 to have you all here. So thank you all for coming. I'm Matilda McQuaid, I'm acting director of Curatorial and I'd like to welcome you to our fifth program of the series Behind the Design. This is a lunchtime discussion for our curators, conservators, educators and other specialists to come together for conversation around our collection and exhibition. So, and it's an opportunity for you, the audience to ask questions. So I encourage you to put your questions in the Q&A part of this presentation. So you can see it down at the bottom, not the chat, but the Q&A. Also just wanted to let you know that our next program, we have two programs this September, for this September, will be on September 28th and we'll focus on the exhibition that we just opened a few days ago, Underground Modernist, E. McKnight-Calfer. And it's a must see. So please come into the Cooper Hewitt. If you are local or nearby, it's free to the public through October. So, first a big shout out to Phoebe Moore and Robin Carter are helping with this program today. And so on to the program, we're going to hear from Susan Brown, who's acting head of textiles. Alexa Griffith-Witton, who is manager of content and curriculum at Cooper Hewitt. And they're curating the 2023 exhibition on Dorothy Leibis. And they are joined by Liza Curran, who's the interim director at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. And Erin Kenhart, who's the head of collections processing at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. And they recently digitized the Dorothy Leibis papers at the archive. So welcome to you all and let's talk Leibis. Thank you, Matilda. And thank you all so much for joining us. As Matilda mentioned, we're here to celebrate the recently completed digitization of the Dorothy Leibis papers at the Archives of American Art, generously funded by the Kobi Foundation. For the first time, the complete papers are available to the public online and no one is more thrilled than Alexa and me as we prepare for the first monographic exhibition on Dorothy Leibis in over 50 years. The papers help us to understand the breadth and scope of her career, which was huge, but also to look more holistically at mid-century design because Dorothy Leibis was truly woven through every aspect of the design field from domestic and commercial interiors to industrial design to fashion and film. So we're gonna start with a brief five minute overview of her career for those of you who may be less familiar with her life and work. And then I'll have some questions for our panel and at the end we'll have time for questions from the audience. So please put those in the Q&A box. We would also love to hear from you if you knew Dorothy Leibis or anyone who worked in her studio. So we'll drop an email in the chat where you can reach us. Dorothy Leibis was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She studied art at UC Berkeley and art education at Columbia. But it was after studying weaving that she developed a vision and an ambition for the prominent role that textiles could play in the modern interior. Over a period of 40 years from when she opened her first studio in the early 1930s until her death in 1972, her approach to textiles was instrumental in defining the look and feel of American modernism. You're having some technical issues. Sorry, please be patient. My internet is saying it's a little bit unstable which is unusual for me. So I'm hoping it's momentary but that's the lag in getting the presentation up. Give me just one sec please. I'll keep going in case because we have such a short amount of time here. The architecture was one of Dorothy's great passions and she aligned herself early on with some of the most important architects and interior designers of her time including Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Dreyfus, Donald Deskey, William Paulman, Francis Elkins, Samuel Marx. Leibis felt that modern architecture with its vast expanses of glass required a completely new textile vocabulary with her woven blinds and screening fabrics. She offered solutions to practical issues of privacy and light mitigation. Although we associate her with the indoor outdoor California modern look by the 1940s, her textiles were synonymous with sophistication and glamour from Honolulu to New York. As you see in these examples from the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and Raymond Lowe's apartment. There we go. Thanks Alexa. She also contributed to the spatial arrangement of rooms with freestanding screens, movable space dividers and rigid translucent panels formed from textiles and acrylic like this wall in the Arthur Keating apartment designed by Samuel Marx. Go ahead. And these retractable screens for the United Nations Delegates Dining Room. Thanks. Although Leibis is known for her love of color she did design for several clients with important art collections where she used texture and metallic sparkle to convey luxury. As far as we know, Doris Dukes Honolulu Home Shangri-La is the only interior where the Leibis fabrics remain in place as they were originally installed. Next. She was a close friend of Frank Lloyd Wright and worked with him on his home and studio, Taliesin, the Estonian Exhibition House, the Price Tower in Oklahoma and other interiors. So how does such a prominent designer come to be so little known? Most of the time Leibis's work was reproduced in half-tone prints like the image in the center. It's only in the interior designers rendering on the left that you see the critical role of color in that space which is carried