Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will open the first posthumous museum exhibition dedicated to Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, the San Francisco-born artist and designer whose bold, color-blocked graphics at The Sea Ranch helped launch an entire design movement. The show, titled Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Why? Why Not?, opens January 16, 2027, and runs through July 11, 2027, at the museum's 701 Mission Street address in San Francisco.
The exhibition arrives more than two years after Solomon's death at age 95 at her San Francisco home in May 2024, as archpaper.com reported at the time. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the show is curated by Martin Strickland and draws on newly accessible material from Solomon's archive, focusing on how California itself shaped her work. It will open with a public celebration during San Francisco Art Week, which runs January 16-24, 2027, the Chronicle notes.
From Basel Training to Sea Ranch Supergraphics
Solomon was born in San Francisco in 1928 and left in 1956 to study Swiss-style graphic design in Basel, Switzerland, training with Armin Hofmann at the Institut Kunst, according to SFMOMA. She returned to San Francisco afterward and, per the Chronicle, became internationally recognized in 1966 after painting supergraphic letters, stripes and arrows on the walls at The Sea Ranch, the Northern California coastal development.
The New York Times reported that Stauffacher Solomon served as the project's graphic designer, working on promotional materials and the Sea Ranch logo, and that she spent three days creating enormous spatial illusions using bold diagonals, circles, arrows, letters and blocks of bull's-eye colors. That work, as the New York Times put it, led to the beginning of environmental supergraphics — a style the Chronicle describes as combining Swiss modernism with California's irreverent ethos, and one that went on to shape generations of designers. Solomon later received two American Institute of Architects awards for her Sea Ranch designs, SFMOMA notes.
A Practice That Spanned Painting, Books and Public Art
Solomon's output extended well beyond Sea Ranch. From 1962 to 1972 she designed SFMOMA's monthly program guides, fusing hard-edged Swiss design with California Abstract Expressionism, the museum's exhibition page states. In 1995 she completed the Ribbon, a large outdoor public artwork along San Francisco's Embarcadero. The Chronicle notes her broader practice spanned painting, design, writing and landscape work, and that she later earned a master's degree in architecture from UC Berkeley in 1981, a milestone also detailed by docomomo-noca.org.
Her approach wasn't static. According to the Chronicle, Solomon experienced a practice shift after spending a decade drawing formal European landscapes, eventually rebelling against her own rules. That restlessness fed into her 1992 book Good Mourning California, which the exhibition will focus on. Publishers Weekly described the book as portraying the Golden State as, in Solomon's words, an oasis of myths and illusions, while the Chronicle adds that it also confronted California's utopian myths, the illusions of marriage, and used the 8.5-by-11-inch page as a space to question power, societal roles and expectations placed on women.
What Visitors Will See at YBCA
The Chronicle reports the show will include paintings, drawings, book maquettes and ephemera from Solomon's Telegraph Hill studio, along with works from her ping-pong table series and a newly installed original supergraphic. Admission will run $5 to $10, with the museum open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday, per the Chronicle's reporting.
YBCA CEO Mari Robles described Solomon, per the Chronicle, as an iconic figure in Northern Californian art, design and culture. The show is part of the first-ever Further Triennial, which the Chronicle says includes art events and exhibitions across Northern California spotlighting the region's artistic history and present. Nellie King Solomon, the artist's daughter, serves as executive director of her mother's estate, according to KQED.
Part of a Broader Resurgence
The YBCA exhibition follows a string of recent tributes that have kept Solomon's work in public view. SFMOMA presented her large-scale commission Strips of Stripes as a free public installation on the museum's second floor in 2023, and she was the subject of a solo exhibition there in 2019, per the Chronicle. KQED has reported that Solomon was experiencing a resurgence in popularity among a new generation of designers, architects and artists, and that the style she helped pioneer — linking graphic design, architecture and environmental space — came to be known more broadly as supergraphics.
Other institutions have echoed that interest. The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive commissioned a large-scale mural from Solomon, painted with help from a small team that included her daughter, according to KQED. More recently, the Anthony Meier gallery exhibition Garden = Grid = City presented rarely exhibited works on paper, paintings and a supergraphic through February 2026, as reported by artnet News. Her site-specific paintings, which she called Supergraphics, also established the conceptual logic behind LAXART's exhibition Relax Into the Invisible, per Artforum. The YBCA show marks the first time her work receives a posthumous museum presentation of this scale in the city where she lived and worked until her death.
