The first metal: arts & crafts copper : Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon

Abstract

Copper, one of the few metals that occurs naturally in a usable form, was the first metal humans fashioned into tools and accessories. For nearly five thousand years--from about 9,000 to 4,000 BCE--it was the only metal worked by humankind. From northern Iraq, where a small pendant dating to about 8700 BCE was found, to the Great Lakes region, where Native American cultures were mining and working copper more than 8,500 years ago, copper's impact was widespread and significant. Comparatively soft, plentiful, readily mined in its pure form, and easy to shape with hand tools, copper has remained a favored material of metalsmiths to this day. The First Metal: Arts & Crafts Copper is a catalogue for the first exhibition devoted solely to the use of copper in the Arts & Crafts Movement. Drawing on the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art's Margo Grant Walsh Twentieth Century Silver and Metalwork Collection and a select number of private and museum loans, the exhibition presents a range of hand-wrought copper works by many of the premier metalsmiths working in late 19th and early 20th century Britain, the United States, and beyond. The fully-illustrated exhibition catalogue includes essays by Arts & Crafts scholar-curators Mary Greensted of the United Kingdom and Jonathan Clancy of the United States tracing the rise of the Arts & Crafts movement and the role that copper played in its development and ethos.