A drab stretch of alley in San Francisco’s South of Market will be transformed into a vibrant art walk under a plan approved this week. The art will be a permanent component of the Minna Natoma Streetscape Project, a public works project to provide a safer, more entertaining walk along two blocks of one-way alleys that parallel Mission and Howard streets and connect New Montgomery Street to Third Street.

The goal is to provide a safe and scenic connector between the Transbay terminal east of Second Street and Yerba Buena Gardens west of Third. Minna and Natoma both run into the back side of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which collaborated on the project. A side benefit will be to introduce the work of Bay Area artists to people who park in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art garage on Minna Street and walk to the entrance on Howard Street.   

“Our local artists bring life and energy to San Francisco’s streets by welcoming people to our galleries and museums, and now they’re literally bringing art to our streets,” Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a statement introducing the project. “Public art like this turns an everyday commute into something joyful and encourages people to discover new corners of their community.”

The work of artists Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Mel Vera Cruz and Muzae Sesay will be incorporated into the project’s asphalt streetscapes. Artists Jesse Schlesinger and Masako Miki will contribute street furniture.

A show at Anthony Meier in San Francisco revisits the art and legacy of the woman who brought Swiss design to the United States.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon was a brilliant observer of the grammar of the world’s construction. At Anthony Meier, a series of her works on paper, a supergraphic, and two canvas Ping-Pong Tables–two of only twelve works she ever made on canvas in her matured practice, and presented at SFMOMA in 1990 as part of Visionary San Francisco–highlight her interest in the utopian significance of a green rectangle, the phenomena of the urban garden, and the tensions between how public and private space is built and maintained. Using the green rectangle as a symbol for paradise, the exhibition pulls from ideas Solomon compiled in a thesis publication titled “Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden” (1988), following a master’s program that she completed at UC Berkeley in landscape architecture. Her intimate and fantastical drawings that study the grid, perspective, scale, symbol, and accumulation continue throughout the entirety of her career, helping us attune ourselves to wonder about the ordering of things around us.

I am particularly interested in the pieces where she includes text fragments, such as “The walls are for doorways to the fields” in the work Walls Lead to Furrows, 1979. Her poetic phrases hint at the tension between what we perceive as natural and what we register as man-made. I love how this connects to her graphic design, and threads an insistent observance on how society’s structures are created, made to mean, and hold a civic body.

The late Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s singular colored pencil drawings, which informed her work as a graphic designer and landscape architect, will be the center of this show. Specifically, it focuses on the garden, rendered as a verdant rectangle, as a meditation on constructed spaces and paradise.

She pioneered supergraphics, yet Barbara Stauffacher Solomon remains under-recognised. Wallpaper* explores the work of this industrious and uncompromising figure, who was by all accounts decades ahead of her time

When Barbara Stauffacher Solomon passed away in 2024, she had a supergraphic painted across the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art lobby (still there), and an asphalt artwork planned for the Minna Street corridor (now under construction). But she didn’t have local gallery representation, and opportunities to see her smaller scale artwork in person were rare. Garden = Grid = City is the artist’s first exhibition at Anthony Meier Gallery, which now represents her estate. Included in this show of works on paper, paintings and a supergraphic are Solomon’s Ping-Pong table paintings, hung on the wall with a net attached, capturing the artist’s playful, devastatingly clever approach to making art.