For years, Freddie held an annual “calendar collage party”, towards the end of the year. She would provide calendar templates, and a bunch of magazines and images, scissors & exacto blades & glue & markers, and invitees would make their own collages for a month or months of their choosing. Freddie would assemble them into a full-year calendar, duplicate them, and send them out invitees & others. (We are gathering & scanning images of these collage calendars! If you have some, please send them along to contact@freddiebaer.com )

In some ways, this was just another one of Freddie’s many creative, community-building activities, like the WisCon clothing exchange, or Christmas dim sum. However, it also reflected something deep in Freddie around the value of collage. In interviews, Freddie would talk about not having thought of herself as artistic — but that she and anyone could do collage, assemble materials into images. Collage was deeply political and personal — it opened up creativity and arts to people who have been told by society that “Art” is something professional Artists do, or children — but not ordinary adults. In Freddie’s calendar collage parties, she got ordinary adults to do collage — to connect with zine-making skills — to do art.

In Freddie’s honor, therefore, we present the “Freddie Baer Memorial Calendar Collage Party Toolkit” — many words to capture the beautiful simplicity of her idea of friends gathering, making art, & thinking about the future.