Sculptor Denali Granholm is good with figures

by Kim Nowacki
ON Magazine
051308_vientosculpture_web
Photo courtesy of Denali Granholm
"Viento" is her signature piece, says Granholm. "It's pretty much my self portrait," says the Yakima sculptor.
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Of the more than 200 bas-relief sculptures that Denali Granholm has created for Nike's Walk of Fame -- Wayne Gretzky, Nolan Ryan, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, to name a few -- she's only met a handful of her famous sports subjects. Most of the time, Granholm is working from photographs to create the bronze portraits for Nike's world headquarters in Beaverton, Ore.

She has an innate talent to turn those snapshots into three-dimensional works of art with personality, despite discovering her passion for sculpting after several other career and life paths -- a flight attendant for United Airlines, teaching home economics in India, interior design.

Doing portraits, she says, is in her cellular makeup.

"It's like I have a memory from another lifetime," the 59-year-old Granholm says while sitting in her tidy Yakima studio, which is one of the stops on Saturday's Tour of Artists' Homes and Studios, an annual fundraiser organized by the Larson Gallery Guild.

Now in its ninth year, the self-guided tour is an opportunity to visit the living and creating quarters of local artists. It offers insights into how local artists think, live, work -- and decorate.

And like last year, all of the stops are new. Except, of course, for designer Leo Adams' celebrated Ahtanum Ridge work-of-art abode, which has been included annually since the tour's inception. (Regular tour-goers would most likely cause a stir if they didn't get the chance to check out Adams' continuously changing home -- and hang out with his adorable dogs.)

 

In addition to Granholm, whose studio is in the basement of a beautiful English Tudor-style brick house near Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital, folks will get to visit Gary Dismukes (clay), Carol Fletcher (jewelry/mixed media) and Evans Fletcher (mixed media/fused glass), and Ardith Kaiser (painting) and her daughter, Holly Mahre (sculpture).

Also new this year is a $5 discount ticket for high school and college students.

Granholm is excited to be on the tour, but also sorry she doesn't get to visit the other artist spaces. (It's a common lament.)

Born and raised in the Lower Valley, Granholm has led an adventurous life filled with travel and various career paths. She has a curious mind that needed to see what was out there.

But it wasn't until she took an art class just for fun while attending Metropolitan State College of Denver -- she was studying psychology -- that Granholm realized abilities she didn't know she had.

Eventually, she earned her degree in art education from Central Washington University in 1977 (and a minor in psychology), then moved to Vancouver, Wash., where she started sculpting, and built a career as an interior designer.

However, in spring 1989, Granholm felt she needed a sign to tell her which way her life should go. Three months later, a Portland art gallery that showed her work called to say Nike was interested in talking to her about portraits for its Walk of Fame.

At the time, Granholm had only done one bas-relief sculpture, ever. Nike was so impressed with her work and ideas that she has a lifetime contract with the athletic company titan.

But sculpting the faces of seminal sports figures isn't Granholm's only medium. She's responsible for the life-size bronze statue of the late, great jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton that stands at the University of Idaho in Moscow. Granholm met and measured Hampton for the piece. He was a man, she recalls, who exuded much love.

Granholm also sculpts beautiful, sensual abstract pieces -- they come from the soul, she says -- and has commissioned pieces of people's horses. Granholm has had a life-long love of horses, and even bought one when she lived in Colorado. (When she was a kid, "I thought I was a horse," she says.)

Granholm returned to the Valley in the winter of 2005 after her mother died and her father needed some help. And she plans to stick around and settle down.

She's traded in her saddle for skinny road bike tires -- cycling being another passion -- teaches art classes and is at peace with staying in one place.

"I'm happy to be back," she says.

 

If you go

WHAT: The Larson Gallery Guild's ninth annual Tour of Artists' Homes and Studios.

WHO'S ON THE TOUR: Leo Adams (paintings/designs), Gary Dismukes (clay), Carol Fletcher (jewelry/mixed media) and Evans Fletcher (mixed media/fused glass), Denali Granholm (sculpture) and Ardith Kaiser (painting) and Holly Mahre (sculpture).

WHEN: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday.

HOW MUCH: Tickets cost $20 for adults and $5 for students (high school and college) and are available at the Larson Gallery, Oak Hollow Gallery, Simon Edwards Gallery, Yakima Bindery and the downtown Banner Bank.

MORE INFO: Call the Larson Gallery at 574-4875 or visit www.larsongallery.org.