 Welcome everyone to Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. I think we have a few people settling down, but we'll get started, so we're on time. We're excited to see the room so full. My name is Kim Robledo-Diga. I'm the Deputy Director of Education here at Cooper Hewitt. So welcome to our fourth of five Hidden Figures programs. This is the Dorothy Levis unorthodox textiles program. This project received funding from the Smithsonian American History Initiative. The goal of this week of this program is to bring light to previously under-recognized American women in design in Cooper Hewitt's collection. Today's program is three part. There'll be a talk and an intimate collection viewing led by Kate Irvin, who I'll introduce in a moment. She's the Museum Curator of Costume and Textiles at Rhode Island School of Design. And a hands-on workshop led by fiber artist Liz Collins, which is why you see those lovely fun supplies on the table that we'll be able to dip into in a moment. But before we get started, I wanna go ahead and look forward to a couple of things at Cooper Hewitt's coming in the new year. We have two exhibitions that further the conversation on Hidden Figures. Contemporary Muslim Fashion will be opening on February 28th, 2020, and Willie Smith Street Culture opening on March 13th, 2020. Both exhibitions explore culture, identity through design and fashion. So please return. There'll be fantastic exhibitions and programming related to that. So thank you for being part of this program today. And without further ado, let me welcome Kate Irvin to the stage. Hi, everybody. Let's see, I think I need to stand closer. Can everybody hear me? Okay, great. I'm so happy to be here today and to have had this chance to kind of dig into Dorothy Leibis a little bit more. But before I start, this quick romp through the life and work of Dorothy Wright Leibis, who was once regaled as the first lady of the loom. I'd like to thank Director Caroline Bowman and the museum's education and curatorial staff for bringing me here. In particular, Kim Robleda Diga and Susan Brown, Gregory Heronshaw. And though we hadn't met until just now, Alexa Winton Griffith, who is actually writing a book on Dorothy Leibis. So ask her all the questions at the end of this. The generous invitation for me to come here and talk about Leibis has led me down a rabbit hole of research that's taking me back to my first days as a curatorial assistant at the RISD Museum, which was over 15 years ago. When I first encountered many of our museum's 72 design swatches that came out of the Dorothy Leibis Studio, these swatches akin to the pieces that you'll see later today were given to RISD, that's the Rhode Island School of Design, if you don't know it, by bequest of the Leibis estate expressly to inspire the school's students in the textile department. And just as our art and design students for nearly 50 years have reveled in the experimental materials, novelty yarns, and vibrating color palette expressed in these swatches, an aesthetic known in Leibis' own time as the Leibis look. I too was and continue to be captivated by how innovative and dazzling they appear to this day. According to Leibis, a standard studio joke for visitors in her atelier was, don't stand too near that loom, she might weave you into it. This sums up Leibis' approach to her work, constant experimentation with materials, colors, and textures, her revolutionary color combinations, use of new materials ranging from woods, splints, wood dowels to metallic lurex, and richly textured yarns open the door to widespread commercial acceptance of her aesthetic. At the time, her example encouraged other artists working in fiber to explore materials and processes outside the traditional scope of the medium. According to a 1945 House Beautiful article, quote, she's probably the greatest weaver alive today, for she's broadened textile horizons as no one before her. This sentiment was echoed decades later in the exhibition catalog of Leibis' 1971 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, which is now the Museum of Art and Design, of course, at Columbus Circle. I'm quoting the catalog introduction. It's difficult for most weavers or designers today to imagine a period in American textiles when there was no use of brilliant colors, textured yarns, or subtly related materials. But in fact, this change from the dark ages of both hand-woven and power-loomed fabrics was begun in the early 30s by a fragile-looking blonde weaver from California. Now, I wasn't going to include that last part, but then I decided that it serves to show just really how fierce Leibis was to have set off the fireworks that she did in both an industry and culture so quick to belittle women throughout her career and her life. Going back to the first part of that statement, though, it doesn't feel at all wrong to credit Leibis with changing the landscape of textile design, especially in the field of home furnishings through her uninhibited play and experimentation with color, composition, and material. Leibis was born in California in 1897 and died in New York in 1972, and she left an indelible mark on the aesthetics of textile design from coast to coast in the four decades of her weaving studio that was devoted to both high-end, custom, and mass markets. Her early training as a teacher and artist educator never left her as she forged a unique path from a bustling creative studio working with leading architects and designers, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Frances Elkins, and Donald Desky, to consulting with industry giants like De Bekman, which is now Dow