entirely by the textiles and by encountering the textiles themselves that you understand the tactile experience of being in that space. The images also fail to convey the seductive glimmer of metallic fibers, one of Leibis's signature materials as they were activated by natural and artificial light. By using archives in conjunction with museum collections we can begin to piece together different types of documents that together illuminate just how central textiles were to the design of these spaces. Next. In addition to interior fabrics, Leibis created textiles for fashion designers, Paulien Triget, Claire Potter and Bonnie Cashin, women designers associated with the American style of functional clothes for active women. And for those who love the look but not the price, Leibis fabrics were also used by a variety of hat, bag and shoe manufacturers and distributed at department stores nationwide, including the Stoles on the right by Carol Stanley. The model you see there is photographed in Dorothy Leibis's studio, posed in front of her Ramshead loom, which today is in Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Next. The Leibis look was also disseminated through Hollywood films. Her fabrics and woven blinds were used for the sets of the Hepburn Tracy romantic comedy, Adam's Rib and the Barbara Stanwick nightclub, Noir Eastside, Westside. Next. She designed custom woven fabrics for costumes created by Hollywood designers like Adrienne Edith Head and Travis Banton and worn by stars like Lucille Ball, seen here in promotional photos for the film, Love or Come Back. Next. Leibis was deeply committed to making good design accessible to all. And eventually she gave up her lucrative custom fabrics business to create hand woven samples for interpretation on industrial looms at affordable prices. She became a color and design consultant to a dozen U.S. firms, including DuPont, Dobeckman and Dow Chemical, who sought her expertise and leveraged her reputation as a taste maker to help them build markets for new materials like Orlon, Dacron and Lurex. Leibis's reach extended to industrial and transportation design, including passengers ships, automobiles and airplanes. She worked with her friend, Henry Dreyfus, on a range of projects, including the American Airlines flagship 747 and the luxury passenger ships, SS independence and constitution. This letter from the archives captures the personal side of their relationship, reading, did you ever get a million carnations we sent you for your birthday with a hand-drawn sketch of a red carnation? Next. Leibis designed nearly all the fabrics, both hand and power loomed for the SS United States, the lightning fast luxury passenger ship that in many ways embodied the American economic, industrial and cultural dominance after World War II. This piece in Kirk Hewitt's collection will be the subject of today's behind the design discussion. So, Liza, can you tell us how the Dorothy Leibis archive came to be at the Archives of American Art and how did Leibis come to the top of your list for digitization? Sure. First, I wanna thank Susan and Alexa and Cooper Hewitt for shining such a bright light on Dorothy Leibis. And Erin and I are so pleased to participate in this celebration. As Susan mentioned, it's really surprising that she isn't better known, but she is known to us very well, the Archives of American Art, because her collection is one of the most heavily used of personal business papers. And the story of how they came to the archives is really one of our effort to document the history of the visual arts through collecting primary sources. In the 1960s, our director, Van Bill Wolffenden, knew her as a distinguished textile designer. There was also a personal connection because the president of our Board of Trustees, Russell Lyons was the managing editor of Harper's Magazine, and he knew both Dorothy Leibis and her husband, Raulman Moran, who was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press Correspondents. And following Russell Lyons' lead, we reached out to Leibis in October 1968 to ask her about her papers and the possibility of us microfilming them. And she was on board with the project, but before I could come to fruition, she died. And we took up the conversation with her husband in November, 1972, and we visited the Leibis studio on Lexington Avenue and met with him and also Ralph Higbee, who was the director of her studio. And the papers came to the archives New York office between 1972 of December, 1972 and March, 74. And they've been available to researchers in our DC office ever since. But Kathy Gaines, an archivist on our staff, produced the first finding aid. And then last year, their arrangement was refined by Stephanie Ashley with funding from the Terra Foundation for American Art. And this year, we digitized the entire collection with funding from the Kobe Foundation. And this is a foundation that specifically funds projects in the field of textile and needle arts. So we're particularly grateful to have this funding because the collection is one of our most frequently consulted. And so it makes perfect sense for us to make it available online and what perfect timing with your retrospective exhibition. So we're doubly pleased that this has come to fruition now. I think it's amazing that her papers are so frequently requested. And I think it really speaks to what a key place she plays in the mid-century design story. So after Dorothy Liebes died, Ralph Higbee dispersed the textiles remaining in the studio to universities and museums across the country, including