Long live Bobbie

Offline pursuits and a tribute to a graphic design legend

Looks like winter hibernation is coming to a close: the coast is in superbloom mode, the northern lights appeared all over Northern California. Culture-wise, things are picking up in the Bay Area, if SFMoMA’s extremely winning design exhibition ‘The Art of Noise’, a Blackbird Spyplane event at Snail Bar, a pop-up art exhibition at O2AA in West Oakland, and a group sculpture show at Salmon Creek Farm are anything to go by. Here’s what's on my mind of late, heading into “summer” as the rest of the world knows it (known now to me as fog season).

RIP Queen

Absolute legend Barbara Stauffacher Solomon died on May 7 in San Francisco, where she was born, raised, and led most of her robust graphic- and landscape-design career. Her work is distinctive, and influential, and all those important things, but Bobbie the person was a quote machine, and had an intimidating ability to keep one on their toes. She will remain A Fascinating Person Forever™️.

Clockwise from top left: A young Bobbie; a welcome sign in St. Moritz, Switzerland, commissioned in 2022; an early photo of the signage Bobbie painted on the spare, wooden buildings at the Sea Ranch (1965); Cal-Expo water tower in Sacramento (1968); supergraphics on the cover of Progressive Architecture magazine (March 1967); and subway signage she described as “sleazy Helvetica,” part of a Ulrich Franzen masterplan at Hunter College in Manhattan (1984).

A few Bobbie breadcrumbs:

• I’ve been reading my old interview transcripts with Solomon, as well as every interview I can get my hands on, for the past week. I had interviewed her a few times for my composite oral history of The Sea Ranch, which was published in 2019* on Curbed. She was already in our orbit: Brock Keeling wrote about her collaboration with Vito Acconci and Stanley Saitowitz along the Embarcadero—a popular skate spot until the city put up blockades on it, IYKYK—for Curbed SF in 2017. Also in 2017, Curbed NY’s Amy Plitt identified BSS as the designer behind the “sleazy Helvetica” signage at the 68th Street subway station in Manhattan. That project was completed in 1984 as part of Ulrich Franzen’s Hunter College expansion.

• One of the most interesting periods that I wish I’d asked her about was a stint as art director of a short-lived magazine called Scanlan’s. Picture Hunter S. Thompson editorials, an extreme anti-Nixon bent, outré illustration, wrapped in Solomon’s signature graphics. As Steven Heller noted, “Solomon’s design was unique for counter-culture publications at the time. Although Swiss modernism was a common corporate design language, it was foreign in this context.” Readymag has a few great covers in its timeline.

You can see a clear design language at work in this cover for Scanlan’s (April 1970) and a poster advertising an event in Ghirardelli Square (1969), top right, as featured in the aforementioned SFMoMA exhibition.

• She joined Lawrence Halprin in Minneapolis in 1970 for a forum of outside expert architects and landscape designers in a conceptual project to reimagine Hennepin Avenue. The street nearly runs into the Walker Art Center (hence the group of “ground-breaking mind-stretchers”—other panelists included architect Robert Venturi and sculptor Tony Smith) but was known as a down-on-its-luck downtown thoroughfare. You can read issues of the Walker’s Design Quarterly via JSTOR; here’s a piece rounding up press coverage from that time, including descriptions of her as “a little girl who designs big signs.” Right… Solomon went on to study landscape architecture at Berkeley not too long after.

• A friend who works at Mithun reminded me that her second husband was Dan Solomon, the Bay Area architect who founded that practice. Mithun was more recently the architecture firm tapped for the renovation of the Sea Ranch Lodge. Bobbie herself famously spurned Sea Ranch after working on the project (and bought a house at Stinson Beach with her paycheck)—but did agree to a couple of commissions there over the last few years, including a redo of the women’s locker room at Moonraker Rec Center and a new supergraphic for said Lodge.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon photographed at home in San Francisco, 2020, by Heather Sten for Apartamento.

A short syllabus

Bobbie, exhibited: A new experimental gallery in SF, Staircase, currently has a small but momentous show of hers, in partnership with artist Gabriel Garza. Several years back, SFMoMA curators Jennifer Dunlop-Fletcher and Joseph Becker staged a massive Sea Ranch show at the museum, along with a companion show of Solomon’s work, which I would argue ushered her back onto the cultural scene. SFMoMA’s lobby is currently gussied up in her “Strips of Stripes” installation.

