The winning sculpture
Winners were announced Friday, Jan. 28, at the awards ceremony held at the Riverwalk Center.
The first-place Wisconsin team was captained by Brett Tomczak and included Jeff Shawhan, Jim Malkowski and Gregory Brulla. Their sculpture, The Digital Divide, depicts two hands — one human and one robotic — coming out of the ground interacting with a wall of binary code in the middle.
“It’s amazing because over the last 12 years, we’ve been here eight times, and of all those times, we got third place once, artist’s choice once — which was really nice — but never first,” Malkowski said. “So we’re really happy about it.”
In second came Team Germany with its sculpture Float. On the team was Franziska Agrawal, Katja Kulenkampff, Gabriela Kulenkampff and Dan Miller-Lionberg.
The abstract piece is made up of five rectangular blocks stacked on top of one another and facing different directions. The work also won the Lothar Luboschik Artists’ Choice Award, meaning it received the most votes from fellow competitors.
The second Wisconsin team won third. Members Mark Hurst, Glen Vogt, Mike Nehs and team captain Neal Vogt constructed a scene of a bee visiting a flower for a sculpture titled Bee Sustainability.
