A Storied Collection of Blotter Acid Art Will Help Launch Northern California’s Inaugural ‘Further’ Triennial

A new triennial focusing on Northern California will include a show closely linked to the psychedelic counterculture often identified with the Bay Area: it will display the art that is printed on the sheets of card stock on which LSD is usually distributed. The artifacts come from the collection of San Francisco artist and psychedelics enthusiast Mark McCloud.

“I’ve been at it since the mid-’60s, collecting it in the inside of my body first and then in my freezer, and then I started framing it in the ’70s,” McCloud told ARTnews in a phone call. “That’s the way you save them. You’ll choke on the frames if you try to eat them!”

“Institute of Illegal Images: Return of the Rebel Replevin” is the most comprehensive display of the collection in four decades, displaying what McCloud bills as the world’s leading collection of LSD blotters. The show takes place at Et al. Gallery, run out of a storefront in San Francisco’s Mission district.

McCloud has over decades amassed his holdings of thousands of these sheets, perforated in a gridded pattern and printed, often with repeated imagery; when they are employed by dealers, each section is treated with a single dose of acid. The name of the collection parodies the seriousness of the museum, even as the collection itself is the kind of thing that has traditionally gotten scant attention within actual institutions. But McCloud has been exhibiting them annually at Psychedelic San Francisco Gallery on Bicycle Day, an unofficial celebration of the first LSD trip, taken by its inventor, scientist Albert Hofmann, in 1943 while on a bike ride home from the lab.

The imagery on the sheets ranges, said McCloud, “from the most comical to the deepest religious approach, because many people have mystical experiences on LSD and others just have a really good time. It’s a full cornucopia.”

“Institute of Illegal Images” is organized by Further Triennial director Zully Adler, a former research fellow at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

“Northern California is still a place of well-kept secrets—amazing things hidden just under the surface,” Adler told ARTnews in a phone interview. “A lot of our artists and what they make test the limits of what constitutes fine art or advanced art and is anointed as such ex post facto.”

The Further Triennial is the first exhibition of its kind to focus on Northern California, with exhibitions spread across about 100 nonprofit visual arts organizations across the Greater Bay Area, including, in San Francisco alone, SFMOMA, the Fine Arts Museums, and the Institute of Contemporary Art; participating elsewhere are Marin MOCA, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, along with numerous smaller organizations. The triennial takes its name from that of the school bus that San Francisco author Ken Kesey drove across the US in 1964 with his “merry band of pranksters.” Further’s inaugural edition, “Around Here,” opens in March 2027.

The triennial was founded by art collector and philanthropist Robin Wright, who has lived in San Francisco since the 1980s. She visited the first PST ART initiative, founded by the Getty Foundation in 2011 to focus on Southern California, and saw the need for a project that would focus on her own region.

McCloud first showed the Institute of Illegal Images (III) collection at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 1987 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love. The Further show marks the 40th anniversary of that initial outing, which led to increasing attention to the artist, some welcome, some not. He would be arrested in 2000 in what Artnet Magazine called a SWAT-style raid by a task force of FBI and DEA agents and charged with felony conspiracy to distribute the drug, and faced consecutive life sentences. Artnet said that none of the nearly 400 framed blotters seized in the raid or any of the artist’s 33,000 sheets of McCloud’s own blotter art had any traces of the drug, since exposure to light causes it to decay. McCloud was acquitted in 2001, partly on the basis that his holdings were art; art critic Carlo McCormick was among those to testify. When the collection was returned to McCloud, it bore traces of its journey in the form of FBI-issued evidence catalog numbers on strips of masking tape. The returned works are a focus in the new show. As for the show title, replevin is a legal action that allows a person to recover personal property wrongfully taken or unlawfully held by another.

The subject matter of the printed imagery leans to the lowbrow, said Adler, pointing out that visitors will see Beavis and Butthead, Ozzy Osbourne, and Conan the Barbarian, but because of the optical wonders often revealed during acid trips, designs by Op artist Bridget Riley and some of her peers also make an appearance. Don’t count on seeing many artists you know by name, though; since these sheets were created to transport illegal drugs, Adler pointed out, the artists are mostly anonymous or operate under pseudonyms.

“Here is somebody who recognized this underground medium as a realm of creative expression when others were far from seeing it that way,” said Adler. In the references to icons of popular culture and in the gridded layout of the blotter sheets, Adler thinks, it wouldn’t be crazy to see affinities with both Pop art and Minimalism. “But,” he adds, “that wouldn’t have been an obvious connection in 1987, when these things first appeared at SFAI.”

Just as there is a market for drugs and a market for art, there is a market, if a modest one, for these artistic artifacts. While many sheets of blotter are sold privately and online at sites like etsy, eBay or even Amazon for over $1,000, McCloud says, the highest price he can recall is $36,000 paid for a piece at a benefit auction for the family of the biochemist Alexander Shulgin, who specialized in psychedelics.

Adler is organizing not only the McCloud show but three others as well. At the Berkeley Art Center, he will stage “How Many Worlds: Martin Wong in California.” Adler recently completed his PhD on the Bay Area icon, who is best known for paintings created on New York’s Lower East Side in its pre-gentrification era in the 1970s and ’80s but was active in what Adler calls the “varied worlds” of California in the 1960s and ’70s. At the San Francisco Historical Society, he’ll offer “Paulina Peavy: Ether Beam,” looking at artwork by a spiritual medium and spanning from works created for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition to films from the 1980s. Cayuga Playground Clubhouse, in San Francisco, will show “Demetrio Braceros: Kindness to Any Creature,” focused on an artist and horticulturist who stended the Golden Gate Park Arboretum before being transferred to Cayuga Playground.