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.
Last, but far from least, the venerable Baltimore Sun mentioned us as a part of their “Artscape Survival Guide“.
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!
