Eliana Willis

Its been a long time since art was restricted to walls and pedestals, but artists at the cutting-edge of immersive experiences are still finding new ways to create layered encounters with sound, movement, and touch. These elements have made Atmospheric Memory by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer an international hit with audiences.
The Mexican-Canadian artist invites visitors to step into a physical concept that was once just an idea in the mind of 19th century British philosopher and inventor Charles Babbage. “The air itself is one vast library on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered,” wrote Babbage, marveling at how the atmosphere around us captures our every gesture and utterance, however small or mumbled. He even believed that air molecules stored this information, and that they could be the key to rewind the passage of time and experience these moments again.
Inspired by how this “vast library” might work in reality, Lozano-Hemmer has brought together a collection of interactive installations that each make use of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics. One is Cloud Display, a screen made of 1,600 ultrasonic atomizers that uses water vapor to write any word spoken into its voice recognition system. Another, Atmosphonia, is a sound environment that plays waves of familiar sounds like wind, fire, water, birdsong, and bells while visualizing these tonal changes with LED lights.
Lozano-Hemmer is known for his “anti-monument” to victims of Covid-19 and a light show over the U.S.-Mexico border, but he believes that this work may be his most ambitious. “Atmospheric Memory explores [Babbage’s] idea today, when the dream of perfect recollection is one of the defining conditions of our digital life, and the air that we breathe has become a battleground for the future of our planet,” he said.
The work debuted in the U.K. at Manchester International Festival in 2019 and has since traveled to the Carolina Performing Arts theatre in the U.S. The latest stop on its global tour is Australia, where it is headlining the Sydney Science Festival at the Powerhouse Museum until August 20.
See more images from the installation below.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Atmospheric Memory (2019). Photo: Zan Wimberley.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Atmospheric Memory (2019). Photo: Zan Wimberley.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Atmospheric Memory (2019). Photo: Zan Wimberley.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Atmospheric Memory (2019). Photo: Zan Wimberley.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Atmospheric Memory (2019). Photo: Zan Wimberley.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Atmospheric Memory (2019). Photo: Zan Wimberley.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Atmospheric Memory (2019). Photo: Zan Wimberley.

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The long, unsung history of so-called “Women’s Work” takes center stage at the New-York Historical Society in a new show organized by the institution’s Center for Women’s History.
A selection of 45 objects drawn from the museum’s collection showcase the various roles—both paid and unpaid—women have served in New York City society over the centuries, and how a wide range of different activities have been considered “women’s work” during different periods of time.
“We wanted to look at at our collections and find and tell the stories and histories of diverse women,” Anna Danziger Halperin, the exhibition’s co-curator and the associate director of the Center for Women’s History, told Artnet News. “But the show’s title, ‘Women’s Work,’ is kind of a provocative one.”
“On one hand, we are looking at these historical examples of women’s labor of women’s work,” she said. “But then we’re also playing with the idea of women’s work as a stereotype of what people imagine is appropriate within cultural norms for women to do. It’s about the public sphere versus the private sphere, or men’s work versus women’s work, and really blurring those distinctions and showing how women have always worked.”
We spoke with Danziger Halperin about five key objects in the show and what they can teach us about how women’s work has evolved in New York City over the last 300 years. Here is what she had to say.

19th-Century Mahogany Cradle
Mahogany cradle (ca. 1820–30). Collection of the New-York Historical Society, gift of Mrs. Willis Reese.
This is one of the objects that make the biggest impact when you walk into the gallery, and it’s the biggest one physically in the exhibition. It’s a really gorgeous mahogany cradle from 1820 to 1830, with a wide arch over where the infant would have been rocked, draped with a prop veil—it’s very dramatic-looking.
It was really important for us to show examples of care work near the beginning of the exhibition, because that’s often what people think of when they hear the words “women’s work.” Yes, women are considered to be natural caregivers because female bodies can have babies, but caregiving is work whether it’s paid or unpaid, performed by mothers or other kinds of caregivers.
This cradle belonged to a family named the Gallatin who were wealthy and well-connected, very politically influential. [The donors were descendants of Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and founder of New York University.]
The infants who were cared for in this cradle were likely tended to by Black nurses in the 1820s. Because of the history of gradual emancipation in both New York and Pennsylvania, where the family lived, we believe that they were most likely indentured, rather than enslaved. And although that means that they were legally free, women laboring under indentures had to work for many years without wages or salaries. So, it’s a different kind of unfree labor.

