American Pottery Festival

Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, but it seems a goodly number of our acquaintances get their thrills by slapping around wet lumps of clay. In any of the Twin Cities’ plentiful venues for making pottery, you can find small crowds of dusty people hugging their misshapen pots and discovering their reverence for Warren MacKenzie. And there’s hardly a scenic Minnesota drive that doesn’t pass a pottery studio in the woods. This love of mud has inspired four days’ worth of pottery pondering at the Northern Clay Center, where works exhibited by twenty-six artists from around the country set the stage for lectures, workshops, slide presentations, and general worship of all things that come out of a kiln. 2424 E. Franklin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-339-8007; www.northernclaycenter.org