Since it has come to our attention that the little blurb about us in Wired’s print edition (March 2011 issue, page 80, pictured above) and on their website (complete with video) is now available for everyone to see, we thought it’d be appropriate to give you fine folks a welcome post, located right at the top of the page.
We are Super Art Fight, and as our catchphrase goes, we are the Greatest Live Art Competition in the Known Universe.
Since our inception in June 2008, we’ve had the honor and pleasure to rock many a venue with our unique blend of Pictionary and Pro-Wrestling, burning a line up and down the East Coast and melting faces everywhere we stop.
Our website is full of details on past and upcoming shows, including photos, videos, results and more.
If you read the article and hope to catch us live, great! We’d love to see you at a future show.
Our current show schedule is as follows.
Friday, March 18th – The Red Palace, Washington, DC
Friday, March 25th – Frederick Cultural Arts Center, Frederick, Maryland
Super Art Fight X – Friday, April 22nd – The Ottobar, Baltimore, Maryland.
If you watched the video and decided, HEY! I want these guys to perform for me/where I am/near me, great! We’re open for bookings.
Feel free to contact us at SuperArtFight at Gmail dot com to discuss booking details. We can customize a package to the size and scale of your event.
Thank you for taking the time to read up on us, and we hope that you keep watching us.
There’s truly nothing in the world like Super Art Fight, and in 2011 and beyond, we’re going to prove that fact.
Shot at MAGFest this past weekend, our own Nick “Ghostfreehood” Borkowicz, Jamie “Angry Zen Master” Noguchi, Ross Nover and Marty Day sit down with BaltimoreGamer.com‘s Adam Chase to discuss the history of Super Art Fight and plug this weekend’s Super Art Fight 9.
As the minutes tick down to Super Art Fight 9, various press outlets are jumping on board for our first show of the year.
One such outlet is the popular indie rock outlet Brightest Young Things, who on the eve of this large event decided to interview one of our co-hosts, Ross Nover.
The interview is full of all sorts of insight into our growth lo these past few years, and is worth a read.
Here’s a snippet.
What is an optimal strategy for novices?
At the end of the day, there aren’t really any rules. We don’t have a referee most of the time, and when we do, he’s too busy drinking. Even if an artist is given a topic, he or she can leave it in the dust and do whatever they want. The best thing to do is draw BIG, with strong lines, and make it funny.
I’ve been to two art fights now, and have noticed the artists have personas and egos.
There’s definitely been an evolution in that process. At first artists were just happy to be there and having a good time. Now it’s gotten to the point where there are definitely “good guys,” and others who have taken the role of a “bad guy.” At Super Art Fight 8, there was a new guy named Josh Taylor. Not only is he an amazing artist, but jumped right into his character. Behind the scenes, he’s the nicest guy, but when he hits the stage he becomes the biggest asshole I’ve ever seen. It came across so well. When the topic of “Super Art Fight Does Christmas” came up, Josh looked at the canvas, wrote “NO,” and just kept going. The audience cheered for him, so he flipped them off and they loved him for it!
With less than 24 hours until our return to the Metro Gallery for Super Art Fight 7, the anticipation is building, so much so that a number of media outlets picked up on the awesome.
This past Wednesday, the alt-weekly City Paper featured an interview with the five folks behind the birth of Super Art Fight, and it’s a heck of an insightful read. It’s also our final word on a certain blanco hip-hopper.
From shows at Baltimore’s Metro Gallery and the Ottobar to venues as varied as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Centennial High School in Ellicott City, Super Art Fight is working to become a phenomenon. The touring art competition, launched in summer 2008, is the brainchild of five local webcomic creators: artists Nick Borkowicz, Chris Impink, and Jamie Noguchi (who compete in the matches) and writers Marty Day and Ross Nover (who host and offer commentary).
“The best way I’ve heard it described is it’s Win, Lose or Draw meets pro wrestling,” Nover says. A typical Super Art Fight bout lasts around 30 minutes and features 2-4 artists positioned in front of an enormous sheet of white paper. Each is given a topic to illustrate. Every five minutes, the artists are given a new topic via “The Wheel of Death,” a random word generator made up of topics submitted in advance by attendees and “activated” by an oversized lever pulled by an audience member. Crowd cheers pick the winner. What really makes Super Art Fight stand out is the participants’ ability to vandalize and sabotage the drawings of their competitors: a horrific Lovecraftian monster can be ruined in an instant by a well-placed cartoon heart, for example.
In anticipation of the upcoming free July 17 Super Art Fight at Artscape, City Paper sat down with the crew to discuss the event’s inception, the art of art war, and a bizarre history with nerdcore rapper MC Chris.
If that wasn’t enough, the blog The Epic Gentleman’s Society did a full profile of us. Having been there from our first show, the piece does a great job of chronicling our growth from an upstairs attraction to a full blown show, touring the country.
If you haven’t been hearing the buzz about Super Art Fight yet, you’re missing out. Think “Pictionary meets Pro Wrestling,” an incredibly accurate description given to me by co-founder Marty Day. More specifically, Super Art Fight is a beautiful blend of art, live entertainment, audience interaction, and a little bit of insanity, all mixed in a melting pot of ink and awesome.
Metro Gallery: This gallery presents live competitive art — yes, such a thing exists — Saturday night during the Super Art Fight. Artists are faced with a blank canvas and a limited amount of time to create a masterpiece in front of a live audience.
Can you feel the excitement in the air? It all hits a fever pitch tomorrow, at 7pm as doors open for Super Art Fight 7. BE THERE!
Back on May 22nd, we had the absolute honor and pleasure of being a part of the first ever Innovate Love show.
An art auction event to benefit the Baltimore Love Project, our co-founders and artists Nick Borkowicz and Jami Noguchi performed a live mural that evening which had the live audiences enthralled and captivated.
But don’t let just our words set the tone – check out the full article on the event from the awesome online magazine What Weekly, if just because of the great ways they describe us.
I’m not sure how apt “a band of wandering artists with superpowers and anger management issues” is, but I sure think it’s going on our next poster.
With literally one day to go until Super Art Fight 6 hits the stage, word is fast getting around different sources about our awesome little show.
This past Wednesday, the City Paper mentioned our show in their Weekly “Short List” column – we’re actually the first thing mentioned for Saturday night!
If that wasn’t awesome enough – our old friends at B made not one, but TWO mentions of us!
The first was in Thursday’s ArtsPage….
Not sure how Jamie will feel about that Hillary Clinton comment…
And the second was in Today’s Weekend Calendar, seen above!
The super rad podcast Geeknights just released their Connecticon 2009 episode, and within it, they had some very kind words to say about our little show here, Super Art Fight.
The latest episode is available for download here, and the talk of Super Art Fight kicks in at the 1hr, 12min mark, give or take a bit. Give the rest of the episode a listen, too, as these guys were behind a metric TON of panels this past weekend in Connecticut, and the show gives you a really unique insight into being involved in a large convention from the programming side.
The Front Row Crew has been handling programming at conventions for some time (infact, members of the Super Art Fight roster were part of “Anime Match Game” a few Katsucon’s back), so to get their kudos is a great beacon of where we’re heading.
