Dorothy Liebes

Dorothy Liebes (1897-1972) grew up in Santa Rosa, California. After finishing high school, she taught art for one year, then studied anthropology, art and teaching at San Jose State Teacher's College and at the University of California at Berkeley, where she received a degree in 1921. While there she was encouraged to pursue weaving, so she bought a small portable loom and taught herself.

She then studied weaving and design, first at Hull House in Chicago and then at Columbia University and the California School of Fine Arts. By selling small handwoven articles, she earned enough money to visit European museums and weavers.

In 1928 she married Leon Liebes, a businessman who sponsored several young artists. He gave his wife studio space in the building that housed his store and encouraged her to experiment. Her first group show was in 1933 at the Decorator's Club in New York City. In 1934 she started Dorothy Liebes Design, Inc., of San Francisco and received her first major commissions from the Ahwahnee Hotel in the Yosemite Valley and the San Francisco Stock Exchange Club.

She was named director of the influential Fine Arts Exhibit of the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair, and began winning awards and having shows in the United States and abroad.

In 1940 she and Leon Liebes divorced. In 1948 she married Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Relman Morin, but she retained the surname of Liebes professionally.

When Liebes began weaving, most weavers were only producing standard cloth, such as twill, plain weaves and damasks of cotton, wool, silk or linen. But Liebes saw weaving as an art and used not only yarn but also strings of beads, strips of bamboo, cellophane, leather, metallic threads, straw and metal rods. She also used unconventional colors, such as lacquer red, chartreuse, fuchsia, tangerine and turquoise. She said, "There are no bad colors, only bad combinations of colors."

She created colorful window shades, rugs, upholstery fabric and draperies, as well as sculptural weavings. Her weaves became the standard complement to modern architecture, and she became known as "the mother of modern weaving." She was commissioned by architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Edward Durell Stone and Samuel Marx, and she was a design consultant for companies such as DuPont and Dow, assisting in the development of machinery that could replicate the aesthetic irregularities of hand-loomed fabrics.

From whoislog.info and Notable American Women: The Modern Period: a Biographical Dictionary, edited by Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green

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