Chemical, and DuPont. Jacqueline Orlarsen, who today is one of the greatest weavers and craftsmen of our time, and one of many talents encouraged and supported by Leibis, described his mentor in his 1972 Craft Horizons obituary, using those very same words as the greatest craftsmen of our time, as well as calling her a titan, one of those few people who loom larger than life. I think that's a bit better than a fragile looking blonde. He went on to say, quote, her success stimulated the market for handweaves, and more importantly, on an expanded scale, the serious pursuit of weaving as a profession. As these accolades indicate, Leibis's reputation and commitment to supporting burgeoning designers brought her to many design schools, universities, museums, weavers, guilds, and crafts councils to lecture and lead workshops. For example, pictured at left here, and I'm sorry, it's very hard for you to see, you probably can't see much of it, anything, but at left is a letter from Marianne Stringel, who is the head of Cranbrook's Academy of, Cranbrook Academy of Arts, Weaving and Textile Design Department, and another influential modernist textile designer, indeed a textile luminary herself. The letter mentions, invites, talks about a lecture that Leibis is invited to give at Cranbrook, and it mentions the academic interest in the way that Leibis changed the picture of color in the US, as well as Cranbrook's students' interest in her successes in designing for industry in particular. In my many years of experience teaching with the Leibis Swatches in the RISD Museum, student reactions to seeing the details of these textiles up close, haven't changed much since Leibis's first visit to RISD in 1947. As RISD's president wrote after her visit to the campus, Leibis's presentation to the community was quote, a shot in the arm. Trustees, students, faculty, and the public have been asking for more. I have no faith in applause meters, but when students in the cafeteria jabber over their hamburgers, it must be the real thing." End quote. Similarly, in more ways than one, and you'll see in a second why I say that, after a 1963 talk, Parsons president, S.A. Callison wrote in a thank you letter to Leibis quote, they say that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and while you are certainly not a pudding, the students came very close to eating you up yesterday. Artist Liz Collins will be leading today's design workshop inspired by Leibis's transformation of common materials into eye-dazzling designs, and whose textile work is just as dynamic and boundary-defying as you can see here, is long familiar with Leibis's designs in the flesh, both as a student and as a professor. She first encountered the Swatches when she was an undergraduate at RISD. Apparently some of the Swatches that came to RISD didn't end up in the museum, but rather were just kind of tucked away in a storage closet, and one of Liz's jobs as an undergraduate was to kind of find those, pull them out into the light in the late 1980s, and catalog them. So she's really got a very deep connection to these Swatches. It really comes all full circle, especially when we consider the Swatches that are at the bottom of this slide that Liz made in 1991 as a RISD student, in which she's now showing his artwork in their own right, quite in the spirit as Leibis as we'll see. As Liz and I discussed our mutual and overlapping interactions with Leibis as jewel-like Swatches in preparation for today, we homed in on what I'd like to highlight in this brief introduction to Leibis and her sparkling design production. That is the idea of the Swatch or sample as the beginning, the foundation, the experiment, the guide, and ultimately as here, the end, the object or artwork in itself. Leibis herself was very clear about how the sampling process allowed her to try out variables, materials, textures, colors, patterns for her then and as it is today for students and successful artists like Liz alike, creating Swatches is a way to flesh out ideas to maybe find what you're looking for and sometimes it simply becomes an end in itself. And here you can see in the foreground, there are a lot of Leibis Swatches that are mounted to paper and you'll see many like that today. The moment of the Swatches landing in the museum in large part is the end of Leibis's life story. Though I should note that she also donated links and Swatches during her lifetime from the 1940s on. But let's loop back to the beginning to shed light on the role that the hand woven samples played in the development of Leibis's signature aesthetic that consistently and playfully pushed the boundaries of accepted color combinations and material use and not just for a rarefied clientele but rather in dedicated service to a mass market audience. In 1938, a writer from California Monthly painted a rosy picture of Leibis's studio, describing it as quote an atelier in the true meaning of the word. A studio or workshop community of experience craftsmen or artists who learn while they work, specifically students of design each taking his part in the craft of the whole end quote. The article goes on to say quote, they work because they like it. They work because as Mrs. Leibis says, they want a mutual association of craftsmen so that they may learn and only they will learn and and they will learn because most of all, Mrs. Leibis enjoys the aspect of passing to others her experience and ideas. At this point in 1938, Leibis's professional studio had been up and running for eight years. She started the professional studio in 1930. Though she had also started weaving for others long before in a studio that she