Barbara "Bobbie" Stauffacher Solomon (born 1928) is an American landscape architect and graphic designer. She is well known for the large scale interior Supergraphics that were highly influential in the 1960s and 70s and exterior signage at Sea Ranch in

Sonoma County, California Sonoma County () is a county (United States), county located in the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 United States Census, its population was 488,863. Its county seat and largest city is Santa Rosa, California, Santa Rosa. It is to the n ...

Early life and education

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon was born in 1928 as a third-generation San Franciscan. As a young woman Stauffacher Solomon studied and worked as a dancer, as well as studying painting and sculpture at

San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...

. In 1948, at 20 years-old, she married the filmmaker

Frank Stauffacher Frank Stauffacher (1917 – 24 July 1955, in San Francisco, California) was an American experimental filmmaker, best known for directing the cinema series "Art in Cinema" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1946 to 1954. He was the cinem ...

. The designer and printmaker

Jack Stauffacher Jack Werner Stauffacher (December 19, 1920 – November 16, 2017) was an American printer, typographer, educator, and fine book publisher. He owned and operated Greenwood Press, a small book printing press based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He ...

was her brother in law. In 1956, after the death of her husband, Stauffacher Solomon moved to

Basel , french: link=no, Bâlois(e), it, Basilese , neighboring_municipalities= Allschwil (BL), Hégenheim (FR-68), Binningen (BL), Birsfelden (BL), Bottmingen (BL), Huningue (FR-68), Münchenstein (BL), Muttenz (BL), Reinach (BL), Riehen (BS ...

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

to study graphic design at the Basel Art Institute with

Armin Hofmann Armin Hofmann ( HonRDI) (29 June 1920 – 18 December 2020) was a Swiss graphic designer. He began his career in 1947 as a teacher at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel School of Art and Crafts at the age of twenty-six. Hofmann followed Emil Ru ...

from 1956 to 1959. She made the decision to study design because she knew she could make a living and needed to support herself and her small child. She later studied Architecture at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

and graduated in 1981, writing her thesis on Green Architecture & The Agrarian Garden. She remarried in 1969 to Daniel Solomon, an architect and professor. Their daughter, Nellie King Solomon, is also an artist, and has showed at exhibitions with Stauffacher Solomon.

Career

Stauffacher Solomon returned to San Francisco in 1962 and set up an office as a graphic designer where she designed the monthly program guides for the

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...

. She met landscape architect

Lawrence Halprin Lawrence Halprin (July 1, 1916 – October 25, 2009) was an American landscape architect, designer and teacher. Beginning his career in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, in 1949, Halprin often collaborated with a local circle of modernist a ...

who gave her work at Sea Ranch in 1968, where she designed the architectural scale paintings for the building interiors, due to her educational background. Her work at Sea Ranch grew from her vocabulary of signs to create motion and an awareness of space. She created the logo for Sea Ranch that was a cross between

Swiss design The International Typographic Style, also known as the Swiss Style, is a graphic design style that emerged in Russia, the Netherlands, and Germany in the 1920s and was further developed by designers in Switzerland during the 1950s. The Internati ...

and California impressionalism to interpret the property's rams and crashing waves. Halprin went on to recommend her to other architects in the San Francisco area who let her design what she wanted. She went on to receive two

American Institute of Architects The American Institute of Architects (AIA) is a professional organization for architects in the United States. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the AIA offers education, government advocacy, community redevelopment, and public outreach to su ...

(AIA) awards for her work at Sea Ranch. Stauffacher Solomon was an instructor at Harvard University and Yale University, where she was invited by Charles Moore, whom she had met while working at Sea Ranch, to lead a studio on supergraphics in 1968. The studio was a week-long project creating two-dimensional graphics that reinforced the architecture of Yale University's Art and Architecture elevators. It was wildly successful and heralded by

Ada Louise Huxtable Ada Louise Huxtable (née Landman; March 14, 1921 – January 7, 2013) was an architecture critic and writer on architecture. Huxtable established architecture and urban design journalism in North America and raised the public's awareness of the ...

as a protest against the Establishment. In the short period of its existence from 1970 until 1971 she was art director of Scanlan's Magazine. In 1995, she designed a large outdoor art installation called "Promenade Ribbon" for the city of San Francisco. In 2002, Stauffacher Solomon was a member of the San Francisco Art Commission. In 2015, Stauffacher Solomon works as a landscape architect and continues to realize large scale graphic interventions outside. Stauffacher Solomon is the author of the autobiographic book ''Why? Why not?''."Rebecca Solnit Variety Show for Modern Times"
''Mission Local''

Books

* Green Architecture: Notes on the Common Ground (Design quarterly 120), 1982 * Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden, 1989 * * Why? Why Not?, 2013 * Utopia Myopia, 2013

Exhibitions

Stauffacher Solomon's drawings and supergraphics have been included in a number of museum exhibitions In 2018, she created the supergraphic installation ''Land(e)scape 2018'' at the Berkeley Art Museum. In 2019, she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). From March to May 2021, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon's solo sho
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at Gallery Van Bartha in Basel, curated by Matylda Krzykowski, showcases over 40 drawings and paintings by the artist from 1980s to 2021. Krzykowski introduced Stauffacher Solomon to the gallery.

References

External links

Official website

SFMOMA-Exhibition
The Sea Ranch, Architecture, Environment, and Idealism. December 22, 2018—April 28, 2019. {{DEFAULTSORT:Solomon, Barbara American graphic designers American landscape architects 1928 births Living people California people in design Women graphic designers Women landscape architects Artists from the San Francisco Bay Area San Francisco Art Institute alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni 20th-century American artists 20th-century American women artists American expatriates in Switzerland 21st-century American women