Kim Bernadas found sculpture the way many people find their calling: through a friend’s invitation she nearly declined. In 1991, soon after finishing her physical therapy education in New Orleans, she agreed to try a sculpting class. Within a couple of sessions she was hooked. Her first figure went into a student show and sold, and the decision was made.
More than three decades later, Bernadas is one of the Gulf South’s most accomplished figurative sculptors, and the Eastern Shore has become a second home for her work. She and her husband, Kevin Cook, purchased property in Silverhill, where she spends three to four days a week sculpting and teaching classes at the Eastern Shore Art Center in Fairhope, while continuing her long teaching tenure at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, where she has taught since 2006.
A Career Cast in Bronze
Bernadas left her physical therapy career as commissions replaced clinical work, and her public art record grew steadily. Her landmark civic project is “Birth of a Muse,” the first post-Katrina bronze sculpture commission awarded by the City of New Orleans. Unveiled at Coliseum Square in the Lower Garden District through the city’s Percent for Art program, the bronze depicts Terpsichore, the muse of dance, emerging from a trumpet flower, a deliberate symbol of the city’s renewal. The work was later elected by the Arts Council of New Orleans as one of the most influential public art contributions of the program’s first 25 years.
Her portrait and memorial bronzes span the region: a bust of Walter Dumas for the Baton Rouge Community College Center, an Ed McKee plaque for Livingston Parish, a lifesize Mother and Child for the Tulane Medical Center maternity pavilion, bronzes of the muses Euterpe, Thalia and Melpomene for the Jefferson Performing Arts Center, a lifesize memorial of Brother Martin Hernandez, and a lifesize St. Landry for the St. Landry Parish Bicentennial in Opelousas. She was named WYES Artist of the Year in 2005 and won an award at the 2004 National Drawing Exhibition in Santa Fe.
Teaching the Eastern Shore to See
When Bernadas approached the Eastern Shore Art Center about teaching, the center had not run sculpture classes in about a decade. After her first workshop, students were enthusiastic, and classes in portrait, figurative and animal sculpture now run in eight-week blocks, with periodic workshops alongside. Her current student projects have included animals and birds.
Her teaching philosophy is disarmingly simple. Students should arrive with the mindset of a child rather than an adult; the hardest student to teach is the one who is not open. “Leave egos and insecurities at the door,” she tells them. “Nothing you do is wrong; you are not in a competition.” She recalls a student in his late sixties who discovered, in her class, that he was genuinely talented. “He found his creative energy, discovered that he was decent at sculpting, and didn’t know it until taking my class.”
Sculpture itself is therapeutic, she says, a claim that carries weight from someone trained in physical therapy. Working simple elements of clay lets people decompress from everyday life and, in her words, centers you. Her unusual client list even includes plastic surgeons: she hosts portrait and anatomy workshops in New Orleans that help surgeons better understand the aesthetic relationships of the face when consulting with patients.
Clay to Bronze
Bernadas usually keeps three to five private commissions in production at once, and her specialty is capturing the likeness and essence of a person, sometimes literally turning back the clock by working from old photographs. A bust takes nine to twelve months; a full life-size figure takes about a year, with two or three of those months at the foundry.
On the Eastern Shore, that foundry is close by. She works with Corey Swindle at the Fairhope Foundry, casting her pieces in bronze and collaborating on monumental sculptures across the Southeast. Her long-term teaching dream follows the same arc: to take her students from clay to bronze, guiding them from the first form through mold-making to watching their own sculpture poured into reality at the Fairhope Foundry. “Showing your art is celebrating your hard work,” she said. For students of any age on the Eastern Shore, the invitation stands, no experience required and no egos at the door.