Saturday Afternoon Art Exhibit in Kalamazoo

Art fair weekend in Kalamazoo — the Institute of Arts fair takes over Bronson Park downtown on the first Friday and Saturday of June, up to 145 juried artists across the mediums. Part of the Saturday went to a ceramics exhibit in an old brick building, one artist's work covering an entire wall.

Framed slab pieces hung in rows on the brick: faces assembled from broken tiles, grids of pressed texture, all of it glazed in metallics and rust. Below them, long tables in black cloth held the vessels — raku columns, a big textured disc on a stand, a lidded pot with a gourd for a stem. The artist was there himself, working between visitors, reaching across a table to nudge a vase back into line next to his name card.

One tall vase had a face worked into the front, an eye and a sail in white and turquoise, $215 penciled on the sticker. Farther down, a ceramic figure wore actual pheasant feathers, a whole fan of them coming off the top of its head.