Dorothy Liebes Exhibition Virtual Tour

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Journey through decades of influential textile artistry from a master in the field in this Virtual Tour of A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes. This exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum features American textile designer, weaver, and color authority Dorothy Liebes, who had a profound influence across design fields, helping to shape American tastes. From the 1930s through the 1960s, Liebes collaborated with prominent architects and designers, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Dreyfuss, Donald Deskey, Raymond Loewy, Samuel Marx, Pauline Trigère, Adrian, and Bonnie Cashin. Exhibition co-curators Susan Brown, Acting Head of Textiles at Cooper Hewitt, and Alexa Griffith Winton, Manager of Content and Interpretation at Cooper Hewitt, guide us through some of the more than 175 works in this landmark exhibition. They share the stories behind textiles Liebes created for the 1937 Paris Exposition, Doris Duke’s Shangri-La, City National Bank in Houston, Samuel Marx’s furniture, fashion designer Adrian’s Hollywood salon, 20th Century Fox costume designer Bonnie Cashin, the Persian Room nightclub at the Plaza Hotel, and the SS United States passenger liner. As well as highlighting some of the influential weavers in Liebes’s San Francisco and New York studios, the curators showcase Dorothy Liebes’s actual loom and textile design sample cards. This tour captures some of the shine and shimmer for which Liebes textiles are known, and which are difficult to express in still images. We know you will enjoy this engaging tour of one of the country’s most underappreciated designers!

Length: 35 minutes

Registration Fee: Pay What You Can

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Cooper Hewitt was the recipient of the 2022 Decorative Arts Trust Prize for Excellence and Innovation in support of this exhibition. Read more about Dorothy Liebes in this Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust article by Susan Brown and Alexa Griffith Winton. The exhibition was on view through February 4, 2024.