Cooper Hewitt. But I can say from experience that they mostly came with very little information about the specific projects that they were created for. So a lot of textile collections like Cooper Hewitt's will really come to life and be given new layers of meaning by the information in this archive. Alexa, you have spent a lot of time in the archive visiting in person as a design historian. Can you tell us how you first fell down the Liebes rabbit hole? Yeah, it's a very specific moment that I will never forget in my life and in my career. I was doing some research at the Metropolitan Museum. I was doing some writing for their timeline of art history and they let me kind of run loose in their files for my research. And I came across a tag for a Liebes panel that had been for the United Nations, a project that she had done for the United Nations. And my research is American design history primarily, especially interior design. I was really familiar with that United Nations project and of course I had never heard of her. We're all very familiar with that famous photo of all the male architects. That's sort of how the Corbusier and all the rest kind of fighting to get to design the UN and that's sort of how design history has represented that project. So I became really, really interested in finding out more and it was difficult to find out more, but it started this kind of cascade of research and the first line of approach was things like textbooks and design history and there's very little about Liebes there. So then New York Times archive and then there's more and I'm starting to see more and more, oh, she worked in fashion. Oh, she was often covered in terms of the home section of New York Times often had her. But almost immediately I could see that the history of design was not like what I was finding, even in those first sort of fishing expeditions was not at all reflected in the history of American design. So that made me even more curious. And so the first time I was able to get funding to go to the archives of the American art, that was really like, it was almost like these doors keep opening one after another, if you achievement unlocked, if you work hard and so there are many and that was really, at that time they were only minimally processed. So it is really truly such a thrill that they are digitized now and organized so beautifully. But even previous to their processing it was so incredible to just open a box and then you find this correspond and you start to see how central she was to the story of American design. And her network of contacts and friends are all well-known names to those of us who study design history. So it's Henry Dreyfus, or include Wright, also Francis Elkins in the interior design sector. But then you start to also see all of the ways she intersected with it. Through the hand weaving which is probably the best known but through the industrial design, through the studio that she called a laboratory through her work in fashion which she didn't talk about a lot but actually as you and I are discovering there's quite a lot left to learn and to study about that. And then of course the film which was a revelation. So almost the more I kind of dug in the more rewarding it was. But I also quickly realized that there was I was gonna have to be very creative as a researcher and that a lot of the periodicals and this has changed. I started this in 2007, 2008, something like that. And a lot has changed since then but when I first started this shelter magazines in general like House and Garden, House Beautiful, which are so important to design history were not index. Hand Weaver and Craftsman was a really important publication for her not indexed. So I had to be really creative and eBay was a little bit of an archive for me and I bought a lot of stuff on eBay. And then so I had to, because design history was not kind of reflecting her at all I had to be really creative about how I kind of tried to pull together that information. But I did and I continue as I spend time with you on this project and thinking about leave us feel so compelled to do my very best to share the work of this incredible designer. And so I worked really hard to do that through publications or whatever, it was never enough but I wanted to kind of get her story out there in the way that I could because I do feel that this is a story that is necessary to the history of modern design. And so it's really such a thrill and an honor to be here today to talk with all of you about leave us but also to be working on this retrospective after so many decades of her, really not having that opportunity to share her work with a broad public. Yes. And Alexa has published some excellent articles in the past on Dorothy Bevis and we will share those citations with you in our follow-up email after this program. For now, let's return to that drapery panel that we showed you from the SS United States. As an example of this hunting process. So Erin, can you tell us about the various places in the archive where documents about this project are hidden away? Yes. So most of the documents about the projects such as the SS United States panels are found within the collection's large series of subject files. They span over eight linear foot boxes of material and the file, the subject files are based on leave us original arrangement and contain correspondence, printed material, photographs, memoranda forms and other types of varying invariant combinations. They focus heavily on her consultation work for businesses in the textile industry including many