Baja

Robert Fried

Printmaker and poster artist Robert Fried had likely returned from his time in Switzerland, where he became friends with Timothy Leary, when he made this delicate drypoint, a fanciful, psychedelic image of crystals sprouting in the otherwise sparsely vegetated desert of Mexico’s Baja California.

By the late 1960s Fried had finished his stint in Europe and wanted to enroll in a graduate program on the West Coast. He was accepted into the San Francisco Art Institute and soon became immersed in the world of the West Coast experimental art and music scene. While not as well known as the “Big Five” poster artists of San Francisco, his work became synonymous with the region’s popular style and he created works for the Grateful Dead, Santana, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and many other leading rock bands of 1960s and ‘70s San Francisco. “Baja” was probably created around this time, and shows Fried’s technical mastery of the drypoint medium as well as his imaginative - and possibly LSD-influenced - style.