Lundeen art graces all new Scheels stores

JOHNSTOWN — The 12 life-size and more than life-size sculptures in front of the new Scheels All Sports store in Johnstown tell multiple stories about the store, the subjects and the sculptors.

Brothers George and Mark Lundeen of Loveland spent a year and thousands of hours building the bronze sculptures — four that are life-size depicting sportsmen and women, four double life-size of even more sporting figures and four more that are life-size of three of the Founding Fathers and a former president. To do the building, the Lundeens worked with a team of 10 people and subcontracted with local foundries.

“It’s the wow factor, I think, just the size and the proportions of the pieces, how big they are, although they don’t look very big in front of the store,” said Mark, co-owner with George of Lundeen Sculpture, 356 E. Fourth St. in Loveland.

The sculptures, installed Sept. 7, are just one of many features of the new 250,000-square-foot Scheels sporting goods store that opened Sept. 30.

The store, 4755 Ronald Reagan Blvd., caters to athletes and sports enthusiasts with 2.2 million items in stock and by forging art with experience that goes beyond simple shopping. The offerings include a Ferris wheel, an aquarium, archery lanes, mini-bowling and arcade games, along with places to shop and eat. Throughout the store, there is artwork such as paintings, sculptures and woodcarvings.

“It’s an experience as much as anything to go into the store. It’s an entertaining attraction, and we’re happy, happy to be part of it,” George said.

The sculptures sit six and six at the store’s two entrances for Scheels’ 27th store — the employee-owned company is building one store a year through 2020 and hires the Lundeens to create the same sculptures for each store.

“It’s extremely high quality work, and it’s very detailed,” said Jason Loney, vice president of store development for Scheels.

Most of the cities in the 13 states with Scheels stores aren’t known for being a sculpture destination like Loveland with its sculpture park, sculptures on display downtown and other areas of the city, two annual sculpture shows and three foundries.

“If they go to a sculpture park, they go to see the sculptures, but if they go to Scheels, they may be surprised to see the sculptures,” Mark said. “Hopefully, they will be pleasantly surprised and say, ‘Gosh, I wish I could meet those guys who made them.’”

The sculptures together weigh 10,000 pounds and took about 8,000 hours to make — the Lundeens don’t know the exact timeframe but work with their team to create the dozen pieces over the span of a year. The first set, finished in 2008 for the Reno Sparks, Nev., store, took another 4,000 hours to create the clay molds, they estimate.

The life-size sculptures of sporting figures include a baseball player, football player, soccer player and golfer, while the twice life-size sculptures are of a snowboarder, fly fisherman, mountain biker and bow hunter.

The other life-size sculptures are of Founding Fathers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and late president Ronald Reagan.

Steve Scheels, CEO of Scheels and grandson of the founder, originally contacted the Lundeens about creating life-size sculptures of sporting figures for all of its new stores and narrowed it down to the eight sports — so far about 10 sets have been installed at the stores.

Scheels called the Lundeens a couple of years later to ask if they would make sculptures of historical figures to place in front of Scheels’ headquarters in Fargo, N.D.

Within a couple of weeks, Scheels called the Lundeens again, saying the sculptures brought additional traffic to the store and asked that the historical figures be placed at all of its new and existing stores, George said.

George and Mark are working on another set of sporting and historical figures for a store in Lincoln, Neb., scheduled to reopen next year and replace an existing store there.

The Lundeens, who focus on people and a few animals as their subject matter, temporarily display a few of the sculptures throughout town prior to delivery — such as the snowboarder for Scheels that sat outside the Loveland Dairy Queen for a few months.

“We get pieces finished, and we need places to put them,” Mark said.

Mark hadn’t planned to become a sculptor but visited George in 1981 on a backpacking trip after earning a degree in marketing and said he’d do some work for him and never left. George, who has a Master of Arts degree in art, opened Lundeen Sculpture in 1976 in Loveland after earning his degree, studying in Italy as a Fulbright Scholar and teaching art at the University of Nebraska. He picked Loveland for one of the well-known foundries there, Art Castings of Colorado, still in existence today — he worked there for more than a year until he had enough business to go full-time, he said.

George moved his foundry to its current location in 1981. Over the years, he and Mark, who work individually and on joint projects, have created hundreds of different sculptures and thousands of final pieces, though they couldn’t give an exact count due to the large quantity of their work. Their sculptures range in size from three inches to 20 feet.

Customers of Scheels love the sculptures and already are noticing the ones at the Loveland store before its opening, Loney said.

“We have lots of people driving by and going slow and looking at the different sculptures that are here,” he said.

George Lundeen was awarded a Bravo! Entrepreneur award in 2013. Read here.

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