Greetings friends and neighbors!
I don’t know about you, but if it rains one more day I’ll be ready to pack it up and move to the desert. I can’t remember the last time we had this kind of weather in September. We did get a break for the big Cooper Young festival, and it was great to see all of you that came out to celebrate the unique culture and diversity of Memphis with us and enjoy a Pronto Pup or two. Speaking of unique, our city is home to some of the most unique places in America, and we took the time to visit one of them last week. This is the story of The National Ornamental Metal Museum.
The National Ornamental Metal Museum sits high on a bluff south of downtown Memphis. Day and night, barges steer through a wide bend of the Mississippi, while freight trains and Interstate 55 traffic rattle the steel truss bridges to and from Arkansas. The gazebo is a nice spot for a sunset wedding or a glass of whiskey after a day pounding steel.
Forged-steel gates, painted black with gold-leaf trim and dappled with hundreds of rosettes, open to the museum grounds, a riverside oasis shaded by century-old oak trees and strewn with sculpture, some of it peculiar—a metal yellow flower, eight feet tall; a cast-aluminum lion holding out a paw; and a green-and-yellow fence piece shaped like a row of cornstalks.
The gallery, which is inside a 1930s brick building with a white portico, recently displayed exquisitely crafted chastity contraptions, an exhibition titled “Impenetrable Devices.” The 3,000 items in the museum’s permanent collection tend more toward decorative copper vases, silver jewelry, gothic boxes and wrought-iron crucifixes.
The smithy, the heart of the place, is across the lawn from the gallery. Here metalsmiths in safety glasses and leather aprons work amid blasts of heat and earsplitting noise. Along the back wall, coal hearths fire metal to glowing red-hot and white. Two green, refrigerator-size power hammers dominate the center of the room. An array of chisels, anvils, electric buffers and other tools clutter the sooty worktables. Metal shavings litter the concrete floor. Nearly 30 years ago when the three-acre site, formerly the home of the U.S. Marine Hospital, was just grass stubble and derelict buildings, the city leased the property—a dollar a year—to a group of metalworkers who wanted to start a museum. Jim Wallace, then a blacksmith in Colorado, was recruited to head it. He says his main qualification for the director’s job was gullibility. “The board had approached several people,” he recalls, “but they were all museum professionals, so they knew better. I had a young family, and I figured I’ll come here and work two years, save enough money and move to Montana.” He shrugs. “It didn’t work out that way.”
Wallace moved his family into a ramshackle duplex on the property and started converting an abandoned nurses’ dormitory into exhibition space, doing much of the painting, plumbing, wiring and bricklaying himself. “There were snakes in the gallery,” recalls sculptor John Medwedeff, who was an intern at the museum during its fledgling years. “The phone would cut out. Four visitors on a Saturday was a big deal.”
Every October, the museum sponsors a kind of metalworking orgy called Repair Days. A hundred or so metal artists from around the country volunteer for three days to fix whatever anybody brings in—antique earrings, candelabras, dysfunctional door hinges, bed frames, dented steamer trunks. “Anything but cats, cars and broken hearts,” is the museum’s motto. Or, as Wallace puts it, “from absolute trash to a Paul Revere chocolate pitcher.” Repair fees go to the museum; the artists get venison stew and beer.
Rick Smith, head of the blacksmithing program at Southern Illinois University, fashioned a new antler out of casting wax for a pot-metal deer. Nearby, Medwedeff melted the end of a pen-size rod with a blowtorch, then applied its molten tip to the broken edges of a metal mare’s leg like Crazy Glue. A Kansas University teaching assistant looked on as undergraduate Amelia Fader repaired a wedding ring. “‘Just fix it like it’s for your mother, not the pope,’” Fader says she was advised.
As the museum has grown—it now gets some 30,000 visitors annually—so too has the art of decorative metalworking. Demand for it declined during the Great Depression and World War II, when money and metal were scarce, and again during the rise of Modernism, which emphasized clean, unadorned style. But it rebounded in the 1970s when Southern Illinois established a blacksmithing degree program and a major metalworking text was published, the first in decades. In 1974 the Artists’ Blacksmith Association of North America listed 150 members; today it has more than 4,000.
Younger smiths see themselves more as artists than artisans, but the museum embraces both. You and your family can experience this Metal Masterpiece for yourselves. Hours are Tuesday - Saturday: 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Sundays: 12:00 noon to 5:00 p.m.
Closed Mondays and during exhibit changes.
They are also closed during Easter, July 4th, Thanksgiving and the last week of December.
The Museum is closed due to weather when Memphis City Schools are closed.
Have a GREAT week and remember to keep a smile on your face, hope in your heart and always, ALWAYS keep the faith baby! Your ride home, Bill ;-)
