Bullion Plaza Cultural Center & Museum held a grand opening on Jan. 13 for an impressive new exhibit, transferred from Tempe to Miami. The event included private tours of the museum, a catered lunch and a Globe-Miami Chamber of Commerce ribbon cutting.

For over a year, a small team of volunteers worked to move and re-install an HO-scale diorama telling the story of copper; fittingly, its new home is Bullion Plaza’s Copper Room. The volunteers included members of the Mining and Minerals Education Foundation (formerly known as the Mining Foundation of the Southwest), who drove up to Miami from Phoenix and Tucson, as well as one local man, Bob Walish.

With every item created to scale, the 27-foot exhibit (scaled down from its original 40 feet) represents the complete workings of an open pit copper mine. Below the diorama itself are stations with videos on different stages of the copper process, where visitors can hear about different aspects of local mining.

The diorama’s tale began around 2008, when the Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum approached the Mining Foundation of the Southwest about creating an exhibit on the story of copper. After the museum closed, the display eventually found a home at the Tempe Heritage Center. After about a year and a half, the center asked Bullion Plaza if they would like to have it.

Starting in mid-June 2022, under the foundation’s auspices, the group of around six volunteers took on the task of moving and reassembling the original exhibit. The team included Dykers, Walish (who also worked on restoring a second Copper Room exhibit, a model of the Carlota Mine) and Tom Aldrich. Dykers, his wife Iris and the foundation’s Tom Scartaccini provided primary funding for the display’s relocation to Miami. Capstone Mining also lent a hand, providing transport and unloading for the diorama.