It’s an art project that literally offers a window — or more precisely, many windows — into the multilayered story of Sonoma County.
Instead of peering into the Sonoma Media Investment offices along Fifth and B streets in downtown Santa Rosa, pedestrians walking past the building now have something more intriguing to look at.
Each window is covered with a collage of instantly recognizable images that are, as longtime locals say with a nod, “So SoCo.”
There are hot air balloons over Windsor, the Sebastiani Theatre marquee splashed across Sonoma, an apple tree spreading in Sebastopol and Snoopy as The Red Baron flying above Santa Rosa, the longtime home of cartoonist Charles Schulz and The Schulz Museum.
Spread among 10 of the building’s windows, the collection of 5-foot-tall collages are the work of graphic artist Coco Tafoya and her daughter, Lily, 18, a young artist just heading off to college in Paris.
Coco Tafoya, who grew up in the area, is calling it, “My Love Letter to Sonoma County.”
She and her daughter were commissioned to do the project for Sonoma Media Investments (owner of The Press Democrat) through Artstart, a 25-year-old nonprofit that helps facilitate public art projects using emerging and professional local artists, while also offering hands-on apprenticeships to youth in the arts.
The collages have an old-timey feel like vintage post cards or posters, but with the sharp and vibrant colors of contemporary digital design.
SMI received $25,000 under the city of Santa Rosa’s facade improvement program to offset the cost of repainting the exterior of its downtown offices at 416 B St., install new signage and remove old awnings.
The program is part of a larger Small Business Support Program put together by the city with money from The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, aimed at helping smaller businesses facing financial hardship due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The company also received an additional $10,000 from a companion program to fund public art projects that help revitalize downtown and promote community engagement and cultural identity, said Troy Niday, SMI’s chief operations officer.
“We’re storytellers for this community. Why not use art to tell the story of our communities in a different way?” he said of the concept.
It was a challenging undertaking, said Coco Tafoya, who also is a branding specialist and stylist. It meant sifting 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 appear cohesive, like separate chapters of the same story.
There is a window for each of the nine cities in Sonoma County — Rohnert Park and Cotati are combined — as well as Monte Rio and Bodega Bay representing the Russian River region and the coast.
“We did a ton of back-end leg work, searching The Press Democrat archives,” Coco Tafoya said. “We wanted to do some vintage images but we also wanted to mix that with the new and modern. Finding the images and making sure they were high enough resolution that they would look good blown up ultimately took us awhile.” A photographer, she took some of the photos herself, including the pickup truck with a couple of waving kids in back — her own — on the Monte Rio collage.
Another was the familiar “Welcome to Sebastopol” sign, a nod to her father.
“I tried to incorporate some personal touches,” she said. “I grew up in Sebastopol and my dad also was a graphic designer. He was commissioned to paint the four signs at the entrances to Sebastopol. He designed, constructed and painted them in our garage in the 1980s.”
Daughter Lily, a 2024 graduate of Santa Rosa High School and its ArtQuest program, as well as a former Artstart intern, had some experience in collage. She helped by recoloring images, cutting out iconic buildings and helping to organize the various images for each city in a way that made sense.
While wine and grape growing predominates through much of the county, the Tafoyas tried hard to find imagery that went beyond that: a saxophone player for Healdsburg, home of the Healdsburg Jazz Festival; oranges and old postcards for Cloverdale and its history of growing citrus; a mariachi player and Luther Burbank in Santa Rosa; and the pink and white candy-striped home of Patrick’s Salt Water Taffy in Bodega Bay.
Niday and Tafoya said care was taken to be inclusive.
“We wanted not only to reflect the diversity of the different communities but the diversity within the county,” Niday said. “We wanted to make sure we reflected the Native American presence and to get that right.”
A Pomo artist was consulted to ensure that images like a Pomo basket in the Rohnert Park/Cotati mural was accurate to the tribe.
Each collage was printed on adhesive vinyl by Signarama and affixed like a gallery to the building’s windows facing Fifth Street, offering privacy to people working inside the building. They can see out but those on the outside cannot see in.
The building, once home to the old Greyhound Bus station, had been freshly remodeled when Sonoma Media Investments moved there in 2022. But the outside needed a makeover too, Niday said.
Asherah Weiss, a programs director for Artstart, said the vinyl collages broke new ground for the organization, which had overseen painted murals on buildings but never worked with the digital arts.
“Lily turns out to be an incredible collage artist and Coco an incredible digital artist, photographer and stylist,” she said. ”Their collaboration was beautiful. As a mother-daughter team they know each other already so well and they were able to learn from each other and bring their unique skill sets to the project.“
Niday said the window gallery synchronizes with the mission of a local press. “It does what we do as a newspaper; it holds up a mirror to our community and reflects back the best we have to offer.”
You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.
