I think everyone should have art of some form in their home, in their town.

You go to a restaurant where there's a really good chef.

That's an art form on its own, I think.

Clarinda, it's our home.

Art is what we love.

So Clarinda and Art are together right here.

And I'm I'm thrilled that we've been able to do it.

It's a place for children.

It's a place for community members.

It's a place for gatherings.

It's a place for all people of all ages to discover contemporary art.

If you love art and you live in the Midwest, you just can't miss this.

It's just absolutely incredible.

CCAM opened in 2014.

We're in the old Clarinda Carnegie Library, which was built in 1907 and 1908.

I'm sure most people now, you know, Andrew Carnegie was a steel magnate.

And at the end of his life, he decided that the best thing he could do, I think, for his soul and for his family was to get rid of his wealth, as well as much as he could before he died.

And the quickest way he could come up with was to institute these libraries across America.

More than sixteen-hundred in the United States.

And I think there's four or five hundred outside the United States.

For him, a Scottish immigrant.

He could barely read, write when he was a child.

I think that was important to him to implement these more rural, underserved populations in the Midwest.

So he did that.

It was a huge gift to the country.

They all look similar in a way, but they're not in other ways.

They all have 13 steps up and 13 steps down.

He felt that reading should be free, but you should have to work for it just a little bit.

Andrew Carnegie started it all and you can see his picture is still up on the wall.

Well, it's my home, it's where I grew up, I always felt that I had one of the most wonderful childhoods that any child could have.

I'm an only child, but I walked to school every morning with my little dog, and I would ride my bicycle to this library.

I lived here constantly I was here every week.

When we found it.

It had been closed as a library for a number of years.

We bought the building and we said, what are we going to do with it?

That's the truth.

We bought a building, didn't know what to do with it, and it needed work.

You know, it was over a hundred years old, so we were going to have to spend money on it.

We've been collectors all of our lives, and so we're actually collecting art who is just an extension of our collecting gene.

And we both have it.

So we thought about it quite a while and finally decided because we're art collectors.

We have a lot of art.

But why not share it?

We decided that we would turn it into an art museum in Clarinda, mainly a contemporary art museum.

I love to watch people come through the door, especially people that grew up here.

I love it when they hit the front door because they open and I hear, oh, my gosh.

Because it's familiar, but it's new.

This was our place, this is where we went to hide.

It's where we went to grow.

It's where we went to get better.

It's exactly what it was before it was an art museum.

It was a library, it was where you went to learn more about the rest of the world.

And you could go to Spain, you could go to Belgium.

That's exactly what it is.

We have international shows.

Each one is a different theme, it rotates about every six months.

So you might come in and see a representation of New Zealand or India or Spain or Cuba.

It's a connection to people and the artists are people and their through their ideas and their expression and the whatever they're making or doing that's exposing people in Clarinda, Iowa, to those to those cultures and those places all around the world through their art.

We built it for the community, but it's really gone beyond that.

It's gone beyond this community to other communities, like I say, to travelers going cross-country.

You know, it's it's a destination in this part of the state.

So it was a huge a huge gift to our community, but it outstretched past that to connect Clarinda to the whole world.

And that's what we're truly trying to make.

Our mission for these years ahead is to let everybody feel what this feels like.

It's wonderful.

It's hard for me to describe it, but I can't tell you how much joy we have in some of this and finding some of this art and sharing with people.

But when we finished, we think it's the most wonderful thing that we've ever done.

This this is the best thing we've ever done.