files on her work with Dupont, Goodall, Dow and others. Documentation on the SS United States panels are somewhat hidden within the subject files. You do have to do a little bit of digging around and look at specific dates of course. There is a register of orders from 1949 to 1951 that includes panel orders in 1950 for this project but frustratingly it gives very minimal details on the materials that were part of the project. Later in the 1950s her documentation practices seemed to have changed and the files and in the files caught orders completed from 1958 to 1967. There are a sequence of memos, order confirmation forms and purchase orders that give many more details and bring to light the work she did in 1960 for an upholstery project for the same ship. There's another group of folders in the subject files called studio business that primarily contain letters and memos from studio employees to leave us when she was away. These letters are another good source of information on the decision-making processes for fabricating samples and selecting yarns and dyes for projects such as this one. Leva's also documented her work and professional achievements in a series of 33 scrapbooks which are very fragile and difficult to serve in the reading room. So I'm happy we can bring these to researchers digitally now but they provide a great visual timeline for her projects. Her 1952 scrapbook includes several clippings about the interiors and innovative fabrics used for the SS United States. And then one last hidden reference to the project is in her 450 page draft of her unpublished memoir. She mentions this project specifically, her work on the SS United States ballroom curtains and the blue and green color palette that she used for the project. I have to say the studio business folders are my favorite because Levis was traveling all of the time and for a period of years she had a studio both in New York and in San Francisco. So her employees were constantly writing letters to her detailing their progress on various projects. It's where they get into the nitty-gritty about our drapery, like what yarns they can use in the warp to minimize stretching over time, what dyes they need to use to prevent fading in this intensely sunny environment of a ship. But it also puts into writing the day-to-day concerns of the studio, the kind of thing that normally goes completely undocumented. So we know from the press clippings that Levis and Dreyfus collaborated on the SS independence, but we know from the studio business that they were worried about being able to do it at the price that Dreyfus needed and that they considered it to be such a prestigious commission that they thought they should do it anyway even if they could only break even. So as excited as we are about the things that are in the archive, of course, there are also things that are maddeningly missing. For example, we have these letters from the studio to Dorothy Levis, but not her responses, even though both parties seem to type everything up in duplicate for the purposes of record keeping. There's also no correspondence with Bonnie Cashin, who was one of her closest friends and collaborators. Liza, from your years of experience working with artist archives, do you have any theories about why some things, even things that are not terribly personal, are held back? Well, Susan, it's always to keep the archives that are incomplete and this is a very extensive collection, so it's always those veins of research that you're pursuing that somehow they've disappeared. We don't really know in this case if there's materials held back for personal reasons, but there is a note in our file from November, 1972, stating that Levis's husband, Raul Moran, he destroyed the correspondence that was in the home because he considered it to be irrelevant. So could it been some of the things you're looking for? We don't know. And we're considering her business, the studio, there are letters from Levis's studio staff beginning in 1952, as you probably know, but we can only speculate about what happened to the earlier responses. And some of the correspondence has been destroyed or lost. The collection still includes a great depth of personal business correspondence, thousands of letters, maybe not the one you need. From about 1922 to 1973, the studio the year after her death, but there's always missing pieces. And that's the real enterprise of art history and design history is to make those informed beliefs when the primary sources don't exist. Yes, and you are absolutely right. There are thousands and thousands of letters. And when I look at the sheer volume of her correspondence, I can't believe she had time to do anything else. So needless to say, Alexa and I are very excited about Dorothy Levis, but she is no doubt one of many women designers who have been rendered invisible in the design histories that have been written so far. So as a question for all of you, how do you think that the digitization of the Levis archive and others like it will impact design scholarship more broadly? Erin, do you wanna start? Sure, I can start. So digitization allows for global access to this archive and provides just a starting point for digital scholarship. These online documents can now be contributed to crowdsourcing projects such as the Smithsonian Transcription Center, which is what I'm very excited about as next steps. And this makes it even easier to find the connections between the people and the projects within the papers. Educators can use the digital images in their classrooms or share thematic content through