Good Mourning California by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

First edition of the 1992 book by supergraphics creator and design legend Barbara Stauffacher Solomon.

A poetic exploration of California's landscape, nature, and gardens mixes supergraphic pioneer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon's drawings, collages, and photographs with a lively text to bring the state's seductive terrain to life. 

Seventeenth-century European explorers imagined California to be an island; in Solomon's view, the Golden State today is an oasis of myths and illusions. Spliced together with her own images of highways, the Marlboro Man, painted maps, conceptualist doodles and photomontages, her reflective free-form essay presents the California dream as a triumph of the synthetic, a narcissistic haven where "everyone writes their own myths," where originality is passe and "freedom is being free to conform." A California artist and architect, Solomon ( Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden ) here provides a social topology of gardens, from San Franciscans' backyard vegetable patches to the golf-course-sized lawns of conservative Republicans. She examines the racist and jingoist underpinnings of westward-moving Americans' myth of Manifest Destiny, then looks at California's new wave of Asian and Latino immigrants, squeezed in a state where "poverty has always been a sin." A disturbing, provocative collage. 

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Rizzoli; 1st edition (August 15, 1992)
• Language: English
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 0.8 x 11.2 inches

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon is also the author of Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden.

Please note that due to this item being a vintage, out-of-print item, there is wear and tear, along with slight discoloration and cut corners of miscellaneous pages.