had set up in her parents attic after having studied weaving at Chicago's Jane Adams Hall House and then Berkeley. Reflecting on the days of her early studio, Leibis wrote quote, I started in with a small laboratory studio to make models to try them out on the buying public and critical public either through exhibitions or occasional sales. To support this design studio, I taught school for many years. I looked upon it as a guinea pig where we do experimental work, end quote. It's really interesting to me to note here that the over the years both Leibis herself and many journalists refer to her hand weaving studio as a laboratory indicating not a clinical atmosphere far from it as you can see, but rather a place for ongoing creative research and development. This experimental work was recognized and promoted in a variety of ways throughout the 1930s and 1940s. It was shown in galleries and museums such as the Portland Museum, shown here with Leibis at the back of the room and there's just a little inset here and you can see those very same swatches that are mounted on that back wall in that right image. She also showed at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Bishop Museum in Hawaii and the Chicago Arts Club and she curated the Decorative Arts Display at the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco, a really notable achievement. And in 1942, 1942, the Brooklyn Museum mounted a show titled 25 Years of Dorothy Wright Leibis. So this we're talking about her weaving sense from 1917 when she was about 20 years old. By the time of this 1971 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, her work had been exhibited in over 100 national and international museums and gallery shows, 50 commercial textile shows and eight trade and world fairs. In this way, the samples and swatches were finding a place on the wall alongside yardage lengths developed for projects such as Doris Dukes' Honolulu House, Shangri-La, several of Frank Lloyd Wright's residential projects, the United Nations Delegates Dining Room, the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel and the King of Saudi Arabia's Traveling Royal Throne Room among many other projects. Throughout her career, numerous articles describe Leibis' work and process as painting with thread and she herself said that, quote, weaving is music and painting and more to me. An off-told story of Leibis' beginning as a textile designer is the one in which her art professor suggested that she actually study weaving because her paintings looked so much like textiles. According to the 1938 Harper's Bazaar article, quote, once Mrs. Leibis wanted to be a painter, the fact is she is a painter, but instead of oils and tempera she uses yarn. Her palette is one wall of her lime yellow shop, one wall of pigeonholes overflowing with yarns in all the colors of the world. In a 1950 memo sent as part of her role as being an advisor to RISD's textile department, she suggested that the department, quote, have bends of yarns, all kinds in many colors out where students can see them to create an atmosphere of color like a painter's palette. In regard to color, in a 1964 reflection published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Leibis said, quote, I also from the very beginning of my hand weaving have tried to get away from the tried and the true, the conventional colors, yarns and textures that characterize so much of what I call loving hands at home sort of weaving. Color speaks a universal language. It's the weaver's best tool. It speaks in combination and much of the fun of weaving is in juxtaposing colors on the loom. She also most poetically claimed that, quote, color is the elixir, the magical, lovely ingredient. Color is sensory as well as visual first appeal. It is emotional rather than intellectual. It is a delicate instrument. Though she respected the delicate nature of color marriages as she liked to say, Leibis also was emboldened to put certain unrelated colors together such as blue and green, a daring and novel move for a time when the old rhyme still resounded. Blue and green should never be seen except with something in between. From the beginning and throughout her long career, an aspect of Leibis' aesthetic that never went unmentioned was her constant and ever-evolving play with diverse materials and textures. Laundry lists of various materials used for both warp and weft appear in nearly every piece written about her from the 1930s through today. Remember that studio joke, don't stand too near that loom. She might weave you into it. In an article titled Tomorrow's Weaving that Leibis penned for a Woman's Day magazine in 1944, she explains some of this impulse, quote, we can weave with unlimited materials, strings, trimmings, braids, ribbons, oilcloth, cork, wood strips, reed, lace, paper, pine needles, and leather. We can use all kinds of scraps, which is not only good citizenship in the conservation sense, but conducive to exciting and interesting textures. Personally, I belong to the Mixed Fibers School of Thought. I like the play of light on cloth of different fibers and weight. It also gives a perfect opportunity to use up all the odds and ends in your scrap bag. Hence why you have the Mardi Gras beads on each of your tables. It's worth it, I think, to read you a bit of a longer quote from the 1947 Interiors magazine article that bestowed on Leibis the title of First Lady of the Loom, quote, Leibis fabrics always have striking characteristics which make them easy to recognize, colors of unsullied clarity and strength, textures of amazing tactile appeal, varied and completely unorthodox yarns if they