Arts You're grounded 

San Antonio outsider artist Kenneth Karcher (whose work is pictured above) returns with a one-man show December 10-January 6 at Salon Mijangos, 1906 S. Flores. If you miss the opening reception, 7-10 p.m. Saturday, December 10, the gallery is open by appointment, 271-5952.

If a Karcher painting doesn’t seem the perfect gift for your loved ones, take your list to the San Antonio Museum of Art’s annual fundraiser, Bazar Sábado, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday, December 10, in the museum’s parking lot, 207 W. Jones. Shoppers can fortify themselves with fresh buñuelos and complimentary hot chocolate and coffee as they pick through folk art brought back from Mexico, South America, and Asia by SAMA’s curators. Admission is $3, and prices range from $1-1,000. Proceeds benefit SAMA’s Latin American Art Department. For more info, call 978-8100.

Through coincidence or astral collusion, Terra Firma materializes twice this winter at Blue Star Contemporary Art Center: once as the current main-gallery exhibition curated by collector Jerry Kruse, and once as a poetry anthology by Agave Noir, a collective of six poets whose orbits have taken them through Austin during the past three decades. Three of the poets, Owen Ames, R. Turtle Okaji, and Michael Vecchio, will read from their Terra Firma 7-8 p.m. Thursday, December 15, at 119 Blue Star. Book signing to follow. “Caught in a post-modern literary world where poems built upon symmetrical coherence seem to have fallen off of a cliff back around the time of T. S. Eliot,” writes Gary Gautier, “these six poets grope toward some terra firma with enough gravity to hold poet and reader together, for a moment, in the world of the poem.” For more info, call 227-6960. •