the Smithsonian Learning Lab and curators can use the content for virtual exhibition purposes. So there's a great deal of potential for new online storytelling opportunities and collaborations that tell the design history directly from the documents. Thank you. Liza? Well, now that the collection's available online, as Erin mentioned, it's much more easy to make relationships and discover these relationships that were more difficult to find before. And for instance, we recently acquired the papers of Emma Amos and we know that she worked in Libas' studio and there is some material there, but we were having a hard time seeing Emma Amos in Dorothy Libas' papers, but within the desk diaries and calendars there, you can really see how involved Amos was in the day-to-day operations of the studio and beginning in the early 1960s, just frequently mentioned in these diaries. And the diaries were kept by her staff because Libas traveled so often that they kept a record of what was happening so that she could be informed of what was going on in the studio. And there's particularly information about Emma Amos' connection with new rug designs and also their very close personal relationship because Emma Amos was married in Libas' studio. And there are moments in the diary marking parties and marking the celebration of her wedding day, which was May 1st, 1965. And for the history of design, the collection provides a real wealth of details about the development of her thought process and methods and this is revealed to her extensive reports, memos to clients and other customers and particularly in the subject files. And the papers also show relationships and connections between individuals in the design world that were previously maybe not so highlighted. For example, the exchange between Henry Dreyfus and Libas in June of 1961, it really reveals their mutual efforts to provide opportunities for each other on the projects they participated in. So there was a great sense of collaboration that is revealed in these papers that might not otherwise have been so evident. And now that they're online, I think it will be easier for people to make those connections. Absolutely. Alexa? Sure, I will absolutely echo everything that my colleagues have said, but I would like to extend that to, I mean, the real vital and central role that the archives materials play in establishing the career that she had and the history that she had, which is, as you mentioned, Susan, in the beginning, her work is sort of atomized across a number of institutions and not clearly documented in many cases and then incompletely documented in the public record. And without the archives of American art, this incredibly deep and long career, I think the full spectrum of it would not be able to be surfaced. And so this very important voice and participant in the formation and conversations around American design would be missing. And to me, that is what is so exciting about having these papers digitized and accessible anywhere. Also the condition with mid-century things, every time I would go down there, I felt like I was killing them a little bit because of just the paper that was used and everything. So it's a huge relief to know that they are accessible and safe. But I would also just like to point out that this is somebody who was at the apex of privilege and power. She was this beautiful, blonde white woman who was wealthy and successful from a very early point in her life. And yet still so quickly she was really brushed off and erased from the history of design. And so as historians, I think we need to really pay attention to this because it speaks to much greater absences that need to be looked at. And for all the design historians in the audience, this is such an exciting time because there is so much opportunity to continue to surface these important contributions. And I think the papers from the Dorothy Leibis Archive are going to be so important to many stories that have yet to be fully articulated. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Liza and Erin and Alexo for this conversation. At this point, I think we're going to open it up for questions from the audience. So there seem to be quite a few. So I'll just kind of share a few. The first one, did Dorothy collaborate or work with the design, or actually did you all collaborate or work with the Design Center at Philadelphia University on this project? Because they have, I guess, a massive Leibis collection. Yes, our wonderful master's fellow has been in correspondence with the archive there. The Design Center at Philadelphia University is one of many universities that received large gifts of these samples, watches that Leibis called idea fabrics. And I think she very deliberately sort of planted them like seeds at all of the textile programs across the country from RISD to UC Berkeley, which actually has almost 800 of these samples. Another question, can you just talk briefly about some of our early life? And was she a weaver? I assume she was. There's a loom. How did she come to weaving? Sure, she started weaving really young. She talks in the memoirs, which there's a question in the chat. The memoirs are digitized and available. And this is sort of the skeleton of her life that we work really closely from. But she put together a loom and started weaving, and it sounds like she fell right into it. She was really creative originally. She had thought she was going to be an artist, but soon she saw opportunities in textile design and weaving specifically. So she honed in on that very, very early. And