Finding a Way (to do what you love)

Bonnie Kern started her career as a Kindergarten teacher, and through her curiosity, tenacity and love of creativity became an artist and eventually Hood's Gallery Director.

Her unusual journey to Hood

Department

Art & Archaeology

Title

Gallery Director

Staff

Partnerships

By Michelle Burnett, 02/09/2023

The latest exhibit in the Mary Condon Hodson Gallery, titled “Neuro Land,” features large fabric and paper diorama installations based on enlarged microscopic images of “biological neural networks,” that portray “nano-scale landscapes” of the human brain. The artist, Michael Gavish, is a former scientific researcher-turned-artistwho illuminates the aesthetic collision of art and neuroscience.

Like Gavish, Bonnie Kern, gallerydirector in the Department of Art and Archaeologyat Hood, knows a thing or two about starting in one direction professionallyand finding your way to another.After earning her undergraduate degree in education at Penn State, she pivoted when circumstances wouldn’t allow her to accept aHood College Grad School offer andbegan her career as a kindergarten teacher. Energized by her young students’ ability to channelendless wells of creativity, she forged her own artistic path, won a photo contest in 2005, and pivoted once again.

Bonnie started her own photography business in the DC area, Polka Dot Portraits, which focused initially on family portraiture and later expanded to sports and events and even industrial photography “taking pics on the side of a mountain with steel-toed boots capturing the welding and installation of pipelines.” After 15 years in business, she longed to “find my creative voice just for me.” In another pivot, she earned her MFA at Wilson College. Bonnie's first personal exhibit, with the Adams County Arts Council in Pennsylvania, sold out of prints. The subject matter? Dumpsters. “Yes, dumpsters.” Her MFA led her to a teaching assignment at York College, and then, fortuitously, to Hood.

What brought you to Hood?

I always wanted to attend or work for Hood, so when the opportunity came to work in the gallery and teach here, I was ecstatic to apply. During grad school, I worked at Wilson College’s Bogigian Gallery and felt inspired to create spaces to recognize artists’ work.

Describe a memorable Exhibit

The first exhibition I produced at Hood was with [artist] Katie Helms. We needed the largest U-Haul to get all of her work into the gallery! Her Victorian-furniture, coral-reef sculptures were intricately created, some with mindful desperation to thrive in an ever-changing environment, some pieces taking on human personae including ears, eyeballs and fingers sprouting up within the sculpture. Focusing on a scientist-artist brought Hood’s Center for Coastal and Watershed Studies together with the arts, which is a great feat.

What has been particularly rewarding about your work?

Since signing on at Hood, I have taught Business of Art and Senior Seminar. It’s an opportunity to share my journey with student artists in hopes to inspire their own journey of creating a career they are proud of in the arts. As I tell them in class, “find a way to make a living doing what you love.”