It is an art project that literally opens a window – or more accurately, many windows – into the complex history of Sonoma County.
Instead of peeking into the offices of Sonoma Media Investment at Fifth and B Streets in downtown Santa Rosa, pedestrians passing by the building now have something more exciting to see.
Each window is covered with a collage of instantly recognizable images that, as locals nod, are “so SoCo.”
Hot air balloons float over Windsor, the canopy of the Sebastiani Theater stretches across Sonoma, an apple tree spreads out in Sebastopol, and Snoopy, as the Red Baron, flies over Santa Rosa, the longtime home of cartoonist Charles Schulz and the Schulz Museum.
The collection of 5-foot-high collages is spread across ten windows of the building and is the work of graphic artist Coco Tafoya and her daughter Lily, 18, a young artist currently on her way to college in Paris.
Coco Tafoya, who grew up in the area, calls it “my love letter to Sonoma County.”
She and her daughter were commissioned to carry out the project for Sonoma Media Investments (owner of The Press Democrat) by Artstart, a 25-year-old nonprofit that supports public art projects with emerging and professional local artists and provides young people with hands-on training in the arts.
The collages look old-fashioned like vintage postcards or posters, but have the sharp and vibrant colors of contemporary digital design.
SMI received $25,000 through the City of Santa Rosa’s Facade Improvement Program to cover the cost of repainting the exterior of its downtown office at 416 B St., installing new signage and removing old awnings.
The program is part of a larger small business assistance program launched by the city with funds from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and aimed at helping smaller businesses that have experienced financial difficulties due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The company also received an additional $10,000 from a companion program to fund public art projects that contribute to downtown revitalization and promote civic engagement and cultural identity, said Troy Niday, SMI’s chief operations officer.
“We are storytellers for this community. Why don’t we use art to tell the story of our communities in a different way?” he said of the concept.
It was a challenging undertaking, says Coco Tafoya, who is also a branding specialist and stylist. It meant going through countless ideas and images to settle on 15 to 20 that best represented each area and its distinctive character. At the same time, the collage had to feel cohesive, like separate chapters of the same story.
There is a window for each of the nine towns in Sonoma County – Rohnert Park and Cotati are included – and Monte Rio and Bodega Bay represent the Russian River region and the coast.
“We did a lot of prep work, digging through The Press Democrat’s archives,” Coco Tafoya said. “We wanted to do some vintage images, but we also wanted to mix them with new and modern images. Ultimately, it took a while to find the images and make sure they were high resolution so they looked good when blown up.” As a photographer, she took some of the photos herself, including the pickup truck with a couple of waving kids in the bed – her own – on the Monte Rio collage.
Another was the famous “Welcome to Sebastopol” sign, a nod to her father.
“I tried to add some personal touches,” she said. “I grew up in Sebastopol and my father was also a graphic designer. He was hired to paint the four signs at the entrances to Sebastopol. He designed, built and painted them in our garage in the 1980s.”
Daughter Lily, a 2024 graduate of Santa Rosa High School and the ArtQuest program and a former intern at Artstart, had some experience with collage. She helped by recoloring images, cutting out iconic buildings, and helping arrange the different images for each city in a meaningful way.
While wine and grape growing predominates in much of the county, the Tafoyas tried hard to find images beyond that: a saxophone player for Healdsburg, home of the Healdsburg Jazz Festival; oranges and old postcards for Cloverdale and its history of citrus growing; a mariachi player and Luther Burbank in Santa Rosa; and the pink-and-white-striped home of Patrick’s Salt Water Taffy in Bodega Bay.
Niday and Tafoya said care was taken to be inclusive.
“We wanted to reflect not only the diversity of the different communities, but also the diversity within the county,” Niday said. “We wanted to make sure we reflected the Native American presence and do it right.”
To ensure that images such as the Pomo basket in the mural in Rohnert Park/Cotati were true to the tribe, a Pomo artist was consulted.
Each collage was printed on adhesive vinyl by Signarama and installed like a gallery on the building’s Fifth Street windows to provide privacy for people working inside the building. They can look out, but people outside can’t see in.
The building, which once housed the old Greyhound bus station, was freshly renovated when Sonoma Media Investments moved in in 2022. But the exterior also needs to be renovated, Niday said.
Asherah Weiss, program director at Artstart, said the vinyl collages are new territory for the organization, which oversees mural painting on buildings but has never worked with digital art before.
“Lily is turning out to be an incredible collage artist and Coco is an incredible digital artist, photographer and stylist,” she said. “They were wonderful to work with. As a mother-daughter team, they already know each other so well and were able to learn from each other and bring their unique skills to the project.”
Niday said the showcase gallery is in line with the mission of a local newspaper. “It does what we do as a newspaper: It holds a mirror up to our community and reflects the best we have to offer.”
Reach staff writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or [email protected].
