Art In The Pearl is proud to announce the recipient of the inaugural Mel Stiles Award for Creative Achievement in Craft. This award was created to honor the memory of Melissa “Mel” Stiles — a beloved artist and former board member whose vision, dedication, and creativity helped shape the spirit of our festival.
This year’s recipient, Nicholas Stelter, has been shaped by a lifetime of creativity and a deep respect for craft. From learning precision and patience in his grandfather’s woodworking shop to watching his mother shape clay into art, Nicholas developed not just skill with his hands but an eye for beauty and form.
He began working with glass in 2000, first exploring stained glass and later venturing into stone, concrete casting, and wood. Today, Nicholas sculpts glass within the kiln, letting the material guide him to its truest form. Each piece is then cold worked, polished, and paired with a pedestal he designs and fabricates himself — creating a complete, unified sculpture. His work is marked by a purity of form, a balance of strength and delicacy, and a profound respect for the materials he works with.
As part of the award, Nicholas’s work will be featured in Art In The Pearl’s promotions for next year’s festival, and he will be invited to exhibit without going through the jury process — allowing our community to experience more of his remarkable artistry.
Please join us in congratulating Nicholas Stelter, the winner of the first-ever Mel Stiles Award for Creative Achievement in Craft!
A Labor Day weekend fixture in downtown Portland since 1997, the free festival offers booths for more than 100 artists, plus food, music, demonstrations, and hands-on activities.
Artist Michael Gard’s sculptures and mobiles will be at Booth S75 at Art in the Pearl.
It’s Labor Day weekend, which for thousands of people in and around Portland means one thing: heading downtown to the North Park Blocks to catch the booths and food and music and more of the free end-of-summer celebration Art in the Pearl.
As it has since 1997, Art in the Pearl will take over the North Park Blocks, on Eighth Avenue between Northwest Davis and Northwest Flanders streets, with enough booths to showcase the works of well more than 100 artists. This year’s hours are 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 31 and Sept 1, and 10 a.m.-4 p.m. on Labor Day: Monday, Sept. 2.
Artist Kelli MacConnell’s prints will be at Booth S49.
The volunteer-run Art in the Pearl calls itself a “Fine Arts & Crafts Festival,” and that’s part of its attraction: It considers “art” and “craft” part of the same family, and includes work by Northwest artists in a broad diversity of forms, including two- and three-dimensional mixed media, ceramics, digital art, drawing, fiber arts (including wearable art), glass, jewelry, metal, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and woodworking.
In addition to the art booths (yes, you can buy the art) there’ll be plenty of world music, food booths, hands-on art activity areas for kids and adults (yes, the festival’s kid-friendly, and you can even bring your dog on a leash), and demonstrations by handweavers, sculptors, ceramicists, calligraphers, woodworkers, and metal artists. The weather looks good, too: mostly sunny, with highs forecast at 93 Saturday, 87 Sunday, and 76 Monday.
Left: Ken Hanson, Aurora & Amethyst Sea Fan, glass, Booth N92. Right: Carol Risley, Leather Pear Bag, Booth N77.
Art in the Pearl was begun as a nonprofit organization in 1997, partly in response to the demise two years earlier of the annual ArtQuake celebration, which had been a downtown Portland celebration of performing and visual arts for 19 years. Art in the Pearl has outlasted that and is still going strong — for one weekend every year, a free outdoor gallery for everyone.
John Fields became fascinated with glass in the early 1970’s while studying business at the University of Arkansas. Heather Fields first took a glass blowing class in 1987 while attending Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts. The two met in Portland and started online casino working together in 1995, and gradually their individual visions began to show the influence of one another’s work. A harmonious style emerged that reflects John’s love of classical form and Heather’s painterly approach to design.
Catherine started drawing natural subjects in early childhood, and studied fine art in college. Her work expands upon time-honored natural history illustration techniques by incorporating four different mediums to produce a wider variety of colors and textures. She often incorporates collage and antiquing techniques to create the look of an ancient drawing. Catherine believes few places on earth combine nature and culture as gracefully as Portland does, and says she is grateful to be a native Oregonian.