National Welfare Rights Organization Pin
National Welfare Rights Organization pin-back button (ca. 1966–75). Collection of the New-York Historical Society, gift of Jim Lodge.
This a pin back button from the National Welfare Rights Organization. This is 100 and 50 years later, and I think there’s some really interesting connections. The organization was active from the late 1960s to the early ’70s. It was a movement that was really coming together at the intersection of the civil rights movement and women’s liberation and antipoverty activism.
Most of the leaders of the movement were single women of color, and they were pushing against social policies that were forcing recipients of different benefits to work in the pay market place rather than taking care of their own families.
The leading activist of the organization, Johnnie Tillmon, wrote an amazing essay for the inaugural issue of Ms magazine [in 1972], “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue.” We included this great quote on the label that in some ways, speaks to the exhibition as a whole: “If I were president, I would solve this so-called welfare crisis… I’d just issue a proclamation that ‘women’s’ work is real work.”
In the ’60s and ’70s, there were different competing kinds of cultural messages about women in the workplace. There were ideas that if you were a middle class or elite white woman, you were expected to stay home, but Black women and women of color were often forced to work for elite, wealthy white families.
There was a movement of feminists starting to say, “we shouldn’t be forced to stay home,” but then you had activists who were Black women saying, “yes, but we also shouldn’t be forced to go out to work. We should be able to be seen as respectable mothers and have our care work recognized as work. And our work of caring for our own babies is just as valuable to society as our work caring for white babies.”

Haudenosaunee Beaded Cushion
Unidentified Native American artist, Haudenosaunee beaded pincushion (ca. 1890–1910. Collection of the New-York Historical Society, gift of Arnold and Dora Stern.
This kind of beadwork work was often associated with women’s work in Indigenous groups. In the later half of the 19th century, when white settlers were really pushing them out of their historic lands, a really sophisticated kind of business model began to spring up, adapting this traditional bead work for a new souvenir market place.
This pin cushion is an example of that, made for white tourists coming to visit Niagara Falls, for example. It has a bird holding two American flags in its wings, and beaded fringe and leaves. It’s this sort of Americana decoration, like something that you would get at a gift shop for a presidential library.
It really shows this traditionally feminine form of craft being used in an entrepreneurial and creative kind of way. They are adapting because they can’t survive off of hunting and fishing and trapping in their homelands, and they need income. Indigenous women would sort of set up an assembly line within their home, and different family members would contribute.
But these things were sold as trinkets, little souvenirs. They were not very valuable. One of the points that we wanted to make is that often when work is identified as something that women do, its wages become depressed, and the professions that women were thought to pursue were more and more lowly paid.
And there’s connections here too to the work women were doing for the garment industry at the same time. We also have on display a hat that has silk flowers. Flower-making was something that women would often do at home with their children, as a way to get around, various labor laws and child labor laws.

Jessie Tarbox Beals, Portrait of Ann Haviland
Jessie Tarbox Beals, Portrait of Ann Haviland, perfumer, (ca. 1915–28). Collection of the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society.
I love this photograph because we use it to tell both the story of two different professional women who were doing really interesting, creative work: Jessie Tarbox Beals, a photographer, and Ann Haviland, a professional perfumer. We might think of them as the new woman of the late-19th century, early-20th century, entering the professional world in new ways. And both of these women are artistic.
Ann is posed in the photograph surrounded by all the different tools of her profession. It really looks like she’s a chemist. So it’s really emphasizing the scientific expertise she had to have to create perfumes.
An early example of a professional perfumer, Ann ran a mainstream fragrance business at the early stages of the beauty industry—this new field where something that was seen as feminine was now being sold to a mass audience. She also marketed herself in really clever ways, by partnering with early film actresses and writing advice columns in fashion magazines. She was putting herself out there as the expert.
And Jessie Tarbox Beals was a professional photojournalist at the time that photography was really taking off. Beals bought her first camera from selling magazine subscriptions. She took a lot of photographs of different people at work, not just women, but men as well. We have a lot of those images in our collection, and several on display because they are so amazing.
In the exhibition labels, we quote from something that Beals wrote in 1904, that “all a woman needed to succeed as a photographer was her health and strength, a fair photographic outfit, and the ability to hustle.”

