Biography

Dorothy Liebes was a highly respected textile designer who was one of the first American craftspeople to adapt her hand woven techniques for mass production. She began her career as a painter, but since her paintings resembled textiles she switched. After earning multiple degrees, she worked in Paris with several textile designers. A few years later, she set up a studio, where she began taking commissions for commercial fabrics from architects and businesses. Her career blossomed, and she became known as "America's first lady of the loom."

From PARAMOUNT THEATER WEBSITE- OAKLAND:
Dorothy Wright Liebes (1899-1972) was special consultant to Timothy Pflueger for the textiles, including the stage curtains, used in the Paramount Theatre. She was then on the threshold of her long and distinguished career in textile design. After designing the appliqued gold and silver pattern of the house curtain, among other things, for the Paramount, she worked with Pflueger again in 1939, when she designed the white silk ceiling-to-floor draperies for his Patent Leather Lounge in the St. Francis Hotel. California-born (Guerneville, CA) Dorothy Liebes numbered Frank Lloyd Wright, Edward Durell Stone, and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia among her international clients, and her commissions ranged from the Persian Room of the Plaza Hotel in New York to the main lounge of the S. S. Constitution. She specialized in custom-designed hand-loomed textiles, not infrequently combining metallic yarns with silk and cotton. Her textiles formed an integral component of the architectural settings in which they were used, and her influence raised the craft of weaving to the status of an art.
[Also see: Smithsonian Archives of American Art Dorothy Liebes biography and collections]
[Also see: Dorothy Liebes entry in Notable American Women: The Modern Period]

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