The shores of Long Beach played host to the 2014 Great Sand Sculpture Contest last weekend. The event, which is hosted by Rotoract Long Beach and is in its 82nd year, took place at Granada Beach and featured amateur and professional sand-sculpting, arts and crafts, live music and charity fundraising. An estimated $2,500 of event proceeds will be directly donated to the Long Beach Public Library Foundation (LBPL), according to Katie Gaston, a founding member of Long Beach Rotoract.
In this year’s event, internationally recognized professional sand-sculptors took to the beach to craft Long Beach’s first-ever 100-ton centerpiece sculpture. The crew carved a piece of art highlighting this year’s event theme: “Fizz, Boom, Read!” and required two days of heavy machinery, over 120 hours of professional labor and three full days of sculpting, according to Gaston.
On Sunday, 30 community teams lined the beaches of Belmont Shore to sculpt their way into the Sand Sculpture Contest Hall of Fame. Teams competed in three unique categories: family, civic and corporate teams. Judges included: Ron Nelson, executive director of the Long Beach Art Museum; Stephanie James, board president of the LBPL Foundation; Stacy Mungo, 5th District councilmember; Suzie Price, 3rd District councilmember; and Kym Cloughesy, Mrs. Southern California Cities.
Sculpture themes included corporate logos, giant sea turtles, Star Wars characters such as R2D2, and alien space craft. The grand prize-winning team, Higher Education, crafted a NASA space-shuttle with a moon-landed astronaut reading a book, without his glasses, on the moon. Winning teams were awarded donated prizes from local businesses, and each first-place team received a Keurig machine from event sponsor Keurig.
This year, more than 10,000 people attended the contest, according to Gaston.
Source: Rotoract Club
