David and Sally on the front porch of Tamarack in 1992. Courtesy Traverse, the Magazine, January 1992.
Driving around Chicago, looking for work in their little Volkswagen loaded with everything they owned, and having no luck, they parked the car on the street for a short time only to come back and find someone had broken into it and stolen everything they owned. They had hit rock bottom. No jobs, and everything they owned was gone.
Pic of Gallery – Tamarack Gallery in 2002. Photo courtesy Marianne Vick, who also takes many of the photos for the ads in the Leelanau Enterprises.
David and Sally Viskochil were college graduates, had served three years in the Peace Corps, and were down on their luck. They decided to return to Traverse City, where they had grown up and see what they could find there. Since they were art majors in college, and 1972 was the earthy beginning of the craft movement, they opened a gallery which focused on functional crafts, but a more sophisticated version. “There was a real conscious effort to be a reaction against a painter’s gallery,” Sally said in the 2001 article in the Leelanau Enterprise. They were able to rent gallery space in what had been a tavern on M-22 at the base of Sugar Loaf. “We started with some local artists, people we could talk into it, and it just progressed from there,” David recalled. “It was all consignment because we didn’t have any money.”
A grove of trees nearby provided its name “Tamarack Craftsmen Gallery”.
Sally and David with their beloved Border collies. Courtesy Leelanau Enterprise, August 9, 2001
After five years there, the couple decided on the spur of the moment to move with their 1-year-old daughter and the gallery’s “family of artists” to Omena when a friend told them of a vacant building for sale there. It forced them into making a decision, realizing that they couldn’t stay where we were because they didn’t own the building and had an uncertain future there. Little did they know how uncertain their future would have been had they stayed. The winter after they moved, the roof of the old saloon collapsed under the weight of the winter snow, and the building was so far gone the fire department decided to burn it as a practice drill.
The Omena building they bought in 1976 had been the 1883 Anderson Store for several generations. The large former general store and Post Office in the heart of Omena also included an apartment above the store. There was an addition to the left as you enter the building, added by the Anderson’s in 1926 so that they could have the required separate entrance for people picking up their mail while Louis Anderson was Postmaster.
1935 article in Traverse City Record Eagle described Anderson’s store this way:” Back in early days of the region much of the patronage of Anderson’s Store was furnished by the Indians. Since the Indians’ time it was the farmers largely who supported the store. In the past few years (1935), however, summer tourists have become such an asset to the business that everything is being done to encourage them to make Omena their headquarters while in the north country.” The old building was about to evolve yet again.
Kimmerly’s Grocery Store, on an unusually chaotic day in 1950. The glass case on the left is still used by Tamarack to show Jewelry. Photo courtesy David and Sally Viskochil
The Kimmerly’s took over the store In 1946, and ran it until1958, when Mike was appointed probate judge. It was vacant for the next four years, was bought and sold several times, used as a vacation home for a while, and finally bought by David and Sally in 1976. The building needed lots of repair and remodeling to become what they envisioned. They would have a large gallery on the main floor and live in the apartment upstairs.
Their “family of artists” grew from the original ten to 115, and eventually did include painters. Now they have 45-50 artist’s work in the gallery. Their staff grew and changed as well after the sudden death of David in 2005, but the zany sense of humor and artistic excellence persisted. The gallery still reflects the very nature and personality of the Viskochils themselves.
Tamarack is closing soon. We will miss Sally, as we have missed David, a couple who have taken this community to heart. David was a common sight around town on his daily morning walks with the dog; some years he and Sally organized and hosted a gala Maypole dance in their backyard and invited the entire community.
David was a member of the school board for 16 years; he started the arts magazine “Exposure” for student work and was a founding member of Chamber Arts North which sponsored chamber concerts in the area.
Sally holds Bobby the Dog at the Gallery in August of 2022. Photo courtesy Record Eagle/Mike Krebs
Sally has been a 4-H leader and parent aid as well as a member of Club 21, which raises money for local scholarships. She started Northport Promise basing it on the scholarship program Kalamazoo has for its students but with “a lot less money”. And she has been the “mother” for Northport’s Girls Basketball and Volleyball teams for 20 years, accompanying them to games and events.
For all this, the gallery and the Viskochils, have been accepted, even embraced, by this tiny community and will be sorely missed.
It’s this couple’s sense of humor and an eye for outstanding art that has made Tamarack Craftsmen Gallery a “must see” destination, that, and their work ethic. “It’s just a lot of work,” David explained once. “We work seven days a week in the summer, six days a week the rest of the year, and we don’t take vacations. There’s this fantasy that we travel around the United States half the year. But we don’t travel at all.”
Always popular with visitors, Tamarack Gallery’s reputation throughout northern Michigan has sustained a year-round business from Interior decorators and designers as well. “We’re a destination and we get people on vacation.” David once said. “So, in a funny way, we get the best of them. We may only see them once or twice a year, but we’ve been at it for so long that we’re all old friends now. We get to talk to so many people that it’s very cosmopolitan. And we get to live here. I just can’t imagine a better deal!
Sally and her sister Barbara Grosmark who has helped her for many years at Tamarack. Other helpers include long time artist and gallery person Marianne Vick, and more recently Nik Burkhart, another artist as well.
What does the future hold for this historical building? Sally says she will continue to own the building and try to find a business that is compatible with the community. “We have a leftover social conscience left over from their Peace Corp days, which is still with us,” David once said. “This is my community,” Sally says. She has devoted most of her life to her family and her business here.
So, 51 years ago, they bought the store, so to speak, complete with an apartment on the second floor. And they moved themselves, their one-year-old daughter, and their family of artists into a town that, small as it was, proved to have plenty of room for a whole new identity. “There’s been some rough times, but there’s satisfaction in perseverance,” Sally said. Omena has been fortunate and proud to be its home.
Courtesy Sally Viskochil, Traverse City Record Eagle June 30,1935; Leelanau Enterprise, August 9, 2001; Traverse City Record Eagle, Wednesday, August 16, 2023; Omena, A Place In Time by Amanda Holmes; and Omena Historical Society for the use of their wonderful archives.