Dorothy Wright, second row, fifth from the left Liebes expected to graduate from Berkeley as a painter, but her teacher, Ann Swainson, noticed “a curious quality” in her work: its resemblance to textiles. Swainson suggested Liebes try weaving and recommended she attend a summer  intensive at Hull-House in Chicago. Liebes could only afford two of the institute’s six weeks, but they had a significant impact on her work.  Hull House She received her Bachelor’s degree and turned

Liebes the undergrad A part time job at the Esther Hellman Settlement House on San Bruno Avenue in San Francisco took up three nights a week during Liebes’s last year at Berkeley. Her job was to “Americanize” recent Eastern European immigrants who accessed the house’s resources. Liebes took the trolley from campus to the Oakland terminal known as “The Mole," ferried across the bay to San Francisco, then hopped another trolley to the Club. The entire trip took an hour each way

Liebes assumed she would attend the University of California at Berkeley right after high school, but her father’s unsuccessful hops growing venture meant postponing her dream. The free tuition offered at San Jose Normal School (now San José State University) allowed Liebes to get a teaching certificate, an “anchor to windward,” as her parents called it. She became president of the senior class and active in several clubs. In 1918, Liebes got her first job as an 8th grade tea

Dorothy Liebes | 2 . In her unpublished autobiography, Liebes interspersed memories of historic events of the early 20th Century with more intimate details of family life: the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, watching the spectacle of Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet steaming through the Golden Gate in 1908 (30 years before the iconic bridge was built); and riding to her grandparents’ ranch in the family’s bright red Rambler with its enormous whitewalled tires.  Liebes lo

Liebes in her early teens, Santa Rosa, California Dorothy Liebes | 1. Textile designer and trendsetter, Dorothy Liebes was born on this day (or the next day), in 1897. Her birth certificate reads October 15, but she celebrated on the 14th throughout her life. A clerical error may explain the discrepancy as the original document was lost in the 1906 earthquake. Liebes was born two months premature – a precarious start in the days before NICUs – and it was common not to name a

After my June visit to the “Intrinsic Beauty: Celebrating the Art of Textiles” exhibit at The Textile Museum at George Washington...

I was awarded The Biographers International Organization's (BIO) Hazel Rowley Prize for my proposal for Useful and Beautiful: The Life...

Because I'm writing the biography of a woman primarily known for her weaving, people often ask if I am a weaver. I am not. I have taken...

Growing up in Sonoma County, Dorothy Wright was never idle, even in her youth. Her mother called her “the makingest child.” She painted...

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Liebes was sickened by the United States’s internment of Japanese American citizens....

February 2025 Olgivanna Wright's private study In the wake of the terrible accidental death  of Svetlana Wright Peters and her children...