“I needed to combine life and design and artwork,” mentioned the enduring graphic designer Barbara “Bobbie” Stauffacher Solomon in a 2018 short documentary film about her work. And for many of her life, that’s precisely what Stauffacher Solomon did.
Stauffacher Solomon died on Tuesday on the age of 95. Throughout her profession, she was referred to as a pioneer of “supergraphics,” the larger-than-life artwork kind that mixed mural artwork with graphic design. Her daughter, artist Nellie King Solomon, told KQED, “She had an enormous life! There’s no tragedy.” In keeping with Solomon, her mother died doing what she cherished: creating.
“She died with Liquid Paper on her palms,” Solomon mentioned. “She wrestled it with the nurses.”
A lifetime of artwork
Stauffacher Solomon was born in San Francisco. She married the filmmaker Frank Stauffacher when she was 20 and gave delivery to her first daughter, Chloe, two years later. When Frank died in 1955, solely seven years after they married, Stauffacher Solomon was left to take care of her daughter by herself. She moved to Basel, Switzerland, to review graphic design and make her personal profession. Throughout her coaching, she spent a whole yr finding out Helvetica. “You didn’t specific your self,” she mentioned of her time finding out in Switzerland. “You probably did what you have been advised.”
“I grew up within the Nice Melancholy and was a single mom within the ’50’s,” Stauffacher Solomon mentioned in an interview with the clothes model Buck Mason. “You simply work as a lot as doable and as arduous as doable to maintain issues going. I used to be by no means enthusiastic about blazing trails or having a legacy. I used to be simply working my ass off to show I wasn’t only a fairly woman.”
Whereas Stauffacher Solomon won’t have imagined herself a trailblazer in these early years, her daring fashion spoke for itself—finally launching her to nationwide recognition. After leaving Switzerland within the early ‘60s, she returned to San Francisco and arrange her personal design studio. That’s when she obtained what she known as her first-ever “actual job,” serving to to design promotional supplies for a seaside deliberate group known as Sea Ranch, north of the town.
She created the group’s distinctive ram’s horn emblem. Then, when designers at Sea Ranch have been finalizing the athletic membership’s inside, Stauffacher Solomon stepped in to improve the uncovered plywood, adorning the house with large blue, pink, and white swirls, in addition to her signature sans serif Helvetica letters.
“I mixed California Summary Expressionism with hard-edge Swiss graphics,” Stauffacher Solomon mentioned within the documentary. “. . . [S]tretching, bending, reaching; the method was as a lot dancing as drawing.”
The look was completely novel for its time. Sea Ranch’s intrepid PR crew helped to unfold photographs of Stauffacher Solomon’s work, which finally ended up on the duvet of Progressive Structure journal. There, an editor coined the time period “supergraphics” to explain the mix of typography and imagery with structure and concrete areas. Since then, the style has taken on a lifetime of its personal, expanding across locales.
After Sea Ranch, Stauffacher Solomon’s profession took off in various totally different instructions. Within the late ‘60s and ‘70s, she designed music store posters and program guides for the San Francisco Museum of Art. Later, she obtained a grasp’s diploma in panorama structure and wrote a ebook known as Inexperienced Structure and the Agrarian Backyard. Within the ‘90s, she made a hanging collection of work impressed by ping-pong tables.
Stauffacher Solomon retained her electrical ardour for design even in her final years. In a 2023 interview, she described waking up in predawn hours to sit down at her drafting desk, the place she would start ideating her subsequent huge mission. And final September, she debuted her exhibition, Strips of Stripes, at SFMoMA; a collage of giant pink and black graphics and the letters “OK” splashed throughout the museum foyer’s ceilings.
After a lifetime of labor, Stauffacher Solomon started to create anthologies of her life and work. Her memoir-design ebook combo is titled, Why? Why Not? 80 Years of Art & Design in Pix & Prose, Juxtaposed.
“Writing the memoir I discovered very fascinating,” Stauffacher Solomon mentioned within the brief movie. “For me—anyone who was all the time having to be a mom or a spouse or a daughter—I might be myself, as a substitute of simply spouting what my husband had taught me. Unexpectedly, I may assume, ‘What would I believe? What would I say?’ I by no means had time to consider myself this manner. It was discovering my voice.”