Hit The Deck

Hit the Deck at the United Trade Show went down last week in Las Vegas at the Alexis Park Resort. We arrived the day before the show to set up. The art show portion of United didn’t have the walls up yet, so we waited until about 4pm to hang the decks and ended up staying until 3:30am finishing it up. The show ran from Tuesday, February 13th to Thursday, February 15th with spectators coming in and out of the art room at their leisure. Hit The Deck was made possible by our sponsors, Draven and Ultimate Ears.

Next to Hit The Deck was a few of Dandelion Black’s Flesh series, an Abide Visuals section, and an exhibition from Blood is the New Black’s amazing squad of artists. We had the pleasure of meeting and hanging out with Blood is the New Black’s Travis Millard, Jeremy Relph, Patrick Jilbert and their ringleader Mitra Khayyam who are good people.

We ended up selling 12 of the 60 decks that were exhibited, some of which were arriving as late as Thursday. There are three more showings of Hit The Deck that are in the works. We will keep everyone posted on the progress of these opportunities to raise more money for The Global Fund.

I have randomly cleaned up a few of the decks from the exhibition after the jump. More to come as soon as I can clean up more of the images.

(more…)

As promised, here is another sneak peak of a pretty popular piece. We have been getting a lot of traffic due to a Grammy winning artist coming on board to create a deck for Hit The Deck.

While I don’t really listen to platinum recording artists, Linkin Park or Fort Minor, I do think Mike Shinoda is a pretty dope artist. I will especially be open to change my mind on their music after hearing the next Linkin Park album, which drops this March, is executively produced by Rick Rubin.

Read the rest of Hit The Deck’s blog posts

It has been a busy week so far with a lot of decks coming in. Hit The Deck is shaping up to be a great show.

What is so unique about Hit The Deck, is that its not just an exhibition of fine art, its also a combination of artists that wouldn’t normally be involved in a project together, showcasing their styles collectively. We have art directors such as Jesse Raker at SoCity, freelance designers like Aaron Winters at Abide Visuals, to fine artists that exhibit regularly like Josh Taylor and graffiti artists Downtimer and Chachi Arcola to clothing designers like the crew at Homeroom Clothing all creating originally designed and painted skateboard decks for the exhibition to raise money for The Global Fund.

People might not have heard of any of the previous mentioned artists and may not be too motivated to see pieces from artists that aren’t the most prominent in the art game. Sometimes, even unconsciously, getting caught up in hype can lead viewers astray. In order to reign in and keep people grounded, we have added many well known artists such as Cope2, David Flores, Haze XXL, Jermaine Rogers & Emek, B+, Mike Shinoda, and George Thompson (Ewok AWR/MSK) to be displayed mixed in with lesser known, up and coming artists. After all, innovative new artists are what keeps the avant-garde movement thriving.

To get viewers familiar with some of the artists participating in Hit The Deck at United Trade Show, check out the following sneak peaks of decks we have recently received:

Aaron Winters:

SoCity:

Josh Taylor:

Downtimer:

Celebrating Synthesis’ big One-O, artist Alex Pardee (CBS, Lords Crew, Bunnywith) graced us with his illustration of Definitive Jux label head/rapper El-P, whos album I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead drops mid March. Head over to Alex Pardee’s blog for a peak into more info on what hes been up to and what hes going to be up to.

Alex Pardee will also be creating a piece for Hit The Deck art exhibition at the United Trade Show located at Alexis Park in Las Vegas February 13th-15th.

The Hit The Deck buzz has been slowly spreading. With artists blogging, posting myspace bulletins and updating the news section on their websites, traffic on our Hit The Deck website has been blowing up…kind of. Apparently, we are huge in Moscow right now.

Today we received decks from Jason Brunson, Downtimer (myspace/downtimer) and SoCity. Sneakie peekies coming next week.