Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon is a San Francisco-based artist, graphic and landscape designer, and writer. Born in 1928, Solomon first worked as a dancer before studying painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute. After the death of her husband in 1956, Solomon moved to Basel, Switzerland to study graphic design at the Basel Art Institute with Armin Hoffman. She later studied Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.
Best known for her interior Supergraphics of the 1960s Sea Ranch and her 1991 Ribbon of Light installation at the Embarcadero Promenade in San Francisco, her iconic style of mixing Swiss Modernism and West Coast Pop, pioneered the look of the California Cool - an important moment in graphic design history.
Her works have been exhibited in galleries around the world from Paris to New York, and is currently on permanent exhibition at SFMOMA. Now in her 90s and still working on her craft, Barbara has turned her attention to a smaller canvas, creating pieces that tell not just one story, but many, and make a single page dance well beyond its borders.
Owl Cave Books met Barbara Stauffacher Solomon in 2017 and co-published two books with Stauffacher Solomon and artist Calvin Rocchio in 2018, Read Any Good Boots Lately? and Making the Invisible Visible. Owl Cave Books also distributed Stauffacher Solomon's self-published works Why? Why Not?, Utopia Myopia, and Super-Silly-Us from 2017 - 2023.