there was a really interesting and kind of creative subculture there in the Bay Area. And she learned from a Swedish weaver called Mama Gravander, who was doing tutorials in Swedish, traditional Swedish crafts and other places where she was constantly learning about weaving. And then she studied design at UC Berkeley. So it seems like she was bitten by the bug very, very early. Next question. Have you seen anything about the rose panels done for the ballroom of the Queen Mary? No, not yet. Go ahead. There are some photographs in the archive that may be those panels, but Susan and I had been working really hard and together with our fellow to try and uncover some of these transportation projects, which are so central and so important, but really not that well documented. So we hope to have more information on those. I'm going to interject briefly. I see so many wonderful memories and connections to leave us in the chat. And I did put my email in there. So if you would like to thank you for everyone who's done that, but if you would like to talk about this further, which obviously we do too. Thank you for that to us. So thank you for everyone who's done that, but please do reach out and I'll put my email in the chat again. Great. Do you know anything about her relationship to now? And I'm going to bungle this. Namorowski who was a weaving teacher at FIT. Yes, now was involved in the curation of the retrospective exhibition in 1970 at what was then the American Craft Museum today, the Museum of Arts and Design. That was, as I mentioned, the last monographic exhibition on Dorothy Leibos. And she wrote for the catalog. And I'm not sure if they had a relationship before that. Alexa, do you know? I don't know. That's that's what I know. Was she influenced by Annie Albers? Did you know Annie Albers? Yes. Letters in the archive, the wonderful archive between Annie Albers and Dorothy Leibos. Leibos was going to be in North Carolina at a conference or something. And Annie Albers who was at Black Mountain College at that time wrote to her and said, Oh, I hear you're going to be in the area. I'd love to meet and response back and forth. So we know that they did admire each other's work and have some correspondence and that they did meet in person. But I don't know beyond that. About inspiration per se. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Sorry, I just add quickly that she did know, she did know the Cranbrook circle of weavers and so on. But she was much closer to Scandinavian weavers and had long friendships with Elsa Gullberg. And so that seems to be more of the orbit that she was in personally with other textile design. Next question. Does the archive include physical fabrics, watches and other materials? It does. We do have a series of textile samples from the studio. They were given to us probably much in the same way they were given to other Cooper Hewitt and others with minimal descriptions, but they most do have a alphanumeric number, like sequence on them, that we have arranged them in that way for the archives. And you can view those online as well. So those have been digitized and are available in the finding. Great. Next question. Going forward, will the textile documentation in the archive be married to the textiles in the various museum collections? Will they somehow be interconnected? Well, that's the dream, of course. But it is, as Liza said, the work of art history to make those connections and to do that data entry so that the relationships between the archival materials and the museum collections are captured in the cataloging of the museum collection objects. Next question. Is there any mention of Libas connecting with Joseph Eichler who developed the mid-century modern homes in Northern California? We have not found anything about a connection between Eichler and Libas. She did, in terms of kind of modular home or mid-century design along those lines, she did do the textiles for Frank Lloyd Wright's model Eusonian that he built on the side of what is now the Guggenheim. But to our knowledge, don't know that she was connected with Eichler. How many staff members did she have in her office? And how many of those were designers? I would say it varied between 12 and 20 at different times, including people who did the books and, you know, responded to all of this client correspondence, as well as weavers, dyers, and so on. And there were other designers working in the studio. As Liza mentioned, Emma Amos seems to have been very, very involved in the carpet designs in the 1960s, specifically for Bigelow carpets. And Tamas Keef, who went on to have a very prominent career as a print designer, worked in the studio for some time. So a lot of people came and went, and some people stayed for a long time. But she, even from the very beginning, it was a studio of 12 to 15 people. Great. So here's one who's thanking for such an inspirational event. As a designer and educator, she's interested in Dorothy Leibis' craft program for World War II veterans. And she's also, you know, covered anything of this in your research. And does it appear in digitized collections or in the archives? You want to take that, Alexa? Yes. The answer is yes to all. And in fact, we had a wonderful art table fellow this summer who was specifically researching Leibis' work on arts and skills. It was a program that she initiated. And again, this is one of those incredible programs or incredible contributions that she made that has sort of fallen from the record. And it was aimed at, inspired according to her memoir, by seeing the injured