Historic 89A in Jerome.
20 • FEBRUARY 2014 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us