Jerry Garcia’s original artwork minted on SuperRare

Artistic pioneer Jerry Garcia, best known as the lead guitarist and vocalist of the Grateful Dead, was one of the first musicians from his era to create digital art. Garcia’s family members have curated a rare artwork that was just minted on SuperRare today, May 5th, in honor of the 56th anniversary of the first time the band played together, then as The Warlocks, at Magoo’s Pizza Parlor in Menlo Park, CA in 1965.

The environmental element of the art release will use the carbon offset tools made available by Aerial, an ecologically driven platform focused on alleviating humanity’s carbon footprint. This particular release will support Aerial’s forest conservation work, verified by the American Carbon Registry and Climate Action Reserve.

“We’re excited to help creators, including Jerry Garcia Music Arts, understand and mitigate the carbon footprint by supporting meaningful projects,” said Aerial cofounder and entrepreneur Andreas Homer.

The multitalented Garcia, who considered himself “an artist who played music,” began creating visual art at an early age and studied formally at the San Francisco Art Institute. The mediums Garcia chose were as varied as his talents and ranged from oils and watercolor to ink and digital works. The virtuoso’s fine art has been on display in exhibits that have traveled throughout the United States and the world. He began creating digital art as early as the late 1980s. In 2014, several of Garcia’s fine art pieces were presented and later donated to the “Art in Pop” museum exhibition at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain Le Magasin in Grenoble, France.

Atop the work with Aerial, an additional charitable element of this project will support the preservation of the planet’s precious coral reefs, a cause Garcia championed during his lifetime. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Garcia and his family frequently visited the Hawaiian Islands, where he developed a love for scuba diving among the coral reefs, often referred to as “rainforests of the sea.”