If you've lived in Copperopolis for more than a season, you've driven past 510 Egan Street more times than you can count. The window display changes every few weeks: watercolors of Lake Tulloch at sunset, a mosaic table runner, a stack of hand-stamped cards. You've probably assumed that's the whole operation. A gallery. A place to buy a gift for a friend's new house or get something framed before the holidays.
It isn't the whole operation. The building with the paintings in the window is Town Hall Arts, also known locally as Galerie Copper, and it has been selling the work of Sierra Foothills artists since 2010. But if you called to sign up for a watercolor class or a Saturday mosaic session, you wouldn't be sitting at an easel inside that storefront. The actual classroom moved next door, into the building most people around here just call the Courthouse. Two spaces, a few doors apart, doing two different jobs. Most people who've shopped at the gallery for fifteen years have never set foot in the studio.
What's Actually Behind the Window
Walk into 510 Egan Street and you're looking at the work of more than 40 local artists, hung salon-style across the gallery walls. There are cards, prints, small gift items, and a full custom framing counter in the back for anyone who's finally ready to hang that piece they bought two Christmases ago. It's a retail space first. You can browse, you can commission a frame, you can pick up a birthday present that isn't a candle. What you can't do inside that room is sit down with a brush and get instruction, because that's not what the space was built for.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because Town Hall Arts markets itself as one thing, an art gallery, art supplies, and classes, all under a single name. It reads like a single address on paper. In practice, the retail counter and the working studio are separate rooms with separate purposes, and only one of them has paint on the floor.
The Classroom Is a Few Doors Down
The class studio now operates next door to the Egan Street gallery, inside the building known locally as the Courthouse. If your only interaction with Town Hall Arts has been buying a framed print, you'd have no reason to know that. There's no reason the gallery counter would tell you either, unless you asked directly.
The gallery sells the finished work. The building next door is where it gets made.
That's the part of the story that doesn't show up if you're just glancing at a storefront window on your way to the post office. The paintings you see hanging on Egan Street were, in a lot of cases, started a few doors away by someone who'd never picked up a brush before signing up for a Thursday class.
Sixteen Years of Teaching Foothill Artists
The person behind most of that teaching is Susie Hoffman, who founded Town Hall Arts with her husband Larry in 2010. Her own path into it is part of why the studio runs the way it does. Susie took up art seriously after retiring from teaching sixth grade, starting in watercolor before branching into nearly every medium the studio now offers. She still teaches beginning classes herself and sells her own paintings and photography inside the gallery, which means the person who founded the place is also one of the people you might end up learning from.
Over the years, the studio has drawn instruction from a rotating group of other foothill artists as well, not just Susie. It has also become something of a draw beyond Copperopolis itself: painters have been known to come in from other towns specifically to work in that studio alongside people they've painted with for years. For a town of under 4,000 residents, that's a meaningful pull, and it's the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a Yelp listing.
What's Actually on the Calendar
The class offerings run wider than a typical small-town art studio. Based on what's cycled through the calendar, sessions have covered:
- Life drawing
- Mosaics
- Paper-making and collage
- Oil painting
- Watercolor painting
- Pastels
Classes run separately for adults and kids, so a Saturday morning slot built for an eight-year-old isn't the same session as a weekday evening life drawing class. The schedule itself lives on the studio's own site rather than in a fixed printed brochure, which means it shifts month to month depending on which instructors are teaching and what's in demand. If you're used to community class calendars that repeat the same six workshops every quarter, this one doesn't work that way. Checking the current month's calendar before you plan around a specific class is worth the two minutes it takes.
When to Actually Show Up
As of a May 2026 update to its public listing, the gallery's hours run Monday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Tuesday and Wednesday, open again Thursday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Those are the gallery's retail hours. Class times run on their own schedule tied to the calendar, so calling ahead at (209) 785-2050 or checking townhallarts.com before you drive over for a specific session will save you a wasted trip, especially since you'll be walking into a different building than the one you might expect.
If you want the fuller regional picture of where art fits into Calaveras County beyond Copperopolis, the Calaveras Visitors Bureau's rundown of local wine and art stops is a decent starting point, though Town Hall Arts is the one actually rooted inside the Square rather than out toward Murphys or Angels Camp.
The Thing That Hasn't Changed
Restaurants and wine bars a few blocks over have swapped names and owners more than once over the years, the kind of turnover that makes it worth checking current hours before you plan a night out. The gallery on Egan Street hasn't done that. It's been operating under the same name, with the same founding family, since 2010, even as the building housing its actual classroom moved next door. That's a strange kind of stability for a town this size: the storefront everyone recognizes stayed put, while the working half of the operation quietly relocated a few doors over and most people never noticed.
If you've lived here a while and never actually walked into the studio side, that's the gap this piece is pointing at. The gallery has been visible the whole time. The classroom just hasn't been where you assumed it was.
For those of you weighing a longer-term move to the foothills, or wondering what daily life actually looks like beyond the listing photos, this is the kind of detail we like sharing over coffee. Reach out to Kevin Baxter and the Baxter Luxury Home Team for a conversation about what Copperopolis is really like to live in, not just what it looks like from the road.
