About the Author

Susan Brown is associate curator and acting head of textiles at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian American Design Museum. Alexa Griffith Winton, manager of content and curriculum at Cooper Hewitt, is a design historian and leading Liebes scholar.

Reviews

“[Dorothy Liebes] has all the elements of a 20th-century design legend, but she isn’t a household name yet. This exhibition, and its handsome accompanying monograph, will surely change that.”—Sarah Archer, T List (newsletter, New York Times T Magazine)

“Textile designer Dorothy Liebes emphasized tactility, luminousness, and contrast by combining natural and synthetic fibers in neon shades. . . . [This] book, with essays by seven experts and a comprehensive biographical timeline, accompanies a Liebes retrospective. . . . Ms. Liebes, although underappreciated now, practically blanketed the world with products while battling corporate misogyny. Factories adapted her handwoven samples for mass-market clothing and furnishings, and she lined mansions and offices with sumptuous one-offs.”—Eve M. Kahn, New York Times

“Enclosed in a dark green, cloth-covered case binding with an electric lime-colored serif font and aqua-teal end papers (a nod to Liebes’s penchant for analogous colors), a generous selection of lush, full-page close-ups display her weavings in tremendous detail. . . . With thorough and caring scholarship and curation, A Dark, A Light, A Bright feels like a love letter to the path-forging designer.”—Julie Schneider, Hyperallergic

“Well-researched material will be of use to scholars and collectors [and] will have great appeal for the more general reader. . . . The book is particularly nicely designed. . . . Liebes would have approved. . . . The full-page close-ups of her weaves get as close as a printed page can to a sense of handle.”—Victoria Bradley, Journal of Design History

Recipient of the 2023 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, sponsored by ARLIS
 

Selected as the 2025 SAH Exhibition Catalogue Award winner

2023 AIGA cover winner