Freddie Baer, Sept. 10, 1952 – Nov. 12, 2025. 

A hell raiser all of her life.

Made some unwise choices in both love and life, but barreled through anyway.

She lived an interesting life and approached everything with both gusto and obsession.

Spent 32 years learning to love herself and what she could do.

Freddie Baer, Sept. 10, 1952 – Nov. 12, 2025, noted San Francisco-based collage artist and anarchist, passed away in Eureka after a three-year battle with cancer. 

Fredrika Elizabeth Baer, daughter of Jack Baer and Elsie Lambert, grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago. She was radicalized at a young age, which she attributed to her parents’ sense of justice and individualistic thinking, and the general political tumult of the Civil Rights movement, the Viet Nam war, and the 1968 Democratic National Convention. An activist even in high school, Baer initiated a petition against the “artificial settings” and observation of Steinmetz students. Baer embraced atheism and the anti-war movement in high school, and after being introduced to anarchism in college by Neil Rest, quickly became active in anarchist and feminist circles at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s “Circle Campus”. 

Baer was imaginative, creative, and bold from the outset. This is clear from her notorious and widely publicized incident in 1972, Baer and two other women turned the tables on a man who had editorialized that women liked rape. The three activists invited him to experience rape and see what it was like. While he was not actually “raped” in any sense of the term, in the aftermath, Baer was charged with assault, charges that were later dismissed in part because of the gendered definitions of sexual assault. 

In 1978, Baer moved to San Francisco, which remained her home for the next forty plus years. She quickly became engaged in the burgeoning punk and DIY scene, which was closely associated with the anarchist movement. In 1982, after attending an exhibition by Incite!, a collage collective, Baer realized collage was available to anyone, regardless of whether they thought of themselves as “artistic”. She made her first collage that night, “Bosses: The Real Time Bandits”, a reference to Terry Gilliam’s “Time Bandits”. 

From there, Baer’s collage work took off, and she began illustrating articles, stories, and poems in anarchist and science fiction publications; magazine, book, and album covers rapidly followed. In addition to collage, Baer was proficient with silk screening, initiating a t-shirt of the month club in 1989, which she used as an opportunity to experiment with new collage techniques. Baer was also an active participant in zine culture, contributing multiple collages as covers and illustrations for Factsheet Five and Alternative Press Review, as well as numerous other zines and small press publications. 

Baer used her collage, graphic, typesetting, and design skills to support numerous organizations and projects in line with her values, from the Mission-based Komotion arts collective, to Bound Together Books, Queen of Heaven, Processed World, anarchist publishers and magazines, and various science fiction projects. She created 50 or more collages for Potlatch, a Bay Area / Pacific Northwest SF convention, and the Tiptree Award (nor Otherwise Award) for expanding gender in science fiction; these were highly sought after, and were strong fundraisers for those projects. She co-illustrated Kathy Acker’s Pussycat Fever, with Diane DiMassa, and helped produce The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas. She had a long-standing series of collaborations with Peter Lamborn Wilson, aka Hakim Bey, illustrating multiple works by him. In 1992, Baer published Ecstatic Incisions, a collection of these early collage works, with AK Press; Wilson wrote the preface. 

Baer’s collage work was technically precise and innovative. As her skills evolved, she often incorporated graphic design techniques, layering sourced patterns and motifs into geometric frameworks such as windows or mandalas, using her scalpel, graphics editor, and glue to create complex visual effects. The juxtapositions of her collages served as cultural critique, challenging gender essentialism and colonialism as well as the ways industrialization and technology are placed in opposition to nature and art. Baer cited the influence of surrealists and dadaists, including Max Ernst, John Heartfield, Hannah Hoch, as well as Terry Gilliam and Jan Svankmajer, and illustrators and animators including Kay Nielson. In turn, Baer influenced numerous collage and other artists, including R. Seth Friedman of Factsheet Five, and her work is often associated with that of James Koehnline as part of the “marginal milieu” of situationist and anarchist zines. Her works are being collected and made available by her estate at https://FreddieBaer.com/ .

In addition to collage and graphic design, Baer was a proficient beader, and loved making jewelry. Baer supported this hobby in part by thrifting, particularly specializing in rare and vintage glass and stone beads which she re-purposed. Baer was deeply curious, and encyclopedically knowledgeable, about numerous arts and crafts, from fine arts, to textiles and designers, to eyewear. She used that knowledge to establish a thriving eBay trade, which funded the purchase of a home in Eureka, and to build collections of vintage Tura eyeglasses, exotic buttons, cat art, and art glass.

Baer was startlingly creative and energetic, spawning numerous new projects, communities, and traditions – from organizing clothes exchanges at the feminist SF WisCon, to regular Christmas dim sum outings, to annual calendar collage parties, the t-shirt of the month club, zines, and too many other social / community activities to count. She was a passionate science fiction fan her entire life, attending numerous cons, and voraciously consuming thoughtful SF. Baer saw science fiction as liberatory, and the process of visualizing worlds to be inherently political and philosophical – she said a lot of her own collages were “illustrations for stories that haven’t been written yet.”

Baer worked at WestEd for decades. After retiring during COVID in 2020, Baer relocated to her home in Eureka. She was diagnosed with uterine cancer in 2022. After a brief remission, the cancer recurred in 2025, and Baer passed on November 12.

Freddie Baer was unfailingly generous to her friends and to causes and political movements. She freely shared her creativity and donated her time and labor to many causes; made and gave beautiful jewelry to friends; and shared her home, opening her doors to numerous friends and fellow travelers. To be a friend of Freddie’s meant that your closet was bursting with items Freddie had found in thrift stores and thought you would enjoy, be it couture labels, Italian cashmere, fiber art or clothes for your grandkids.

Freddie was frank and caustic in humor, and flamboyant in her attire – she wore gorgeous patterned textiles, red boots, bold jewelry, and cat-eye glasses. She was a woman of size and proud of it. She rode a BMW R65 motorcycle for decades, taking several long road trips in North America and Europe. Freddie maintained her very long brown hair, which she almost always wore in a single braid, until her cancer treatments – when, characteristically, she cut it off and donated it. Even in her last year, struggling with cancer and its treatments, Freddie was actively protesting the fascism of the Trump regime. 

Underneath her outsized personality lay a keen intelligence, which she deployed in often exhaustive (arguably obsessive) research in pursuit of her various interests, collections, and ventures. Freddie knew the details of who, what, when, where, and how, for virtually every passion she had – and these were numerous. Freddie was particularly keen on anarchist history, the associated arts movements of surrealism and Dada, zine and punk culture, science fiction / fantasy, and SF fandom. 

No obituary could be complete without mentioning Freddie Baer’s love of cats. Her BlueSky profile described her as a “Collage artist, cat lover, aging anarchist.” She adopted multiple cats over her lifetime, collected cat art, and incorporated cats into her own art. 

Freddie Baer was beloved by her many friends, and in many communities. She is survived by Erik, an adopted nephew, her sister Kristina Lardner, and her cat Ida. Freddie is also survived by an enormous body of collage and jewelry, including “Read OUR Lips: We Demand Choice!”, “Don’t Fuck with Mother Nature”, and many other collages celebrating art, literature, nature, reproductive rights, sexuality, and the utopian imagination. In keeping with Freddie’s ethos, her intricate and thought-provoking collages are free for re-use and delight.

There will be a celebration of Freddie’s life in spring 2026 in San Francisco. Donations may be made to the Breast Gyn Health Project, BGHP.org.
Her works are being collected and made available by her estate at https://FreddieBaer.com.

To plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.

A short form of this obituary was published at SF.com, Dec. 2025, and on Legacy.com.