First, in a series of medium-based annual invitational shows, Build Me Up, Tear Me Down, Why Don’t You Love Me Babe Like There’s No One Around? (January 25 – May 11, 2025, Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, Washington USA) asks numerous questions beyond its tantalizing title. Museum of Northwest Art executive director Stefano Catalani selected a dozen artists from Washington, Oregon and Montana to display works that, seen in the historical continuum of West Coast clay, might be mistaken for a sequel to the recent Seattle Art Museum survey, Poke in the Eye: West Coast Counterculture ( Ceramics: Art & Perception #123). Only one artist, Patti Warashina, was included in both exhibitions and is, in the words of Catalani, the “matriarch of Northwest ceramics”. That may be, but it is remarkable how Warashina’s art has changed since the 1960s when it was dominated by Surrealism and Funk art, the style born in Berkeley with encoded sexuality, humor, scatological puns, and disorienting imagery.