Boulder artist who created Niwot sculptures dies
Eddie Running Wolf said the excitement in art was always the next piece.
Wolf, a Boulder artist, liked seeing the potential in “the blank canvas, the untouched log, the unmarked block of marble,” he wrote on his studio webpage, Running Wolf Studio. After his death last week, Wolf’s family believes the artwork he created will continue to remind people of his legacy.
Wolf, 62, died at 2:10 p.m. Wednesday after a battle with an illness that he and his family believed was the coronavirus. Wolf was hospitalized at Platte Valley Medical Center in Brighton on July 20. Two days later, he was put on a ventilator, and his condition became critical, according to Wolf’s Gofundme page.
Wolf’s sister, Margie Albert of Hudson, said her older brother got sick in March, after attending an art show. He was coughing, enduring a shortness of breath and experiencing headaches and a fever, which are all symptoms of the highly infectious respiratory disease. Although he tested negative for the coronavirus, Albert said he was being treated as a coronavirus patient. He was also tested for pneumonia, a rare form of leukemia and several other illnesses, but all those tests also came back negative, too.
Wolf and his wife, Melissa, were together for 37 years. They married in 2000. Wolf’s sons are Calvin
Wolf, 23, and Dustin Wolf, 21. The family lives near Fort Lupton, where they had been renovating a home, until Wolf became sick.
Wolf was the oldest of four children. Albert said they grew up in Boulder and the family didn’t have a lot of money. She said she and her siblings were told that they had American Indian heritage, but she said she doesn’t know what tribe they were from. From an early age, she said her brother was always drawing and carving.
“He had a gift like nobody I’ve ever seen,” Albert said. “In his heart and soul, he was full Indian. He very much related with their struggles and some of the injustice done to Native Americans.”
Albert said one of the most incredible aspects of her brother’s art was his ability to re-create complex emotions.
“He can capture the emotions and feelings: pain, love, struggle and exaltation. He has a gift, a gift from God,” Albert said.
Wolf attended Centaurus High School in Lafayette but dropped out at 16 to pursue his passion for art. He began working in a salvage yard. On his 17th birthday, he was cutting up a Cadillac, when the car’s gas tank exploded. Wolf had third- and second-degree burns on his back and right leg.
While in the hospital, Wolf’s father, Larry, who also was an artist, gave him a kit with eight carving tools in it. As Wolf was rehabilitating, he channeled his energy into wood carving.
Wolf said on his studio web page that he was “enamored” with the culture of the Pacific Northwest Coast
Indian art and that he enjoyed studying and replicating the faces of the Plains Indians in his work.
In 2009, Wolf was commissioned by Niwot officials to create sculptures that would honor the area’s Native Indians. Wolf carved from a cottonwood stump the Niisiitenoot Nii’eihiiho, or The Eagle Catcher.
As he explains in a YouTube video about his carving, the eagle catchers would create a pit in a high area, covering it with branches and enticing an eagle with a piece of bait laid on top of the brush.
“When the eagle landed, they would reach up out of the pit and grab the feet, if they were lucky,” Wolf said.
The Arapaho took some of the eagle’s tail feathers and released it, the sculpture plaque explains.
He also carved a man riding a horse, which he describes as “an imagined portrait of Chief Niwot,” who was a southern Arapaho tribal leader. Chief Niwot’s people lived along the Front Range, often spending winters in Boulder Valley. Chief Niwot was welcoming to white settlers in 1858, during the Colorado gold rush, according to Visit Longmont.
On the Niwot Colorado Facebook page, the town expressed its grief over Wolf’s death.
“We are all incredibly saddened to learn of the death of Eddie Running Wolf whose beautiful tree sculptures stand next to Niwot Road and are truly a part of Niwot’s identity,” the post reads.
Wolf was an active part of Boulder’s Native American Rights Fund, a nonprofit that provides legal assistance to Indian tribes. Wolf showed his art at the nonprofit’s annual art show and described on his studio web page that the people who worked for the nonprofit were like family to him.
Wolf wrote that art was something that always challenged and pushed him.
“Art has never been easy for me,” Wolf wrote. “It is a struggle, a battle. I am rarely happy or completely satisfied with anything. Art is hard, it is an obsession, an addiction. It was from the very start. I would want it to be nothing less.”
Albert said since Wolf’s death, his family has seen tons of support from people whose lives were touched by Wolf. “I’m just astounded at the outpouring of love and generosity of the community,” Albert said.