Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (1928–2024) was a visionary American artist and designer whose work across painting, drawing, design, and architecture transformed how art defines and inhabits space. Internationally recognized as the originator of Supergraphics—monumental wall paintings that merge art and architecture—she was, above all, a painter and thinker whose formal rigor, wit, and conceptual clarity shaped modern visual culture.
A third-generation San Franciscan, she studied painting with David Park at the San Francisco Art Institute and Hans Hofmann at the Art Students League in New York, then trained in design under Armin Hofmann at the Kunstgewerbeschule Basel in Basel, Switzerland. Returning to California in the 1960s, she introduced Helvetica to the United States and developed a modernist sensibility that fused European precision with West Coast experimentation.
Stauffacher Solomon conceived her Supergraphics at The Sea Ranch (1964) alongside lifelong friend and collaborator, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, and achieved great acclaim with subsequent public projects including Promenade Ribbon (1995), San Francisco Embarcadero with Vito Acconci and Stanley Saitowitz, and Turia Gardens (1996), Valencia, Spain with Ricardo Bofill.
Her work has also been featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art, High Styles: Twentieth-Century American Design, (1985), the Venice Biennale (1972), Walker Art Center (1986–88), SFMOMA (Visionary San Francisco, 1990; Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, 2019; KLEE + BSS, 2023), BAMPFA, Land(e)scape, (2018), LAXART, Relax Into the Invisible, (2019), the Palm Springs Art Museum, Breaking all the Rules, (2019), the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, BEYOND: Works by Nellie King Solomon and Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, (2020-2021), the Graham Foundation, Exits Exist, (2022), and MarinMOCA, SUPER-SILLY-US, (2023).
She later studied architecture at UC Berkeley, publishing Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden (1988), and received the 1983 AAR/NEA Fellow in Architecture, Rome Prize, and an NEA Distinguished Design Fellowship.
A dedicated educator at institutions including UC Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, ILAUD, California College of the Arts, and the San Francisco Art Institute, Stauffacher Solomon left an enduring legacy that continues to inspire artists, designers, and architects alike.
Stauffacher Solomon’s monumental Supergraphic, Strips of Stripes (2023), is currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Institutional attention continues in 2027 with a solo exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, inclusion in Made in San Francisco at the de Young Museum, which examines the pivotal role of the San Francisco Art Institute (1945 – 1969)—where she was both student and professor—in shaping postwar American art, and a new permanent public art commission as part of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Streetscape Project.
Selected public collections include the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.