can be called yarns. For warp or woof may be ribbon, bamboo, chenille, lusite, fiberglass, extruded plastics, grass, strings of bead and brilliance, and metallic threads, not to mention such commonplace things as silk, wool, rayon, mohair, jute, cotton, nylon, and linen. A Leibis fabric may actually not be a fabric at all, but a flexible window hanging combining the practical function of a rolling tropical blind with a decorative function of a brightly striped drapery, or it may be a stiff sparkling material, clear as water, woven of fine lusite tubing, end quote. As you can see in the images in the last slide in here, nearly all of these ingredients can be found in these samples, all of which you'll be able to see in person very soon. Though all of these unorthodox materials are lusciously tactile and tantalizing, if you're like me, which is to say a magpie at heart, you might be especially drawn to the flash and sparkle of the metallic and lurex yarns in these weavings. On one of her trips to Paris early in her career, Leibis had purchased some fabrics with gold yarns that prompted her to experiment with weaving using metallic thread that she found in San Francisco's Chinatown. This developed even further starting in 1946 when Leibis contracted with the De Beckman Company, the manufacturer of lurex yarns, to be their color stylist. This gave her all the glittering metallic yarn she could ever want to play with, and we see the results to varying degrees of subtlety in many of her swatches and textile lengths. Working with De Beckman was not her first or her last gig, consulting with industry. Starting in 1940, she'd been hired as a consulting designer and stylist by Goodall Fabrics, a manufacturer of furnishing fabrics located in Maine, and she stated that this allowed her to really kind of become even more experimental. I'm quoting her. She says, being assured of a regular income, I was in a position to do more experimentation and research in untried materials and new textures, and that is part of the fun for a designer, end quote. Through the years, she worked for several other industrial clients, including United Wallpaper, Jasko Apparel Manufacturer, Janssen, and as previously mentioned, DuPont, all of which kept her busily experimenting on multiple looms in her studio. Leibis explained her process of working collaboratively with industry in a 1946 New York Post article, quote, it isn't important that a few people can have lovely things, but by fostering artists and letting them experiment, those of you make it possible for others to have the same things. When I'm allowed to have very costly thread and experiment with it on the looms, it reflects itself in machine production. She elaborated on this idea several years later in a 1952 interview. She says, the pilot shop of a first class mill can get an infinite amount from a hand woven model. The mill man treats the hand woven piece as he would a painted or rendered design in the flat, but the dimensional quality of a real textile gives them a chance to appraise its draping and performing quality. And I don't know how well you can read it, but in each of these pictures, the left is Leibis working with an executive from Goodall, and you can see that she's holding one of these swatches that we'll see, and they're looking at what will be interpreted at the mill as a mass produced textile, and then the same is true in the right image. And this is Dorothy Leibis working with an executive from DuPont. By 1949, it was reported that the Leibis studio was creating 2,500 original swatches a year for her clients, most of which were tests for textiles ultimately bound for mass produced industrial applications. These hand woven ideas, if you will, served as creative inspiration and design prompts for high end custom interior fabrics, as well as mill woven mass produced yardage. Even though she decided to cease hand weaving custom projects for private clients in 1958, Leibis's studio was still churning out swatches until the mid 1960s, and one could only surmise that the older mounted swatches continued to serve as inspiration for new industrial weaving projects, just as the group of swatches she donated to Cooper Union in 1954 and 55, and which are now here in the Cooper Hewitt's collections, were meant to serve students in the same way. To wrap things up, I'd like to reiterate how these swatches epitomize Leibis's free experimentation and play with color, texture, and material. They truly are ideas that are pulsating with potential, and they continue to resonate with and awe students today. These are the sketches free and loose that now hang on the wall as exemplars of deep unbounded creativity. Now, before we move on to the next portion of the program, the really fun parts where we get to see the swatches and some textile links in person and up close, as well as work on our own design projects with Liz, I'd like to end with just a few more words of wisdom from Leibis herself to readers of Women's Day in 1944 to get you in the mood. Quote, alas, too many take their weaving too seriously. For many, it may be an escape, a lovely lapse from the stern reality of the daily headlines. One throws the shuttle with ever-increasing cadence and rhythm while thoughts travel far and wide or merely hang suspended. One is fascinated and delighted with a growing color and texture under one's eyes. Beautiful results can be produced from the humblest, crudest materials with the simplest tools merely by the use of imagination, taste, and work. Weaving can be a modern experience geared to the tempo of our time. Enjoy the rest of the program, and thank you so much.