Mississippi bronze sculptor and artist J. Kim Sessums will be the featured speaker at this month’s meeting of the Vicksburg Art Association.

If you go

J. Kim Sessums will speak at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the March meeting of the Vicksburg Art Association. The event will be at the Firehouse Gallery at Main and Openwood streets. Admission is free, and refreshments will be served. Call 601-636-6110.

The event will be at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Firehouse Gallery at Main and Openwood streets.

“We are looking forward to him coming to speak,” said Jean Blue co-president of the VAA. “He will be our first 3-D artist and that will be unique.

Sessums will speak about the inspiration for his art and the sculptures he has created.

Sessums’ work can be seen at the Vicksburg National Military Park.

His bronze statue is the only monument in a Civil War park in the country to honor the Colored Troops, regiments of the U.S. Army during the Civil War that were composed of African-American soldiers.

The monument was dedicated Feb. 14, 2004, and honors those who fought in the 1st and 3rd Mississippi Infantry regiments during the Vicksburg Campaign.

Sessums grew up at his grandparents’ home in Forest. He is the sibling of Kevin Sessums, author of “Mississippi Sissy” and writer for magazines Allure and Vanity Fair; and Karole Sessums, who collaborated with Vicksburg artist and gallery owner H.C. Porter on a post-Hurricane Katrina documentary project, “Backyards and Beyond: Mississippians and Their Stories.”

He practices medicine in Brookhaven, and he and his wife, Kathy, have four children, Jake, Joey, Stewart and Price.

Sessums’ other creations include bronze works of renowned painter Andrew Wyeth, Pulitzer-winning Mississippi writer Eudora Welty and evangelist Billy Graham. He has also worked with graphite particles on paper, paint, clay and bronze.

He recently completed a life-size bronze portrait of former U.S. Rep. G.V. “Sonny” Montgomery of Mississippi.

The VNMP monument features three men — a soldier in a Union uniform looking forward, to the future; a Union soldier, supported in the middle; and a slave, looking back to signify the end of slavery.

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Contact Manivanh Chanprasith at mchanprasith@vicksburgpost.com.