Art: Escape to Wisconsin

Hang spring cleaning. It's time for a weekend in the country, and never you mind that a winter's worth of dust coats the windows, the garage needs sweeping, the lawn must be raked and leaf-mulch chokes the tulips. Those are all reasons to escape to Wisconsin, where artful diversions lurk at 11 sites in the now-greening hills overlooking Lake Pepin.

The area's 10th annual "Fresh Art" spring tour, which starts today, is rich in traditional crafts (blacksmithing, rosemaling, pottery, weaving) in old stores and rustic farmsteads. Many of the artists will also be selling things for the garden -- trellises, bird baths, perennial plants and even such exotica as heirloom tomato seedlings. And when hunger pangs interrupt the ramble, there are temptations at the Bittersweet Bakery in Plum City; Bogus Creek Cafe & Bakery in Stockholm, and the ever popular Harbor View Cafe in Pepin, which has now emerged from winter hibernation.

"Being along the Mississippi River, it's so beautiful here," said Diane Millner, a potter whose studio is in a big red barn on Goatback Road, a winding country trail that runs along a ridge about 8 miles inland from Lake Pepin. Her wooded acreage is about a mile from the birthplace of novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose "Little House" books chronicled the lives of a pioneering family in the 1800s. (The Wilder museum in Pepin and a log cabin replica of the Wilder home will be open this weekend, too.)

Millner, who grew up in suburban St. Paul, was "part of that first back-to-the-land movement" that enticed urban artists to western Wisconsin. "It's a pretty tight little community of maybe 50 artists around here," said Millner, who has lived in the area for 35 years. She'll be selling her functional pottery, including garden lanterns, bird baths and houses. Two friends will offer their work, too: impressionist-style painter Michael Peters from Minneapolis, and neighbor Barbara Andersen, whose speciality is terra cotta birdhouses that are "so cute!"

Four of the tour sites are in Pepin -- a blacksmith and glass shop, two galleries and the Lake Pepin Art & Design Center which showcases work by its artist members.

Smith Bros. Landing on the Pepin shore began as a bait shop but evolved when owner Dave Smith realized "we couldn't make any money" with worms and minnows. He started selling plants, then making trellises, and now -- 20 years later -- has a thriving business in garden ornaments. Think of it as art-on-a-stick.

"I do a lot of different funny birds because they're very popular," said Smith, a former shop teacher. "I use whatever I can for heads -- hammer heads, wrenches, whatever comes along. ... Some would say I'm more of a craftsman than an artist, but I don't know where one stops and the other starts. I just like to make practical things that people like."

Smith's nephew and his wife run the nearby BNOX Gold & Iron shop, which specializes in handmade jewelry. The second Pepin gallery, T&C Latané, also emphasizes jewelry and functional art, including custom-designed cookie cutters.

Trained as a jeweler, Tom Latané shifted into blacksmithing gradually as his interest in traditional locksmithing evolved. He now makes kitchen utensils, Scandinavian-style candelabra, and elaborately carved boxes with hand-wrought hinges and banding. His wife, Catherine, was a fiber artist when they met, "but I married into all these metalworking tools and started playing around with them," she said.

Now her specialties include handprint cookie cutters modeled on outlines of children's hands. They're an old tradition within the "cookie cutter universe," she said, laughing. "I would make them for my daughter when she was little, and it was a big thrill for her to eat her fingers off."

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431