Ok, so picture it: You're at Art Fair. It is a sweltering Thursday afternoon. You can feel the heat coming off the pavement and the hot breath of a chunky woman in a Harley Davidson tank top to your left. About five minutes ago, you found this painting that was awesome, and would be even more awesome in your living room, but the price was a whole figure larger than your weekly paycheck.

You notice that items within your budget include plastic jewelry, copper tubing welded in animal shapes, and prints under 3"x5". You try to make the best of it, and work on convincing yourself that this is not an Art Fair, but a museum good for people watching, which would be vastly improved if you could walk around with a cold beer.

If this sounds familiar, then A. we could probably be friends, and B. you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

While I love my yearly trip the Ann Arbor Art Fairs as much as the next person, there is also something to be said for the Shadow Art Fair at the Corner Brewery in Ypsilanti. It was still packed, yes, and the lady in the Harley tanktop was there, but she was far less menacing with a beer in hand. Most importantly, the art was an alliterative awesome and affordable. This is, of course, no accident: Shadow Art Fair is juried, and participants are chosen to be local, original, and eclectic. For instance, one of my favorite booths housed a woman who had recently finished a degree in art at U of M where she started thinking about objects; specifically, the significance people assign to ordinary objects. She now asks as many folks as possible to tell her a story about an "extra-ordinary object" in their lives. She then transcribes the story and creates an image to accompany it; you can see some of her story/drawings here and here. My boyfriend Jason, on the other hand, was rather taken by ink drawings done by a young man who hopped freight trains across North America for a time, and currently practices hand-poke tattoo. (That's him and his stuff down to the far right there, his work can be found online here).

If you haven't been to Corner Brewery you really should. Its sort of like Arbor Brewing-- which is only to be expected, as its where Arbor beer is brewed-- but it has its own distinct personality. Sisters, not identical twins. Corner, located at the corner of Norris and Forrest in Ypsilanti, has a far more spacious and laid-back atmosphere than ABC (no wait staff, order at the bar) in addition to a large back porch with couches and fenced "beer garden" yard scattered with picnic tables. It's more like a beer-serving coffee shop than a restaurant; in short, the perfect place to read a book on a summer afternoon. Shadow art Fair happens twice a year, in July and December. Corner Brewery is located at 720 Norris St in Ypsilanti. Photographs of Summer '09 Shadow art Fair from right to left: Jewelry by Wei's Open Secret; The scene at the fair; Drawings by Matthew Nisbett.

Allison Bondie usually blogs about food at Food Snob on a Tuesday Night. She can be reached at allison.bondie AT gmail.com If you wanted to know more about her you could look here.