By Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
Published by Owl Cave Books and Calvin Rocchio
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (1928 - 2024) was a San Francisco-based artist, graphic and landscape designer, and writer. Born in 1928, Stauffacher Solomon first worked as a dancer before studying painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute. After the death of her husband, filmmaker Frank Stauffacher, in 1956, Stauffacher 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, and was an instructor at both Harvard University and Yale University.
In 1962 Stauffacher Solomon returned to San Francisco and set up her own design studio. Best known for her interior Supergraphics of the 1960s community Sea Ranch and her 1991 Ribbon of Light installation at the Embarcadero Promenade in San Francisco, she also designed the monthly program guides for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and was the art director of Scanlan's Monthly. Her works have been exhibited in galleries around the world from Paris to New York, and is currently on permanent exhibition at SFMOMA.
