A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes

Few people wielded as much influence over the texture and color of modern interiors in the United States as California designer and weaver Dorothy Liebes. The distinctive style of her woven designs—which combined vivid color, lush texture, and often a glint of metallic—became known as "The Liebes Look," and is inextricably linked with the American modern aesthetic.

Liebes’s studio in San Francisco produced luxurious handwoven fabrics that graced acclaimed Modernist interiors such as Doris Duke’s Shangri La and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, the Palm Springs and New York homes of Raymond Loewy, and the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Her reach also extended to new luxury interiors of the modern age—those of cruise liners, automobiles, and airplanes.The Liebes Look was further disseminated through fashion and film. Her fabrics were used for the sets of the Hepburn/Tracy romantic comedy Adam’s Rib (1949) and the Barbara Stanwyck nightclub noir East Side, West Side (1949), and for costumes created by Hollywood designers Adrian, Edith Head, and Travis Banton. Her collaborations with another California designer, Bonnie Cashin, resulted in some of the most distinctively American fashions of the mid-twentieth century.

Join curators from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum for presentations of Liebes’s influence across the country and a swath of disciplines, from textiles to interiors, transportation and industrial design, fashion, and film. These presentations will be a sneak peek of the upcoming exhibition and publication A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes which opens July 7, 2023 at Cooper Hewitt.

From the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum will be Susan Brown, Acting Head of Textiles; Alexa Griffith Winton, Manager of Content + Curriculum; Charlotte von Hardenburgh, American Women’s History Initiative Research Fellow; from the FIDM Museum Leigh Wishner. Digital Media Manager & Museum Registrar.

$15

Things to Know
This event is for ages 12 and older.
The entrance to the Annenberg Theater is located behind the Annenberg Theater Box Office, adjacent to the Palm Springs Art Museum's North Parking Lot.
Ample free public parking is available in the multi-level public garage across from the Palm Springs Art Museum.
Handicap parking is available. This event is wheelchair accessible.
The organizer of this event is Modernism Week.

Event Check-in Location 
Annenberg Theater,  Palm Springs Art Museum, 101 N. Museum Dr., Palm Springs, CA 92262
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Photo Credits: Dorothy Liebes at her loom in San Francisco, (circa 1930s), Weavers in Liebes’s San Francisco studio. Photographer: Charles E. Steinheimer, (1947), Raymond and Viola Loewy in his New York City apartment, blinds by Dorothy Liebes., (circa 1949), Dorothy Lamour posing with Dorothy Liebes drapes, Photoplay (March 1938), Lucille Ball wearing a coat made of Dorothy Liebes textiles for the promotion of Lover Come Back, (1946), The Royal Hawaiian Hotel, blinds by Dorothy Liebes, Honolulu, HI. Photographer: Maynard Parker, courtesy of Huntington Library, (1946).