This guy—a sculpture by Shay Church—is at Foster/White Gallery, and he doesn't just look tired, he's falling apart. He's made of unfired clay on a wooden armature, so as days go by, the clay has begun to crumble. Slabs have already begun to fall off. There's one there on the floor.

He's a mascot for NCECA—the conference that's brought 5,000 people together in downtown Seattle this week to talk, think, touch, consider, BE ceramics. (It stands for National Council for Education on the Ceramic Arts. Yum!)

I recommend making the rounds this weekend—making it a ceramics weekend. Most every gallery and museum, from smallest to largest, is in on it. Don't swing your arms. You could break everything.

At SOIL, you can punch your own pile of clay right there in the storefront. The Henry Art Gallery has an excellent exhibition of 1960s and '70s funk-and-Japanese-inspired Seattle ceramics. Alwyn O'Brien's luscious-tragic little poems in clay and porcelain are at James Harris. Even the Nordstrom windows are in on on it, with a display that includes pairs of real shoes stacked neatly in a row next to pairs of imitations. It's a nice mental exercise comparing the thing and its spawn.

Here is a full listing of exhibitions coinciding with NCECA. Seriously, everybody is doing it.