Drawn and boarder’d: Museum exhibit showcases 30 years of Burton designs

There are plenty of painters who get their art displayed on gallery walls all over the world. But how many of them have had their paintings strapped to the boots of the world’s best athletes as they push the envelope on what’s possible for mere seconds in mid-air?

That would be Scott Lenhardt, an artist who has designed 60 boards for Burton riders like Ross Powers, Shannon Dunn and Danny Davis, as well as work for Phish, Nike and Mountain Dew.

The Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum on Main Street in Stowe, with its current exhibit, is presenting a deep dive into nearly 30 years of Lenhardt’s work. With more than three decades worth of pigment under his nails, Lenhardt is in no hurry to move from hand-painting his designs to doing them on a computer.

“I’m putting so much energy into them, in hopes that a fraction of that energy is going to come through when someone’s standing on it and riding it,” he said during the museum’s Red Bench talk last week. “Or, if they’re sitting in their room and it’s leaning against the wall, they’re like,’ I gotta go ride that thing.’ I don’t think you get the energy with computers.”

Lenhardt grew up in West Rupert, a tiny Bennington County village — not that Rupert proper is a metropolis — about a mile from the New York border. His youth snowboarding years were at Bromley as part of the Glebelands crew that dominated the mountain in the early ‘90s.

As someone who has produced some 60 boards for the world’s most famous snowboard company, Lenhardt has also worked with some of its most famous faces, creating indelible duos that mesh the personalities of rider and artist. Many of those finished products are part of the museum exhibit.

His collaborations root the viewer in their tracks, with inside jokes and tributes drawn into the whimsical lines that involve robots, Vikings, the Headless Horseman and classic movie monster motifs, but also breathtaking vistas of fantastical colors.

Michael Jager, the creative director of JDK designs, which has collaborated with Lenhardt with several designs, described Lenhardt’s work as “the lion, the lamb and the fearless flow.”

“His art, ideas and very sensibility created there (in southern Vermont, where he grew up) resonates with the bold uniqueness of a lion unafraid to create a universe of images, characters, spaces and places radically individual and powerfully crafted, while simultaneously creating art with a soft flowing nature in line and form, an aesthetic as gentle as a lamb,” Jager writes in the exhibit.

For all the eye-catching nature of the untouched products carefully curated and placed around the museum floor, some of the richest pieces in the exhibit are the artifacts from Lenhardt’s archives. There are conceptual designs drawn on paper and handwritten notes between him and pro riders riffing on concepts. There is a collection of limited-edition Mountain Dew bottles with his designs and even a Ross Powers “Huck Doll” bendable action figure, still in the original packaging.

Perhaps the most museum-quality artifact, though, is a nearly 30-year-old twin-tip snowboard with a portrait of Jane’s Addiction front man Perry Farrell, the only actual ridden board in the collection. It’s arguably the most tangible representation of Lenhardt’s mid-90s origin story.

He said he knew he wanted to get into the business of designing boards, so he painted his own and toted it over to Stratton for the biggest event in snowboarding, the U.S. Open, hoping one of the riders would see it and ask him about it.

That someone was Shannon Dunn, a legend in snowboarding — the first woman to win an Olympic gold medal in snowboarding, taking home bronze in the 1998 Nagano Games. Now, the Perry Farrell board is included right along with Dunn’s Lenhardt originals.

“For anyone out there who wants to break into snowboarding, that’s how I did it,” Lenhardt said. “I basically painted my board and went to show it off at the biggest event in Vermont.”