Bobbie on video: “Visions Not Previously Seen: The Groundbreaking Work of Barbara Stauffacher Solomon” (2018), directed by Natalija Vekic, Kurt Keppeler and Christian Bruno, produced by Adobe

Bobbie in audio: In conversation with curator Matylda Krzykowski for Civa podcasts (2021), on Spotify

Bobbie at home: Apartmento magazine (Issue #25, 2020) with interview (also by Matylda!) and photos by Heather Sten

Bobbie in her own words: Owl Cave Books is currently sold out of her self-published books, but you can check in person at the Graham Foundation bookshop in Chicago.

Bobbie memorialized: Many obits have been published in the past week, but both KQED and New York Times cover her legacy well (and include some characteristically spicy quotes).

Guess who?

Currently reading

My friend Anooshey, a landscape architect, hipped me to Groundswell: Women of Land Art, based on a 2023 Nasher exhibition of the same name. Art history kids may recognize names like Nancy Holt (partner in work and life to fellow land artist Robert Smithson), Ana Mendieta (if you don’t know her story, listen to this podcast), and Agnes Denes (who planted two acres of wheat on infill in Battery Park City in 1982, creating what remain as some of the most striking images of the old World Trade Center). But there are so many more whose work resonates today: Mary Miss, Alice Aycock, Beverly Buchanan, Lita Albuquerque. Order a copy here from Draw Down Books.

Left: Agnes Denes’s “Wheatfield: A Confrontation” (1982) as featured in the book Groundswell: Women of Land Art. Right: Still from a New York Times Magazine feature, “Where Does All the Cardboard Come From? I Had to Know.” Photograph by Christopher Payne.

Photographer Chris Payne—whose work you may recognize from the New York Times Magazine, particularly this deep dive into cardboard fabrication—sent me a copy of his remarkable book Made in America, out now last fall from Abrams. It’s a thorough look into the state of American manufacturing from pencils to pianos. Can’t you just imagine these photographs displayed at massive scale in a gallery somewhere? Stay tuned, because we hear there might be news on that front….

Odds and ends: NYC

I’ll be in doing my part for New York design week month in just a few short days, and anyone reading this newsletter is cordially invited to attend. P.S. The Phaidon book I worked on—Designed for Life—was published in April; buy it already!

First up, I’ll be on the main stage at ICFF on Sunday, May 19 at 1pm with designers Lindsey Adelman and Minjae Kim for a chat in the spirit of Designed for Life. I have known Lindsey for years, Minjae for considerably less time, and am completely thrilled that either of them would deign to appear at the Javits Center** for this. Someone may arm us with Sharpies afterward for a signing; who can say! There will also be a party hosted by Phaidon and RISD for the book launch on Tuesday, May 21 at the EDITION hotel in Nomad. Reply to this email and I’ll add you to the list. :)

Monday, May 20, kicks off several days of Picnic on the Park, a Herman Miller mini-festival celebrating the launch of Ideas magazine, which was produced by the Herman Miller brand team with the help of design director Leo Jung, editor Mimi Zeiger, cover artist Kelli Anderson, and a host of talented writers. We will also debut this summer’s Steve Frykholm summer picnic poster release: the hot dog. (Surely I don’t have to tell you that hot dogs are trending?)

That’s all going down at 251 Park Avenue, our New York flagship, starting with an invite-only panel featuring me in conversation with Leo and Jesse Reed, co-founder of Order, the studio responsible for Herman Miller’s new brand identity. All this niche design talk will be attended by many, many creative directors and moderated by the one and only Diana Budds. Afterwards, a party serving—what else!—hot dogs. As above, reply to this email and I’ll have you added to the list.

Some other design happenings I’m looking forward to cramming in whilst in New York:

Lindsey Adelman and Minjae Kim are both repped by the design gallery Tiwa Select, which just so happens to be exhibiting an intimate collection of oil lamps by Lindsey through June 8. Fellow newsletter scribe and Sophisticated Thinker™️ David Michon is launching the first print edition of FOR_SCALE on May 17 at Colbo. Sight Unseen’s Monica Khemsurov debuts her new fancy hardware company Petra during opening hours at the Blue Green Works showroom on May 16 and 17. Sculptor Alma Allen brings his monumental works in bronze and stone from his studio in Tepotzlán, Mexico to Kasmin Gallery starting May 17. Cooper Hewitt curators will host a conversation on design collecting with August Journal’s Dung Ngo and Patrick Parrish on May 22. And my loves at Egg Collective have organized the fourth installment of their Designing Women series, which brings to life an unrealized architectural project by Eileen Gray and opens on May 15.

Well, that was long-winded. Thanks for reading, and see you real soon.
Kelsey

*This will eventually, with some additional research and bonus content, be printed as a book.
**Shit-talking aside, the Javits has its good angles—and a sizable rooftop orchard.