The most farcical aspect of the tragic exclusion of women from much of the history of architecture and design is that their stories are so wildly irresistible. Take Dorothy Liebes, for example: As shown in A Dark, A Light, A Bright (Yale University Press, 2023) and its accompanying exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Liebes was part mad scientist, part Martha Stewart. Born in California in 1897, Liebes spent the 1920s mentoring textile scholars and artisans from all over before setting up her own studio in San Francisco in 1930. During the war, she helped found the American Red Cross Arts and Skills Corps, which enlisted artists such as Alexander Calder to lead workshops for wounded soldiers. Every modernist hero worth his salt used her rugs and window treatments to warm up a chilly glass office tower. After Dupont brought her on as an in-house consultant, she became one of the first women to infiltrate Big Industry’s old-boys network.
The real story, though, are her textile designs, which mix bright colors in bold almost-clashes and prefigured a glittering future of fabrics made with Lurex and metallic threads. In 1945, House Beautiful praised her as “the greatest weaver alive today.” (Liebes died in 1972.) That sold her accomplishments short. Meanwhile, the fact that a woman in Afghanistan or India or Iran could have just as convincingly laid claim to that title reminds us that there’s still work to do to write history right.