When guest artists visit Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, they’re treated to a preperformance ritual: a hearty dinner of homemade soup and pie at the home of the center’s founders, husband and wife Karl Gartung and Anne Kingsbury. After the meal, each dinner guest is presented with an unfired white ceramic tile, and encouraged to fill the space as he or she sees fit.
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“At first I had a master plan to tile our kitchen so that people would fight for the privilege of doing dishes,” Kingsbury confesses, “but the collection soon outgrew that scheme.” Instead these squares commemorating shared words and meals litter the couple’s dining room. And currently, like an alternative Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the Woodland Pattern is exhibiting select tiles to kick off a yearlong celebration of its 20th anniversary.
The roots of Woodland Pattern can be traced to a small group of Milwaukee artists who practiced guerrilla bookselling at early 70s political events. Eventually the group set up a loosely run, volunteer-staffed bookstore/gallery in the same building as Milwaukee’s Theater X, and by 1976 they’d hired their first paid employee: set builder and poet Gartung. Their new charge had the idea of adding live events like music and performance art to the store’s offerings, but sharing a space with a busy theater company didn’t always lend itself very well to his mission.
And Woodland Pattern is a book fiend’s nirvana, specializing in small-press, fine-press, and self-published books, with rows of chapbooks and drawers of handmade artists’ books. Unlike the many chain bookstores that routinely return books after two to six weeks on the shelf, Woodland Pattern keeps books until they find their audience. Book sales don’t bring in much income, but for Kingsbury and Gartung bookselling remains a form of activism, an important service to underpaid writers and hungry audiences.
–Terri Kapsalis