Mary Dickson’s Tavern license
Tavern license of New York City inn owner Mary Dickson (1784). Collection of the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society.
This is a license that dates to 1784 that was held by a woman named Mary Dixon for a tavern on Moore Street in the South Ward. She was an innkeeper, and she was officially licensed to serve food and drink as well. Women are traditionally housekeepers. So, in some ways it’s an extension of work that would have fallen under women’s purview. It was seen as acceptable for women to be cooking.
Another one of the examples of women business owners that we have is a page of fabric swatches from an account book that was held by a woman merchant named Mary Alexander from the 1740s. Two women who had their own businesses in the 18th century!
We wanted to subvert what people would have expected from the time period about women in public-facing roles. Although under the British laws that would have governed the New York as a British colony, women were the property of either their fathers or their husbands, there was also a legacy of Dutch law that treated spouses as more equal economic partners. So there were women who worked within family businesses, as well as other women who supported themselves.
We included this license to show that women are not just making a clear, linear march towards progress and equality across the 300 years that we cover in the exhibition. It’s really much more complicated than that. But it shows that women’s work is everywhere, and underpins New York society and American society.
“Women’s Work” is on view at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way (West 77th Street), New York, New York, through August 18, 2024.
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You might not know the name Dorothy Liebes (1897–1972), but the American textile designer and weaver was a hugely influential figure, with her work in fashion, film, transportation, and interior and industrial design helping define 20th-century taste in the U.S.
Now, she’s back in the spotlight with her first posthumous solo show—her first in more than 50 years—at New York’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. The exhibition, titled “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes,” is a celebration of the artist’s many accomplishments, her skills as a designer, and her considerable business acumen.
“Her career was so vast,” Susan Brown, associate curator and acting head of textiles at Cooper Hewitt, who co-curated the show with Alexa Griffith Winton, the museum’s manager of content and curriculum, told Artnet News. “She did so many different things, from being a Californian hand weaver, to her very prestigious commissions with important architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, to her work with fashion designers and on film sets.”
Born in Santa Rosa, California, Liebes got her start in textiles with a two-week stint at Chicago’s Hull House in the summer of 1920, taking weaving and dyeing classes. Three years later, she graduated from University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor of arts in decorative art, architecture, and applied and textile design. (She already had a degree in art education from the State Teachers College at San Jose.)
Dorothy Liebes in her Powell Street studio, San Francisco, California (1938). Photo by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, courtesy of the Dorothy Liebes Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, ©Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.
By 1928, Liebes had a commission to design draperies for the San Francisco Stock Exchange, and by 1930 she had opened the Dorothy Liebes Studio in San Francisco. Although she collaborated on major architectural projects, including designing the drapery and upholstery for the 1938 New York World’s Fair, the designer also felt it was important that the average person could experience the “Liebes Look,” as her bold blends of vibrant colors accented with shiny metallic thread came to be known.
“She was very acutely aware that her textiles were extraordinarily expensive and could only be afforded by the one percent of the one percent, and she wanted to make them more widely available,” Brown said.
To that end, Liebes forged industry partnerships with companies like Goodall, DuPont, and Dobeckmun. (The latter were the the makers of Lurex, a synthetic metallic yarn that became a Liebes signature and that she helped expand to a wide range of colors beyond the typical gold and silver, including black and pastels.) She worked closely with manufacturers to replicate the results of her hand-weaving techniques on machine looms, helping bring her designs to the masses.
Dorothy Liebes, Mexican Plaid textile (ca. 1938). Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of the estate of Dorothy Liebes Morin. Photo by Matt Flynn ©Smithsonian Institution.
As a result, in the Postwar period, Liebes was able to move beyond high-profile commissions, which typically required a more restrained, subtle color palette to meet the client’s specifications, Winton said, and finally embrace “the virtuoso use of color that she was famous for.”
“The ‘Liebes Look,’ which was very frequently expressed in public spaces like nightclubs, restaurants, ballrooms, and luxury passenger liners, combined very saturated colors, often in unusual sophisticated combinations,” Brown said. “It had this textured, handwoven look with an abundant use of metallics.”
