For the first time in 13 years, New York public art nonprofit Creative Time staged its wild, weird, and wonderful Sandcastle Competition on the sands of Rockaway Beach on Sunday. After a rainy morning, the skies cleared and the sun came out, allowing seven artist teams to go head to head in pursuit of the coveted “Golden Shovel”—and a $500 cash prize. Gabriela Ruiz ultimately claimed the victory, clad in a red inflatable crab costume to stage what she called an “underwater rave” at Beach 108th Street.

Bringing back the Sandcastle Competition was a priority for Creative Time’s new director, Jean Cooney. She took the helm in February, returning to the organization where she had worked for eight years, most recently as deputy director, before departing to lead Times Square Arts in 2019.

“We have a lot of big plans with commissions and programs, but the Sandcastle Competition is such a beloved event,” Cooney told me. “It really embodies all the things I’ve been craving: getting together in a very iconic New York public place and letting artists lead us through a day that’s a little weird and experimental.”

It’s an exciting start to Cooney’s reign, and a reminder of some of the incredible projects she was part of during her earlier tenure—Nick Cave’s dancing horse performances at Grand Central Station, Kara Walker’s giant sugar sphinx at Brooklyn’s old Domino Sugar Refinery, and Duke Riley’s actual flock of pigeons, released each night with LED lights on their ankles.

“Today was magical,” RJ Rushmore, the former Creative Time marketing and brand strategy manager, wrote on Instagram after the event. “It felt like a return to the golden era of [Creative Time], the one that inspired me to work there and that I caught the tail end of in 2016–18.”

Decades of Experimental Urban Art

Creative Time has deep roots in the city, dating back to its founding in 1974. (One of its very first projects was filling a Wall Street office building lobby with Ruckus Manhattan, a massive soft-sculpture model of Manhattan by Red Grooms and Mimi Gross that recently was the subject of a show at the Brooklyn Museum.)

The sandcastle competition actually offers a link back to the organization’s early years, between 1978 and 1988, when “Art on the Beach” was staged each summer (except for ’79) at the future site of Battery Park City. Back then, the site offered an incongruous landscape of sand dunes at the bottom of Lower Manhattan, in the shadow of the recently constructed Twin Towers.

Cooney’s predecessor, Justine Ludwig (now creative director of the 2030 edition of PST at the Getty in Los Angeles), certainly oversaw important projects during her tenure. Some of those, Cooney worked on, including Moving Chains, a monumental kinetic Charles Gaines sculpture that was eight years in the making and finally debuted on Governors Island in 2022.

But the pandemic undoubtedly took its toll on Creative Time, as it did for so many art organizations. Creative Time had to cancel at least one ambitious project, a food bank and ritual-based performance piece from Guadalupe Maravilla in Queens, due to a surge in cases. And the organization, while undoubtedly beloved, doesn’t have the deep pockets of say, the Public Art Fund.

Returning to Rockaway for such an offbeat, quirky project feels like an exciting moment for Creative Time—like the start of a renaissance.

Fun in the Sun

If you’ve been craving more whimsy in your life, the sandcastle competition offered it in droves.  The MC for the afternoon, drag performer Charlene Incarnate, kept the vibes high as Ruiz and her competitors—Anthony Akinbola; the Canal St. Research Association; Marianna Simnett and Eliza Douglas; Chiffon Thomas and Victoria Martinez; Dean Millien, and Rachel Rossin—toiled on the beach, lugging buckets of water up from the shore, and bending over to craft their ephemeral sculptures.

Heading the judging panel was Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak, who staged the first two competitions during her long tenure leading Creative Time. Joining her were designer and actor Waris Ahluwalia, a returning judge; Pedro Reyes, the artist behind Creative Time’s fabulous 2016 haunted house, DOOMOCRACY; Julio Torres, who wrote, directed, and starred in the surreal art world comedy Problemista; designer Jodi Davis; and curator Michi Jigarjian, president of Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York. (Jigarjian also hosted the event’s afterparty at the nearby Rockaway Hotel, where she is a partner and heads the art program.)

The lighthearted day provided a welcome contrast from the uptight white cube where the art world often congregates. But nevertheless, the competition was fierce.

Akinbola enlisted literal child labor for his submission, using a standard plastic mold to mass produce row upon row of tiny sandcastles, with a sign offering “free sandcastles.” (It reminded me of the photos I’ve seen of the Turkish ghost town Burj Al Babas, home to hundreds of identical, abandoned castles.) Rossin placed a pink model castle atop a mountainous sand landscape embellished with flowers and leaves, meant to represent Bavaria and the inspiration for the original Disney castle.

