Fredrika Baer (September 10, 1952 â November 12, 2025) was an American collage artist and graphic designer, associated with anarchist, feminist and science fiction fandom communities. Her works were widely published as covers of many magazines and books, and disseminated as stand-alone political pieces.
Fredrika Elizabeth Baer was born and raised in Chicago. During high school and college, she had already become political, leading a petition against "artificial settings" and surveillance in high school.
In college, she was exposed to anarchism by Neil Rest, and joined the "Nameless Anarchist Horde". Over the next few years, Baer worked with a number of radical media and activist organizations, including the IWW, Solidarity Bookstore, Newspace, and Black and Red, a printing/publishing group established by Fredy and Lorraine Perlman.
Baer achieved national notoriety in 1972 for an action targeting the author of a pro-rape article in the campus newspaper. Baer and two colleagues invited him to join them, then held him down and talked to him about the realities of rape. Baer was arrested and charged with rape, but was released due in part to the belief at that time that women could not rape men. The incident was immortalized by singer-songwriter Leslie Fish, "The Bold Rapista". Baer described the incident herself in various publications and interviews, including Black Flag: Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross.
Baer began collage and illustration work in 1981, after attending an art show reception for Incite!, a San Francisco-based radical collage group. Her first collage was "Bosses: The Real Time Bandits" (1981).
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Baer was involved in the local anarchist and punk scene, designing many posters, album covers, and illustrations for books, articles, and works of fiction. She worked with Processed World, which she later described as a "fiasco", Fifth Estate, Anarchy, AK Press, Times Change Press, and Komotion International. She illustrated many works by Peter Lamborn Wilson, aka Hakim Bey, and was particularly associated with the Situationists and surrealist movements. Baer's numerous collaborations with Wilson (Hakim Bey) were also reflected in his preface to her 1992 collection, Ecstatic Incisions.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Baer's work with the science fiction community greatly increased. In addition to illustrations in numerous science fiction & fantasy publications, Baer began designing posters for SF cons and awards, including JaneCon, Potlatch, WisCon, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award (later re-named the "Otherwise Award").
In 2020, Baer relocated to Eureka, California. She died after a three-year battle with uterine cancer in Eureka, on November 12, 2025, at the age of 73.
Baer was known for intricate and detailed collages with a great deal of detailed cutting. While she incorporated digital work into her collage, she primarily worked with exacto blades, glue, and original printed work. She was particularly known for collaging together vintage illustrations of nature, women, and patterns, with modern imagery of technology. Her style was described as "juxtapos[ing] graceful archetypal medieval figures and nudes beside the charged symbols of modern technological and industrial life" "The dexterity with which she performs her craft complements the painstaking work of the original engraves. Not a paste-up blunder in sight." "She has taken very traditional, conservative images and created from them witty, anarchic, shocking and beautiful viewing."
<blockquote>"Looking through Ecstatic Incisions, there appear to be four basic styles of collage which Baer uses: images contrived solely of nineteenth century engravings; ones with a patchwork of geometric construction; ones using photographs and ones where text is integrated into the design. ... [In contrast with Max Ernst ], Baer's work is clearly created from different pieces -- she plays with scale; she often has large figures in the foreground which break out of the picture frame, and her placement of objects is much more straight forward. Ernst's collages reflect his background as a painter, whilst Baer's compositions are of a more graphic bent."</blockquote>
Baer's subject matter was described as "ranging from the bitingly political to the sublimely surreal".
She is mentioned by critics as an important collagist of the "marginal milieu" of punk, political, and literary zines along with contemporaries such as James Koehnline, Ed Lawrence, Joe Schwind, and Mykell Zhan.
R. Seth Friedman of Factsheet Five names her as an influence on his art.