![]() When giving a tour of the space, he speaks with a Summer of Love tongue, trailing into tangents of Grateful Dead trivia and name-dropping an encyclopedia of counterculture figures. LSD-themed license plates (left) hang on the front door of the Institute of Illegal Images in San Francisco a framed piece of art advertising "LSD Airline." Charles Russo/SFGATE The Institute of Illegal Images wasn’t officially christened until 1983, when a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts enabled McCloud to put a down payment on a building that he called “the last squat in San Francisco,” which still houses the institute today and serves as his home (the purchase price was $98,000 accounting for inflation it would cost roughly $270,000 today). He made sculptures while working as a waiter at upscale restaurant Modesto Lanzone's, then started teaching at Santa Clara University in the early '80s (the pandemic canceled a plan to return to teaching in 2020). McCloud’s fall out of a window caused him to have a “death rebirth experience,” which led him to devote his life to collecting blotter art as a thank-you to the drug.Īlready deep in his love affair with LSD, McCloud arrived in San Francisco in 1977 after graduating from UC Davis with an MFA. The accident he refers to took place while he was tripping on the legendary Orange Sunshine variety of acid, which was distributed throughout the world in the late ’60s by The Brotherhood of Eternal Love (whom the police called “the hippie mafia”). Mark McCloud, curator of the Institute of Illegal Images in San Francisco, is pictured among the many framed pieces of LSD blotter art, on Thursday, Nov. I didn’t fall out of the building until my first year in college,” says McCloud. I had many pleasant, wonderful experiences with drugs there. “I took advantage of that many, many times. Although his school still subscribed to practices of corporal punishment for misbehavior, it had a very unique policy when it came to drugs: as long as you told a teacher what you were taking, there’d be no consequences. McCloud’s interest in psychedelics also began during that era. “The minute I saw SF back in ’65, I said, ‘When I grow up I want to live there.’ It was the first free city I had ever seen in my life,” he says. Mark McCloud shows off his psychedelic LSD-themed shirt, at the Institute of Illegal Images in San Francisco, on Thursday, Nov. McCloud’s love affair with the city began on a teenage trip from Los Angeles, where he attended boarding school after being sent away from his native Argentina to avoid political violence. Wearing a black sports jacket and fedora over a shirt patterned with rainbow pyramid blotter art, he looks every bit the on-again-off-again art professor, a relic of the city’s turn-on-tune-in-drop-out past. McCloud is the type of San Franciscan who is in short supply these days. That was my second trial, the first was from Operation Looking Glass from ’93.” That initial trial inspired one of many pieces of blotter art that McCloud created himself, a double-sided print depicting Alice’s journey through Wonderland. “I was the first one who suffered the indignity of the new law,” says McCloud. Charles Russo/SFGATEĪlthough he certainly holds court over a psychedelic kingdom, the charges of distribution under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act passed in 2000 didn’t stick, and he was acquitted a year later, thanks partially to art critics called to his defense. Even so, McCloud was threatened with life imprisonment after police tapped his phone and raided the institute to seize 400 framed pieces of art.Ī pair of cosmic-themed LSD blotter art sheets framed inside Mark McCloud's Institute of Illegal Images, in San Francisco. The works of art on display in the institute are either reproductions of vintage designs or have long since faded to brown, indicating they’ve lost their potency. McCloud is the longtime proprietor of the Institute of Illegal Images, a well-lived-in gallery that’s devoted to “blotter art,” which refers to the imagery printed on perforated paper that was dipped in the liquid LSD before being torn into tabs for distribution. ![]() Take one step into his longtime home in the Mission and it’s not hard to see why: hundreds of thousands of tabs of LSD line the walls of his entry room alone. Drug Enforcement Administration, Mark McCloud is a kingpin. Charles Russo/SFGATEĪccording to accusations from the U.S. ![]() Mark McCloud, curator of the Institute of Illegal Images, gives a tour of his many LSD-related artifacts, on Thursday, Nov.
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