The day’s showstopper was probably Simnett and Douglas’s giant tribute to Dolly Parton, with her ample bosom and poofy blonde hair towering over the sand. At judging time, the artists held up a banner behind the figure that appeared to represent the pearly gates of heaven, and played “I Will Always Love You,” promising to put the prize money toward a trip to Dollywood if they won.

A Technical Challenge

“It was my first time doing sand sculpture and I’m never doing it again,” Ruiz proclaimed in the wake of her win, besting Millien in second place and Canal Street in third place. “I watched so many videos and they made it look so easy.”

The contest’s inaugural winners, husband-and-wife artist duo Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw (who recently erected a giant hot dog in Times Square in a project with Cooney), actually credit their victory to their decision not to pursue mastery of the medium. Catron confessed to me that their strategy had been to downplay the sand element of their entry, because they suspected sand sculpting was harder than it looked.

Indeed, if you went to the Creative Time Sandcastle Competition expecting an exquisitely carved sand masterpiece, you would have been sorely disappointed. The most impressively sculpted one in the bunch was probably the giant sand rat by Millien, who decorated the figure with tiny tinfoil rats, shaped on site, like the ones he showed in his installation Cats and Rats in this year’s “Greater New York” at MoMA PS1.

As my toddler son Zachary and I admired the piece, I overheard another visitor tell his friend “it still looks like shit through, compared to real sand castle competitions.”

That’s likely why Creative Time’s contest winners have all taken a more conceptual approach to the form.

Ruiz, who was in this year’s Whitney Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, captivated the crowd by incorporating sound directly into her sandcastle, embedding speakers and a subwoofer into her sculpted figures of a person and two seahorses. When she turned on the music to present to the judges, the sand literally started jumping inside the subwoofer. (Incarnate dubbed it a “deep sea disco” and marveled over the liquid quality the sand seemed to take on: “that’s really something else.”)

In 2013, Jamie Isenstein beat out runner up Esperanza Mayobre, who used molds to create a detailed, life-size refugee raft, and Duke Riley, who came in third place with an incredible White Castle sculpture decorated with shells he collected at New York’s Dead Horse Bay. The winning design, in comparison, featured three tightly compacted sand columns, one topped with bubbles, another with ice, and the third with a musician playing the saxophone.

Catron and Outlaw kicked off this tradition of decidedly untraditional sandcastles by earning top honors for their playful take on Rome’s Trevi Fountain, sitting atop platforms embedded in the sand, which other performers half buried at the base. (They squirted water from their mouths.)

For the artists, who have gone on to show at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum and MOCA Detroit, it was a key moment in their early careers: “We were such young, starting-out artists, and it felt amazing to win,” Catron recalled. “We beat Tom Sachs!”

A Watershed Moment?

The 2013 competition—where I first met Catron and Outlaw—is important to me too. To my memory, it was the first art event I actually went to and pitched writing about. (Thank you to Art in America web editor Brian Boucher, the first art writer I ever met and a friend and colleague to this day, for giving the story the green light.) I didn’t know it at the time, but writing about the contest was something of a turning point for my own professional life.

At that point, I had been at Art in America for over two years—going on three if you count my stint as a marketing assistant—and I had learned so much about art journalism and working at a publication. I could see the careers that the editors had built there, traveling to exhibitions around the world and attending exciting events. (Earlier that summer, I had successfully followed, uninvited, when Boucher and then-editor-in-chief Lindsay Pollock went to the filming of Jay-Z’s “Picasso Baby” music video with Marina Abramović at Pace Gallery in Chelsea.)

I was five years out of college and barely scraping by in New York City. Being a real art writer was something lying tantalizingly within reach, an almost-attainable dream that I was still too ashamed to admit I had. Friends and family members regularly encouraged me to apply to administrative roles that sounded mind-numbingly boring. But I felt like I had cracked open the door to an exciting career, and I couldn’t let myself give up on the chance to walk through.

When, five months later, I serendipitously learned that Ben Genocchio was launching Artnet News, I cold emailed him to apply. My sandcastle story was one of six clips I sent as proof of my writing prowess. Reader, I got the job.

Revisiting the event so many years later, just a few months after my abrupt termination, brought back a lot of memories. Memories of how hard it was living on a salary where, after taxes ($504), rent ($575), student loans ($173), and the company health care premium ($586), I would have had about $661 left to cover the rest of my monthly expenses. (Those are all real figures.) Instead, I went uninsured from graduation until September 2010, when the Affordable Care Act 2010 allowed dependents to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26.

It’s a little bit stressful to think back to that time now, trying to navigate a freelance writing career where $0.50 a word is all too often the going rate. But I also know that I am in a very different place than I was back then. I’ve forged relationships across the industry and built a strong reputation as an authoritative voice in the art world.

So yes, I’m excited to see what’s next for Creative Time under Jean Cooney—and I’m excited to write about it as I continue my own new chapter. Thanks for following along.

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