At the Art Fair with Lissa

Our friends Rick and Lissa Brown were here for the weekend.


Lissa is a weaver - one of those people you see at art fairs in little white canopied booths smiling serenely as people come and go, occasionally answering inane questions (“where did you buy the material to make all this cool stuff?” “I don’t buy it, I make it” “you mean you, like, knit it?” “No, I’m a weaver. My stuff is all handwoven on a loom.” “Oh yea, that’s cool.” ) So yesterday we helped her get set up for an art fair in New Glarus and it was like, you know, cool.


The thing I love about art fairs is the “handmade-ness of it all. In this age of big box stores where you can find row after row of shelves stacked from floor to ceiling with mass-produced, often shoddily made but expensively priced merchandise (much of which hasn’t even been manufactured in the United States) there’s something heartening about art fairs. What you see as you stroll from booth to booth is the work of someone’s hands – usually someone who’s right there ready to answer any questions you may have about whatever it is that has attracted your attention. I love the wholesomeness of art fairs – the fact that much of what you find there has been made out of natural materials: clay thrown pots, hand spun and naturally dyed yarns, wood that has been whittled and carved, or shaped and crafted. I like knowing that in a society where more and more of what people buy looks exactly like what everyone else is buying, it doesn’t have to be that way all the time. Fortunately there are still artists and crafts persons around, like my friend Lissa, to thank for that.





But I’d never thought about how much work goes into setting up and taking down those nifty little art fair canopies, not to mention the display racks that are so artfully arranged inside.


Rick made the wooden racks Lissa uses to display her beautiful scarves, shawls and table runners.

It takes a lot of muscle hauling all this stuff around, and when Rick’s not around to help Lissa does it all herself. You’d never know it to look at her, but she’s one sturdy lady!!


It was a beautiful day for an art fair and I enjoyed hanging out with Lissa watching people come in, admire her work, and observe them as they stood there trying to decide whether or not to buy whatever it was that had caught their eye. Even though most of them didn’t, enough of them did so that by the end of the day Lissa felt it had been a good show. And Rick was pretty happy about it too!