80 Years of Art & Design in Pix & Prose, Juxtaposed
By Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
Published by Fun Fog Press
Lifelines and landscapes from the SF Art Institute, nightclub dancing in NY, to SF's Art in Cinema and the Hollywood movie scene. 1945 to 1955 was spent studying graphic design in Basel, Switzerland, and then onto an SF design office and painting Supergraphics at The Sea Ranch in the early 60s. Studying architecture at UCB in 1967, to work in Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, NY and SF.
After all this, Barbara became obsessed with 81/2”x11” sheets of white paper. She typed lines, drew lines and created letterforms that lined up into words.
"Words lined up into straight lines. Straight lines, one above another, lined up into columns & stories. Each line & liaison led to the next & related to the rest. I cut-&-paste a lot on more sheets of 81/2”x11” paper and became a knotty Y-NOT-KNOT lady looking on from across the book's binding. Glued, I looked for secrets in white shapes, the precious nothing of wide margins, the white space no one notices between the lines and lies, behind the scenes & in my life."
This is the 80+ year career of Barbara Stauffacher Solomon.
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.
