The story of Omena’s Tamarack Gallery

The Omena Village Preservation Association shares the wonderful story of how Sally & David Viskochil came to own the iconic Tamarack Gallery in Omena:

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.

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 the name “Tamarack Craftsmen Gallery”.

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.

Lots more on the Omena Preservation Society Facebook & for sure check out their website – incredible resource for the history of Omena!

Tamarack Gallery will close October 31, 2023. You definitely owe it to yourself to visit the gallery before then!!