servicemen come back from, from Hawaii after Pearl Harbor and thinking that, you know, weaving was very much a solace for her personally to talk about how it calmed the nerves. And she wanted to set up a craft program for servicemen as a kind of, you know, they didn't talk about PTSD at that time, but it was that type of somatic therapy and also a little bit professional. And there is a scrapbook in the archives of American art that is dedicated to the work that she did with arts and skills. It was a huge program with many collaborators. That research is ongoing and we're hoping to uncover more. The National Archives has actual samples that servicemen made under this program, but there is information and there is correspondence in the archives. So we are, it is vital and we're looking forward to more research about that. Great. Does the Bonnie Cashin archive have correspondence between the two of them? Yes. The, the keeper of the Bonnie Cashin flame and Bonnie Cashin archive has been a wonderful partner in this research and incredibly generous in sharing her, her knowledge, her vast knowledge of cash in and also the friendship between Cashin and Levis. They were both from California. They were very good friends and they also collaborated. And we have Stephanie Lake has very generously shared with us some wonderful correspondence that she has from the Cashin archive that documents that friendship, which is a really wonderful piece to have because as, as was mentioned previously, it's not in the Levis papers. Next question. Did religion play any part in her design career? Any, any. That has not emerged in the, in the papers. I don't know about her personally. Okay. And then did Dorothy or her studio donate the swatches to the institutions? This happened after she died. So she passed away in 1972. And then there was a little bit of. Uncertainty about. How to proceed next. But in the end, Ralph Higbee, who was mentioned, who was the studio manager in New York. Sort of divvied everything up into groups of. Five or six large panels and a hundred samples. And distributed those to institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper Hewitt, the National Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Art. And a bunch of universities that have been mentioned, including RISD and the one in Philadelphia, Philadelphia College of Textiles and the Moore College of Art, I think, and several in California, her home state. Who has the rights to interpret her designs for fabric or wall coverings for residential and commercial use? As always, that's a tricky question. The studio itself was disbanded after her death. And so it wasn't, you know, like so many textile companies are purchased by another company. That didn't happen. The studio was just closed and disbanded. And she did not have any children. She did do a lot of work for some major corporations like Goodall and Bigelow Sanford. And she did a lot of work for some major corporations like Goodall and Bigelow Sanford. And so those companies may have some rights in the work that she created for them. But otherwise, there's no, as far as I know, no rights holder for the Dorothy Liebes in her own right. Couple more questions. Was there any mention of Evelyn Ackerman, who also was the mid-century designer of textiles? She was active from the mid-50s to the early 80s. That's not a name I recall coming across. Doesn't mean it's not there. As Erin said, sometimes things are hidden away. But we'll keep an eye out. And if we find it, we'll let you know. And then I guess another person, someone asked if she worked with Trudy Garman Prey, whom we also have the archives for, but I don't know. They did know each other. We know that from the archives, but they did not collaborate to my knowledge. Next question. Were the blinds all hand-woven? This is Peggy Osterkamp. I have the shuttle she used for weaving the blinds. Wow, Peggy. Wow, Peggy. That's fabulous. Yes, most of the blinds were hand-woven. And there are great pictures of them being woven in the studio and there's a lot of correspondence about needing a wider loom to make super wide blinds. She did at some point provide hand-woven samples to Columbia blinds for some more commercially manufactured blinds, but all of the ones that you see in the pictures that we've shown and others are hand-woven in the studio. Okay. Maybe one last question. Do you know of any sort of contemporary analogs to Libas, textile designers now who are working in a similar style? Just one. Yes, many. Her exploration with materials is something that I think, and Susan and I have discussed this, I think if she were working now, she would be 100% dedicated to sustainable materials for textiles. So I think that's something that really resonates. Yes. And I think that she was extremely influential and the Libas look has persisted into our time in the interest of mid-century modern design. So the sort of nubby hand-woven, heavily textural fabrics as a counterbalance to the clean shapes and cool materials, I think is something that has had a lasting impact. Great. Okay. I think we're over our time. And there's still questions. So please, you have emails for Susan and Alexa in the chat. Please, you know, keep them coming and also memories for those. And if you have any textiles that you're looking to put in a safer place, remember Cooper Hewitt. And anyway, thank you all for coming. This was fantastic. Thank you, panelists. And, you know, can't wait for the Dorothy Libas show to be up in two years. Okay. Take care. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.