Meet the Rising Star Weaving a New Narrative

By Sam Cochran, Hannah Martin, and Livia Caligor

Dee Clements of Studio Herron with an array of new woven pieces and works in progress in her Chicago Studio.

My early baskets were very tight and small and finished,” says Dee Clements of Studio Herron, lightly scolding her past perfectionist self. “That was my design brain.” Since enrolling in the master’s furniture program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, however, she’s been fighting that impulse. “I want to shake up the language of basketry.”

These days she’s succeeding, judging from the bulbous, pudgy, and slightly anthropomorphic forms that animate her Chicago studio. “I want people to see this craft in a new and elevated way,” she says, standing next to a tall, curvaceous, multicolored work in progress. And soon people will. That sculptural pseudo vessel and six other pieces, among them a light fixture and an outdoor rug, will star in Clements’s first solo show at Nina Johnson gallery in Miami. Opening June 1, the exhibition marks her turn into conceptual territory.

Clements—who is also working with Salon 94 Design in New York—creates her pieces using thin reeds, which she dyes by hand and sometimes paints with gouache. Her process often begins using a traditional mold, but she lets the material guide her, keeping the reeds wet as she weaves so that they can be sculpted and clamped into the desired shape. “It’s almost like making a clay pot,” she explains of the slow and steady method, which culminates in a coat of polyurethane and sometimes the addition of a weighted ceramic base. “The material has a memory.”

She might as well be speaking about weaving in general. As one of the world’s oldest artisanal techniques, basketry tells a long social history, particularly with regard to women’s work and division of labor. Hence the exhibition title, “The Future Has an Ancient Heart,” taken from a book by Carlo Levi. “Right now in our society, it feels like we’re looking back in order to move forward,” Clements says. “That’s a really important part of my work.” studioherron.com

Liebes's hand loom (1947).

1945 swatch in signature colors.

1953 sample with aluminum yarn.

The designer's Manhattan atelier (1966).

Dorothy Liebes in her San Francisco studio (1948).

Heralded in her day as the “mother of modern weaving” and “America’s first lady of the loom,” designer Dorothy Liebes (1897–1972) ushered in a new era of American textiles. Sensuous and structurally complex, her fabrics subverted the status quo—injecting warmth, texture, and luster into the fashion and design industries while capturing the attention of the architecture elite. Frank Lloyd Wright, Donald Deskey, and Frances Elkins were all fans, though history hasn’t always given her proper due. “There’s a gap between what she did and what the industry remembers her for,” reflects Susan Brown, the head of the textiles department at New York City’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. “She was profoundly influential in shaping midcentury architecture, but her name has been written out of the narrative.”

No longer, thanks to the upcoming exhibition “A Dark, a Light, a Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes.” Opening at the Cooper Hewitt on July 7, the show brings together more than 125 archival works, including fabric samples, garments, and furniture, from the 1930s through the 1960s. “Liebes was really able to grasp the architecture of weaving, the shapes yarns make,” reflects Brown, citing her pioneering use of unconventional materials like cellophane, recycled plastic, and metallic fibers. As Liebes herself wrote in 1946: “Metal is a color. I use it again and again in my fabrics.” Her creations dazzled in many high-profile Manhattan rooms—among them the Delegates Dining Room at the United Nations, for which she created reconfigurable partitions, and the Persian Room nightclub at the Plaza Hotel, where her drapery incorporated thousands of tiny bulbs. “She understood that light was key to experiencing her textiles as she intended,” says Alexa Griffith Winton, who curated the show with Brown. But Liebes also understood that great design should be accessible to all. Collaborating with American manufacturing giants on the order of DuPont, Lurex, and Sears, she helped catalyze the nationwide shift from bespoke weaving to machine looms, creating affordable pathways to quality textiles. And that, Griffith notes, was “Liebes’s quiet revolution.” cooperhewitt.org

Cristián Mohaded's cocktails table for Loro Piana Interiors.

“Apacheta is a way of thanking Mother Earth,” says designer Cristián Mohaded of the stacked stones left by hikers along Andes trails. Those cairns have inspired this cocktail table, part of his new furniture collection for Loro Piana Interiors. Hewn from oak, ceramic, alpaca, and wool, the piece nods to the landscapes of his homeland, the Argentinean city of Catamarca, where Loro Piana sources vicuña fiber for its most luxe fabrics. loropiana.com