Playing in the sand: Renowned sand sculptor comes to Independence

With buckets of sand and his fingers immersed in water, Bert Adams stood among men wearing ties and women dressed in nursing scrubs Thursday afternoon at Centerpoint Medical Center.

Wearing a loose-fitting T-shirt, khaki pants and red Crocs shoes, his long gray hair tied back in a ponytail and his glasses hanging around his shirt collar, Adams worked inside the hospital’s lobby for a solid two hours, but the nationally recognized sand sculptor wasn’t too busy to chat.

“People are probably wondering, ‘What is he doing in the middle of my hospital?’” Adams said, jokingly, as hospital staff and visitors passed him by.

But his purpose was clear: Adams was creating a luminaria for tonight’s Relay For Life at Centerpoint, which marks the inaugural Independence community-wide Relay For Life event. His ending result would read just as the message on this year’s T-shirts: “Cancer Fears the Walker.”

Despite the finished product and the recognition Adams, 52, has gained in the past two-and-a-half decades for his now full-time work, he maintains that he isn’t an artist – his background is in electrical engineering, and he has a better grasp on physics and math than he does on sketching the ideas that fill his mind.

“They claim I’m an artist these days, but I didn’t take any art classes. I don’t know how to draw – seriously, I learned how to sculpt, not how to draw,” said the Vancouver, Wash., based Adams, whose work takes him across the United States and the world. “Part of my engineering background is cheating and learning to use whatever works.”

Roughly 25 years ago, Adams entered a sand contest – his first – with his brother and four friends at the Carmel Beach (Calif.) Sand Castle Contest. The contest’s theme was “150 Years of American Architecture,” but instead of making a stereotypical skyscraper or log cabin, Adams and his crew made a parking lot, including 150 little sand cars that filled the lot.

Sand castles aren’t always about fairy tales or goofy characters, Adams said. His most famous piece, “Under Pressure,” is readily available through an online search. It features a large hand pushing a disgruntled man’s face into the ground. The sculpture created quite a stir when it was originally on display, he recalls.

But the local Relay For Life officials are grateful for Adams’ work, said Heather Palmer, chairwoman of the event and director of oncology services at Centerpoint.

“It’s absolutely amazing,” she said Thursday as she watched Adams create the luminaria. “I’m so thrilled that he would come here to do this for us. For him to be able to put the luminaria in this kind of light for us is wonderful.”

While sand castles are a rare treat in the Midwest – at least compared to the East and West coasts – this wasn’t Adams’ first time in the Kansas City area. In 2011, he brought his Sand in the City sand-building and sculpture contest event to the area, as a fundraiser benefiting the Shawnee, Kan.-based Wonderscope Children’s Museum of Kansas City.

On Saturday, Adams also will offer demonstrations of his work at The Maker Faire, under the Wonderscope Tent, at Union Station in Kansas City.

Back at Centerpoint, it’s easily the first time in the hospital’s five-year history that something like sand-sculpting has taken place inside the lobby, said Centerpoint Chief Financial Officer Jim Brown, who also serves on Wonderscope’s board of directors and was instrumental in bringing Adams to Independence.

In his 25 years of sculpting sand, Adams said, the art form has changed – it started out as “old guys with cartoons, and since the Europeans have been brought into it, the art has really stepped up tremendously. The art is way better now.”

Even though he travels half of the year these days with his full-time job of “playing in the sand,” Adams keeps a light sense of humor with his passersby, such as in comments he made Thursday afternoon: “You can see the tools are rare and very hard to find,” he quipped, “like sponges.”

But it wasn’t until recently that Adams was taken seriously by his mother, who questioned his career change after he went to college, studied math and science and ended up in a field that, to some, seems like child’s play.

It was one circumstance that placed Adams among business executives and traditional professionals – just as he appeared on Thursday afternoon – that changed his mother’s mind.

“She finally started introducing me as a sand sculptor last year,” Adams said, “after I made the front page of The Wall Street Journal.”