Barbara S. Solomon American, b. 1928

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon trained first as a dancer in her native San Francisco, before traveling in the 1950's to Switzerland where she studied graphic design under Armin Hoffman. So assiduously did she absorb 'The Master's' hard line Modernist doctrine that even when she returned to America to work as a jobbing designer, she doggedly stuck to the rigours of Swiss design at a time when, as she notes, 'psychedelic squiggles' were the norm. Despite her varied and inspirational career, she is best known for the epoch defining Supergraphics she did for Lawrence Halprin's Sea Ranch in 1960's California. Her masterwork (painted over shortly after she created it) is a radical graphic statement that can stand comparison with the work of many far more celebrated occupants of the graphic design canon. The history of Supergraphics would be very different were it not for Barbara Stauffacher Solomon.