Things to Do in Portland This Week, December 2025
Image: Courtesy Chess Club
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The only thing Portland loves more than a holiday market is a holiday market organized around a particularly niche subject. If you’re more into glossy magazines and limited-edition artist books than homespun woolens and vintage Pyrex and milk glass, the Portland Art Book Fair might be your jam.
The event is sprawled through nine North Park Blocks–adjacent venues Saturday and Sunday. The book fair portion runs both days (11am–4pm) at three venues. Community gallery Stelo Arts, workshop space and design studio Landdd, and magazine shop Chess Club are hosting dozens of local publishers and bookstores.
The biggest spread is at Stelo, and the group hews closer to prose and poetry than books of visual art. Look out for indie presses Future Tense, Fonograf Editions, and Two Plum, the risograph printer Nůn Studios, and local food magazine Provecho. Landdd is hosting most of the hefty fine art book publishers, like locals Gnomic Book and Container Corps, as well as retailers like Monograph Bookwerks, Hi Books, and Passages Bookshop. Chess Club is already full of art magazines; alongside its usual, global selection, expect records from local label Passenger Seat and drinks from Bardo Tea and the wine bar Company.
On Saturday only, the party spreads to a few galleries in the neighborhood. Most are releasing publications related to their current shows. At Adams and Ollman, Ralph Pugay has promised to “hand-embelish” copies of a limited chapbook corresponding to his current show, ShangriLIEF. ILY2 will have copies of Amanda Ross-Ho’s Grand Gestures, a new career-spanning monograph, as well as Priscilla, or Falling in Love with Liquid Eel by Sasha Fishman, whose show Shad Mode is currently up at the gallery. Rounding out the visual arts side of things, Lumber Room is giving out a free broadside that pairs with its current Louise Bourgeois and Isabelle Albuquerque show, The Wandering Womb, and is also selling books from the gallery’s catalog of past publications.
The finale is a set from Colombian DJ Verraco at the underground electronic music venue Barn Radio, which runs till 4am. “Gallery Hours” at Mono Space, the new hi-fi listening gallery, offers something chiller. On its sound system designed by celebrity audiophile Devon Turnbull’s company Ojas, Mono Space is playing a day’s worth of tunes matched to magazines stocked at Chess Club. Niche enough for you?
More things to do this week
MUSIC Leni Zumas/The Spells
7:30PM FRI, DEC 12 | PARTLY, FREE
Before Leni Zumas moved to Portland and started writing novels—Red Clocks, from 2018, predicted the fall of Roe v. Wade and won the Oregon Book Award; Wolf Bells, about an anarchic intergenerational nursing home, was one of our Best Books of 2025—she played drums in a Brooklyn band called the Spells. The band broke up around the time it finished its debut LP, The Night Has Eyes, and nothing ever came of the recordings—until now! Nearly three decades later, Portland label Garganta Press is releasing the album on vinyl. Friday, Zumas is hosting a listening and record-release party at the record, book, and home goods shop Partly.
THEATER Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women
THRU DEC 21 | PORTLAND CENTER STAGE, $25+
Dad’s away fighting in the Civil War. The family has fallen on hard times, and the March sisters—Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy—are at home with their mom, who soon leaves to nurse Dad. Scarlet fever strikes. Three years later…. You see where this is going. There are many Little Women adaptations, but Lauren Gunderson, who’s become known for modernizing classic novels for the stage, didn’t put the author’s name in her version just to pay respects—she wrote Alcott into the play, turning Jo into a hybrid Jo/Louisa, and grounding the story in the autobiographical context it came out of.
VISUAL ART Jeffry Mitchell
THRU DEC 27; RECEPTION 3–5PM SAT, DEC 13 | PDX CONTEMPORARY ART, FREE
Mitchell makes what he calls gay folk art, which is a nicely tidy name for a fascinatingly complex body of work. Referencing centuries of folk art traditions and mediums, including carved wood furniture, ceramic sculpture and pottery, pewter trinkets and cast bronze fireplaces, he leverages the incidental autobiographical traces folk art often holds into a slyly autobiographical mode of contemporary art. His current show, Winter Blooming (read our full review here), dots the gallery with exuberantly decorated pieces of a winter home: a Christmas tree, bookends, stools, a few end tables, a mailbox. Together, they make a kind of present-day anthropology—pieces of the artist’s own life.
Elsewhere...
- Hannah Krafcik on art and aquatic life: “The only words I recall encountering appear on a large fish cannon made by, as per its label, ‘WHOOSHH INOVATIONS.’” (Oregon ArtsWatch)
- “Friday was a beautiful night for a Krampuslauf.” Elayna Yussen’s photo essay of the annual Krampus run. (Portland Mercury)
