Dorothy Liebes | 12. Mama Bear
- Liz Schott
- Oct 14
- 1 min read
Updated: Oct 25
More than her bold experiments with color, her civic mindedness, and her embrace of
modernism, Dorothy Liebes’s legacy is most obvious in the people she mentored. Liebes’s studios were collaborative, iterative spaces that encouraged imagination and experimentation. Not threatened by the talents of others, scores of designers, weavers, and other artists spent time in her studios, and Liebes championed diversity, equity and inclusion almost a century before the acronym came into everyday use. Art Historian Erica Warren has written, “If you were talented and willing to learn and work hard, you were welcome, no matter your background, race, or sexual orientation.”
Studio employees who went on to prominence as artists and textile designers include
Emma Amos, Dorr Bothwell, Tammis Keefe, Anna Kang Burgess and Darren Pierce – who called Liebes "Mama Bear."
Liebes also helped creatives who didn’t work for her. Tapestry weaver Marta Taipale, who later taught Lenore Tawney, found a champion in Liebes during the devastating years following WWII when she couldn’t get yarn in Finland. By promoting and selling her tapestries in the United States, Liebes helped Taipale survive the privations of this desperate time in Finland.
Textile artists Ivan Bartlett and Lorraine Miller benefited from Liebes’s connections with industry, where she brokered many sales of their designs. Jack Lenor Larsen, another recipient of Liebes’s guidance when setting up his studio, praised her in a 1963 note, writing, “Your activity, your pioneering, your color, your personality – all are a credit to the entire fashion industry.”
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