There was joy in the air as the Seattle Art Fair opened the doors for its 10th edition Thursday, July 23, with visitors streaming in to the cool, dark interior of Lumen Field Event Center to be greeted with flutes of champagne and a fantastic feast of art. 

Though the theme this year is textile and fiber arts, you’ll find art in a wide variety of media and styles, suitable for many tastes. Do you enjoy faintly Surrealist oil paintings? Roq La Rue’s got you, with Lindsey Carr’s mysterious black orb nestled in folds of pink satin against a sunset. Prefer the plastic fantastic? Check out Autumn Mae’s PVC work in dazzling ’80s metallic and chrome shades. For pure visual trippiness, it’s hard to beat the work of Anthony James, which features steel-and-glass cubes with LED shapes that echo into infinity. Here are three other standout works that caught my eye—just a tiny sampling of the delights on offer. The fair runs through Sunday, July 26, so you’ll have time to sample them all.

Courtesy of Bess Lovejoy

1. Tininha Silva’s Between Tides installation, J. Rinehart Gallery

Brazilian-born and Port Townsend-based Tininha Silva is a former swimwear designer whose work is inspired by the Salish Sea, but this immersive installation—suspended in a hallway between booths—is suggestive of many shapes, polysemic, like all the best art. The golden wires that sprout from one side made me think of a baby carriage gone to ruin, while other portions feel almost placental, cerebral (literally), or jellyfish-adjacent. It’s all made of deconstructed wire and metal mesh, with hand-dyed wool, silk, and other natural fibers stitched and woven around the metal, dangling, trailing, blooming, rotting. Even the shadows it casts are fascinating. There’s nothing else quite like it at the fair.

Courtesy of Bess Lovejoy

2. Melissa Monroe’s wool works, Lynn Hanson Gallery

And now for something completely different: Melissa Monroe’s richly colored tufted wool hangings and furniture will delight anyone with an inner child who once spent long afternoons watching Pee-wee’s Playhouse while strung out on Pop Rocks. There’s a tiger who might be crying rainbows, an alligator a very lucky person might be able to sit on, and wall hangings that meld human faces with slices of color that somehow have the intensity of stained glass. “I like furniture with personality,” the self-taught, Portland-based artist—resplendent in a pink sequined minidress—told me at her booth. That’s putting it mildly. She sold five pieces on opening night, so this is definitely one to watch.

Courtesy of Bess Lovejoy

3. Yu Jingoo’s Wave—Poem of Light, LYNN Fine Art Gallery

From afar, I thought Yu Jingoo’s Wave—Poem of Light was made of taffeta, or maybe the kind of glitter we used to throw around on tablecloths at bar and bat mitzvah parties. I was helplessly drawn to the pale blue iridescence, pulling me through the corridor to LYNN Fine Art Gallery’s booth, here all the way from South Korea. The artwork’s label revealed that Wave—Poem of Light is made of mother-of-pearl, or nacre, a traditional craft material that Yu has been working to reinvigorate and modernize. The mother-of-pearl is applied in long, thin strips, so that light skitters and skips along its surface. When a helpful man at the booth shone a flashlight on the piece, the whole thing came alive with flashing colors—suddenly less pastel and more hypercolor. There were shades of Impressionism here, somehow, even though the piece lacked representational forms. (Other works of Yu’s at the show do include lighthouses or boulders, but I prefer the pure field of pearl.) 

“I could stare at this for hours,” I said. “Hours and hours and hours,” the man at the booth and my friend chimed in at the same time.

Seattle Art Fair runs July 23-26 at Lumen Field Event Center in Seattle.