Dorothy Liebes, Sample card (ca. 1953). Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of the estate of Dorothy Liebes Morin. Photo by Matt Flynn, courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.
It was an aesthetic that continues to influence 21st-century design choices to this day—Liebes was a major proponent of decorative pillows, and of livening up a room with an unexpected pop of color.
During her lifetime, Liebes was widely recognized in the press, and exhibited her work at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA), New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, which hosted her career retrospective in 1942. But, like so many women artists, her achievements quickly faded into obscurity, with the Liebes studio shuttering soon after her death, and no children to try and keep her memory alive.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Most of what was written about Liebes was in craft and women’s publications, which haven’t been widely digitized—and even when they have, photography rarely does justice to her gifted sense of color. And some of her most high-profile projects, like the New York interiors such as the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel, the Marco Polo Club at the Waldorf Astoria, and the Usonian Exhibition House, are now almost solely associated with their male architects (Henry Dreyfuss, Donald Deskey, and Wright, respectively).
Another part of the issue was that Liebes’s relatively fragile textiles were meant to be lived with. Drapes faded in the sunlight, and upholstered furniture got damaged by cigarette smoke. Very few objects are still with us today in good condition.
Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel, New York City (1950). Interior design by Henry Dreyfuss; drapes laced with tiny electric lightbulbs designed by Dorothy Liebes. Photo courtesy of the Henry Dreyfuss Archive, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.
Fortunately, the Cooper Hewitt is one of a number of U.S. museums blessed with a collection of showroom samples and exhibition pieces gifted by the Liebes studio after her death. And when Brown and Griffith were organizing this exhibition, they were able to turn to the recently digitized archives of the Liebes papers—which include over 40,000 items—at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
The two believe the show—which features over 175 photographs, documents, and textiles, including clothing, furniture, and samples—has the power to reestablish Liebes’s legacy, restoring her to the pantheon of U.S. design history.
“This exhibition changes what you thought you knew about mid-century design,” Brown said. “There’s been so many monographs written about all of Dorothy Liebes’s major collaborators—Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Dreyfuss, and Samuel Marx. Now, hopefully people will realize there’s been a very important story missing all along. Her work was very impactful and broad-reaching, and touches on so many different aspects of 20th-century design.”
See more photos of the exhibition and the works on view below.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Dorothy Liebes, Sample card, Chinese Ribbons (ca. 1947). Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of Mrs. Morris D.C. Crawford. Photo by Matt Flynn ©Smithsonian Institution.
Dorothy Liebes, Handwoven panel for the Observation Lounge of the SS United States (1952). Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of the estate of Dorothy Liebes Morin. Photo by Matt Flynn ©Smithsonian Institution.
Dorothy Liebes, Sample card (ca. 1945). Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of the estate of Dorothy Liebes Morin. Photo by Matt Flynn ©Smithsonian Institution.
Dorothy Liebes, Sample card for Eagle Ottawa Leather Corp. (1958). Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of the estate of Dorothy Liebes Morin. Photo by Matt Flynn ©Smithsonian Institution.
Dorothy Liebes, Sample card (1945). Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of the estate of Dorothy Liebes Morin. Photo by Matt Flynn ©Smithsonian Institution.
Loom with shuttles at the Dorothy Liebes Studio (ca. 1947). Photo courtesy of the Dorothy Liebes Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Dorothy Liebes Studio, New York City, as photographed for House Beautiful, October 1966. Photo courtesy of the Dorothy Liebes Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Dorothy Liebes, sample for a window blind (1955). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Dorothy Liebes Design, Inc. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource New York.
Donald Deskey, armchair, (1938). Manufactured by Royal Metal Manufacturing Company; Upholstery designed by Dorothy Liebes. Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Florene M. Schoenborn. Photo courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York.
Dorothy Liebes, Power­-loomed drapery fabric for the Persian Room, Plaza Hotel, New York City (ca. 1960). Collection of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Photo by Jacklyn Nash.
“A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” is on view at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, New York, New York, July 7–February 4, 2024.
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