Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Announces “Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Why? Why Not?”

The first posthumous institutional exhibition of the pioneering Bay Area artist, designer, writer, and landscape thinker shines a light on her lifelong relationship with California

October 23, 2026 (San Francisco) – Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) is pleased to announce Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Why? Why Not?, the first major institutional exhibition of the artist since her death in 2024. Across Supergraphics, freeway drawings, ping-pong tables, and a book about paradise gone awry, the exhibition examines her lifelong relationship with California through art, writing, and landscape. On view January 16–July 11, 2027, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Why? Why Not? is guest curated by Martin Strickland and will be presented as part of the Further Triennial, a season of art exhibitions held across Northern California.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon became famous almost overnight in 1966, when she painted giant letters, stripes, and arrows across the walls at The Sea Ranch. Those Supergraphics shaped a generation of designers—yet her wider practice as an artist, designer, writer, architect, and landscape theorist has rarely been seen in full. 

“Most people know Barbara Stauffacher Solomon as a visionary designer, but she was an artist first,” said guest curator Martin Strickland. “The work coming out of her archive for this exhibition, most of it never shown, is where she turned that eye on California itself, playful and rigorous at once. It belongs at YBCA, in the middle of the city she spent her life drawing, reading, and quietly redrawing.”

Trained in graphic design in Basel and later in architecture at UC Berkeley, Stauffacher Solomon came back from Europe to California to unite clean Swiss modernism with the irreverence and energy of California in the 1960’s. For more than six decades, Stauffacher Solomon continued to work at her drafting table every day, producing books, Supergraphics, landscape drawings, concrete poems, and paintings until the age of 95. Drawing on newly accessible material from the artist’s archive, Why? Why Not? moves beyond the iconic Sea Ranch graphics to reveal a restlessly inventive practice—epic and intimate, profound and playful—and positions Stauffacher Solomon as one of the great overlooked figures of American modernism.

“Barbara Stauffacher Solomon is an iconic figure in Northern Californian art, design, and culture,” said Mari Robles, CEO of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. “The exhibition creates a new framework for encountering and understanding her vision, and I’m thrilled to elevate her, particularly during a triennial spotlighting the creativity of this region.” 

At the center of the exhibition is Good Mourning California (1992), Stauffacher Solomon’s sharp, funny, and politically alive book about the state she loved. While her first book Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden (1988) articulated an ordered vision of green rectangles as landscape as architecture as art, her second book Good Mourning California set in motion a looser, more playful, and irreverent side to her work. Tracing California’s landscapes and broken promises from the Spanish explorers to suburban sprawl, she wrote “my parents were born here, I was born here, and for me swimming out into the Pacific is survival, not suicide.” 

The exhibition places works from the Good Mourning California series alongside rarely seen drawings, book maquettes, and ephemera from her Telegraph Hill studio; her Green Rectangle of Paradise paintings; and the paintings of ping-pong tables that blur the line between civic argument and pure play. In addition, one of Stauffacher Solomon’s original Supergraphics will be newly realized across the walls of YBCA. Together, the works take visitors on a journey from Swiss grids to California freeways, with particular emphasis on California and San Francisco—the two places she loved most.

“I’m excited to open Bobbie’s archives and reveal a radical, never-before-exhibited shift in her practice,” said Nellie King Solomon, Executive Director, Estate of Barbara Stauffacher Solomon. “After a decade drawing formal European landscapes, she rebelled against her own rules. With Good Mourning California, she hit the highway to deconstruct California’s utopian myths and the illusions of marriage. From there, the 8½ × 11-inch page became a space to question power, societal roles, and expectations placed on women, inviting us to question everything alongside her.”

The exhibition opens on the evening of Saturday January 16, 2027 during SF Art Week.

About Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (1928–2024) was an artist, graphic designer, writer, architect, and landscape designer born and based in San Francisco. After studying graphic design in Basel, Switzerland, she returned to San Francisco and gained international recognition for her Supergraphics at The Sea Ranch (1966). She later earned a degree in architecture from UC Berkeley and went on to author and design numerous books, including Good Mourning California (1992). She worked daily in her Telegraph Hill studio until the end of her life. The Estate of Barbara Stauffacher Solomon is represented by Anthony Meier in Mill Valley, CA, and von Bartha in Basel, Switzerland.

About Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Opened to the public in 1993, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) was founded as the cultural anchor of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens neighborhood. Our work spans the realms of contemporary art, performance, film, civic engagement, and public life. By centering artists as essential to social and cultural movement, YBCA is reimagining the role an arts institution can play in the communities it serves. For more information, visit ybca.org.

YBCA is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11:00am to 5:00pm. General admission is $10, and $5 for students and seniors. Admission is free every Wednesday. For tickets and information, visit ybca.org.

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For media inquiries:

Abby Margulies | (614) 827-5810 | [email protected]