Early Summer Art Weekend in Portland

Portland for an early summer weekend of art, starting where you have to start: Powell's on Burnside. The marquee out front was still listing author events from the last week of May, and the steel sculpture at the corner threw its bristles up higher than the streetlights. Only browsed — the real errand was across the river.

The fair itself was over on the east side near the Lloyd District, at the convention center — the one from 1989 with the red glass Convergence towers on the roof, and apparently the first in the country to run on wind power. The exhibition hall had string lights strung under the trusses and a roll-up door open to the street. Ceramics everywhere: raku wall pieces framed in black, tall slab vessels with faces worked into them, one with a neon trout hung behind it. A man in a striped polo stood at his table with a sheet of paper, mid-remarks, while people drifted between the black-draped tables.

One framed piece looked like a whole hill town broken into three tiles, brickwork pressed into the clay. Priced, and I keep thinking about it.