The Bold and the Buried

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 fabric…