July has been chock-full of world-class events here in the Boston area!

First there was the spectacle of being a host city for the FIFA World Cup. Then there was the height of activities surrounding Boston 250 that included the July 4^th Parade and Ceremonies. That day culminated in a particularly memorable version of the Boston Pop’s Fireworks Spectacular.

The week after that Sail Boston brought over 60 tall ships to Boston, and on July 11^th I got to watch the Parade of Sail from Tall Ship Boston. That is a 245′ ship turned floating oyster bar moored on Pier One in East Boston. Here’s a video I took of the USS Constitution sailing by and heading towards its home at Charlestown Navy Yard.

 

Exciting stuff!

Of course, my favorite event of all was the Revere Beach International Sand Sculpting Festival from July 17^th to July 19^th. Here’s a short video from Tuesday, July 14^th about the kick-off of the festival from RevereTV’s traditional coverage posted as a YouTube Playlist. If you watch closely, you will see a shot from the day they delivered the sand on Saturday, July 11^th that includes Sail Boston’s Parade of Sail on the horizon.

RevereTV (YouTube)
RevereTV (Website)

If you have seen my posts about this festival in the past, then you are probably expecting to see some sunny shots of beautiful sand sculptures with bright blue skies in the background (From Sand to Sand, Sand Sculpture Sanctuary).

However, I didn’t get shots like that this year. The week of the festival featured sweltering heat, smoky and cloudy skies, wind and thunderstorms. Here are a few stories about the weather related trials that befell the festival.

Boston Enters Its Second Heat Wave of the Summer with Blistering Temps Tuesday (Danielle Noyes, WBUR)
Poor Air Quality Loomed Over Boston Area Saturday Before Storms Rolled In (Louisa Moller, CBS News Boston)
Revere Shifts Sand Sculpting Festival Schedule Ahead of Saturday Storm (Tim Nazzaro, WCVB5)

Despite all of that, the festival did go on, and it was as awesome! There were also a few nice days. I just didn’t get to the festival to take pictures those days, and so my pictures are less “sunny” than usual.

For example, here’s my picture of this year’s center sculpture.

Here’s another clip from RevereTV’s YouTube Playlist that shows a time-lapse of that sculpture being built. Notice that sometimes there were bright blue skies, and sometimes there were not.

RevereTV (YouTube)
RevereTV (Website)

This year I watched the time-lapse of the center sculpture a bit more closely than I usually do and saw that some sculptors competing this year also worked on it.   I suspect that means that constructing it also serves as a nice community building exercise early in the week.

Here’s my shot of this year’s “photo-opportunity” sculpture that features Revere Beach’s iconic clock.

Here are a couple of shots that I took of one of my favorite sculptures. It was built by Marie-Line Gagné from Canada, it was titled Over Protection, and it won 2nd place in the competition.

Each year there is always one (or more) sculptures that I dub “a little different.” Here’s a shot of one in that category that was built by Joon park from California titled Don’t Look Inside.

Here’s an early shot of a sculpture by Ndricim Bejko (or Jimmy Bejko) from Boston titled Final Countdown.

The title is obviously referring to the World Cup, but I got a kick out of it because of the context of where it turned up in my pictures. Here’s a shot of Jimmy putting the finishing touches on his sculpture as judging was about to take place before storms rolled in on Saturday and another shot I took immediately after that capturing all of the sculptors working away during the “final countdown” before the judging was to take place.

Finally last, but not at all least, is an early shot of sculpture by Jonathan Bouchard (better known as Jobi) from Canada titled Odyssey.

Here’s a shot I took a few days later when the sculpture was close to finished.

It is no surprise that Jobi won People’s Choice, Sculptor’s Choice and 1st Place, and this isn’t the first time that he’s done it.

Here are shots I took of his work back in 2024. He titled this one Blend In.

That year he also won People’s Choice, Sculptor’s Choice and 1st Place!

Finally, back in 2019, Jobi’s sculpture was one of the nine sculptures that I included in the post From Sand to Sand. That post was about how I captured time-lapses of my favorite sculptures as they evolved from piles of sand to their full form and then back to sand. Those time-lapses are also the ones that I later included in the Sand Sculpture Sanctuary.

If you can’t see it, you can also explore it on Kuula.

Here’s the time-lapse of Jobi’s sculpture that appears in both From Sand to Sand and Sculpture Sanctuary.

So that’s all I have to say about the pictures that I have taken.

However, now I must confess that observing the dedication of the sculptors soldiering through the challenges this year struck me as SO impressive that I decided to spend some time learning more about what they do and how they do it. This led me down the rabbit hole that is the “World of Sand Sculpting.”

It started out simple enough.

I just wondered how much the videos on RevereTV’s YouTube Playlist would cover how the sculptors dealt with the various trials that beset the festival. It turns out there wasn’t much about it, but I ended up watching all of the videos right through to the Awards Ceremony anyway.

It was fun to see the sculptors introduce themselves and interact amongst themselves, but I was disappointed that they hardly mentioned the challenges or how they dealt with them.

Luckily, there’s an internet for that :)

I went digging around and hit the jackpot!

Here’s a wonderful mini-documentary by Chris Kridler titled Hourglass about the Art of Sand Festival at Space Coast Stadium in 2011 that was hit by a storm that dropped a foot of rain during the building time, and it covers how they dealt with it!

Chris Kridler (YouTube Channel)
Chris Kridler (Official Website)

Now that’s the kind of insight I was hoping to find. Well done!

Err… but along the way I also found a LOT of other stuff, too.

For example, there are two seasons of a Canadian reality series called Race Against the Tide on YouTube.

Race Against The Tide: Season 1 (YouTube Playlist, CompetitionTV)
Race Against The Tide: Season 2 (YouTube Playlist, CompetitionTV)

There also used to be a series called Sand Masters on the Travel Channel.

I even found an article about Sand Sculpting as a career on the US Bureau of Labor Statistics website!

Sand Sculptor: You’re a what? (Elka Jones, Career Outlook, US Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Can you believe Sand Sculpture has its own Dewey Decimal number?

DDC: 736.96 Sand Sculpture (Library Thing)

Ultimately, I ended up with an embarrassingly “robust” pile of resources about sand sculpture, so I did what I always do when I get way too carried away learning about a subject… I added a page about it to Cosma :)

Enjoy learning more about Sand Sculpture@Cosma!

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