Dorothy Wright Liebes was renowned for her weaving, design, and mastery of color from the mid-1930s until her death in 1972. She dominated women’s  magazines, was featured in newsreels, television and radio programs, and created the “Liebes Look,” an aesthetic embraced in later decades even when not associated with her name.

Today, Liebes would be called an influencer. She knew everyone: Diego Rivera and Alexander Calder were in her address book. Her contemporaries described her as driven, charismatic, generous, glamorous, and whip-smart. Her weaving and design studios in San Francisco and New York were go-to sources of textiles for leading interior decorators and architects including Frank Lloyd Wright. She helped and influenced scores of designers, weavers and artists.

Her parents moved the family from Santa Rosa to Berkeley in 1920 so that Dorothy and three siblings could live at home while attending Cal. Their home at 78 El Camino Real remained in the family from the early 20s until Liebes’s father’s death in 1956. While an art student at Cal, Dorothy worked in San Francisco at the Esther Hellman Settlement House on San  Bruno Avenue three nights a week. Her mother would wait for her trolley at the top of Claremont Avenue to walk up the hill to their home with her daughter.

Dorothy was active in campus life at Cal, serving as vice president of the YWCA in her first year, and joining the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. She also volunteered for the Student Affairs Council, which dealt with student misdemeanors. She wrote,  “I found this distasteful but felt it was part of my responsibility to the school community.” Cal’s greatest impact on Dorothy’s career, however, was being encouraged by Anne Swainson to move from fine art into textiles. She was also a student of Alfred Kroeber, and Liebes cited anthropology as one of her lifelong influences and inspirations.

She lived in Berkeley and taught art in the Piedmont Schools until 1924, when she moved to New York to attend Columbia University. She is interred with her parents, Frederick and Elizabeth (Bessie) Wright, and her sister Mildred Wright Wood at Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland.