“San Francisco and Puerto Rico are some four thousand miles apart, but both are to be thanked for a new species of decorating materials.” Pasted into a page of Dorothy Liebes’s 1948 scrapbook is a short profile promoting the newly developed woven work coming out of San Juan’s Fiber Textile Shop. “San Francisco is a place where architects and decorators take eagerly to oriental themes in design—among them the decorative use of matting, bamboo and similar fibrous substances. Puerto Rico is a place where they grow such things—by-products of sugar cane and bananas, coconut and palm. The end and the means have been brought together by the executives of the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company who plucked a young weaver named Geraldine Funk from the Dorothy Liebes Studio in San Francisco to set up a handweaving program” (Fig. 1). [1]
Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Geraldine Funk (née Alvarez, 1920–2009) came to weaving after a distinguished training in fine art. Funk studied painting at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, before going on to earn both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Pennsylvania. Moving into working in textiles, Funk began classes under the direction of weaver Marianne Strengell at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, graduating in 1944. Directly after, Funk moved west to join the bustling and vibrant community of Dorothy Liebes’s San Francisco studio.
Funk worked with Liebes for only a short time, but it proved to be fundamental. Liebes’s studio was at the height of its work with the influential architects of the day, which provided Funk with exposure to producing commissions and handling a certain type of industry demands. Experimenting with color combinations and incorporating unconventional materials gave Funk experience with finding creative solutions within a set of constraints. While working with Liebes, Funk designed models and assisted with weaving workshops for rehabilitating World War II servicemen as part of the Red Cross National Arts and Skills Corps, a program Liebes helped to initiate and served as its national director. This further gave Funk a chance to hone teaching techniques and take on a leadership role. [2] Understanding the ingenuity, creativity, quality, and professionalism that Funk brought to her work, Liebes promoted the young designer for a job that changed her life and established a textile industry within Puerto Rico.
“When the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company needed a weaver to head the Fiber Textile Shop in San Juan, it was my suggestion that Geraldine Funk, then weaving in my San Francisco studio, was admirably suited for the job,” Dorothy Liebes wrote in the Spring 1950 issue of Craft Horizons magazine. “I advised her to search out and develop her own fibers there,” Liebes continued. “This she has done with marked success and originality.” [3] Funk, through Liebes’s recommendation, moved to Puerto Rico in 1947 to take on the role of designer and manager of the Fiber Textile Shop to initiate, establish, and facilitate a hand-weaving program that utilized the native fibers of the island to create textiles for export abroad.
Funk flourished in this role, not only finding personal fulfillment in being able to creatively problem solve but also in implementing pathways for Puerto Ricans to develop new skills that would lead to robust employment. “This continues to be a most gratifying experience, a designer’s heaven, especially if you care to start from scratch,” Funk stated on her work with the Fiber Textile Shop. “In this case, from the conception of the use of the fiber, gathering it, designing with it, teaching, promoting (with its share of educating part of your public), lecturing, exhibiting, marketing, etc.” [4] “Our story from weeds to textiles finished and ready for the market covers a three-year period. It began with the initial thought and progressed through research in the fields, fiber-design study, training and teaching of workers, construction of equipment and building, to marketing and production on schedule.” [5] Maguey, banana bark, junco weed, enea, coconut fiber, sabutan, bamboo, sisal, royal palm leaf, and sugar cane—under the direction of Funk, the shop turned these wild fibers of the island into sophisticated woven goods for the home and fashion. Washable, colorfast, and “tested through tropical storms and sun,” these items were sold to an upscale American market through department stores, including Lord & Taylor and Neiman Marcus, and were celebrated in home and decor magazines in the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. The natural fibers were used in a way that highlighted their unique textures, and were often combined with cotton, rayon, and strands of metallic yarn, then woven together on simple two-shaft floor looms to create window screens, floor rugs, place mats, table runners, lamp shades, belts and handbags. Funk’s work in Puerto Rico with the Fiber Textile Shop was celebrated for its innovative use of material and its artistic sophistication, making it both a commercial success, frequently used by interior designers and architects, as well as exhibited for its artistic merit in design shows and museums.
Under Funk’s direction, the Fiber Textile Shop trained thirty-five youth for a program in Puerto Rico that aimed “to bring a stabilized economic base to the life of the people, and thus to create a better and more balanced way of living.” [6] Through Funk’s experience in Liebes’s studio using bamboo and reeds in blinds and screens, she was able to see the potential of the island’s fibers as a source of endless inspiration. Celebrating the wild fibers, Funk harnessed the qualities they brought to create a unique product that was both luxurious and spoke to the tropical nature of the island. “Each fiber used brings a natural beauty, color, and vigor of its own for the craftsman to use in the manner best suited to its individual qualities,” Funk wrote in Craft Horizons on the material she utilized as her products gained attention and acclaim. “The strong bark of the banana tree, the leaves of the royal palm or the tall slender green stems of the junco plant lend themselves variously to the hand of the worker, and must be understood precisely for best effects.” [7] Working with the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company, Funk and the Fiber Textile Shop also enabled a new labor force to gain employment and skills. “As we wish to gather as many people of the island as possible into the various phases of creating fiber textiles, we have organized groups of country men to gather the fibers from their sections of the island, to dry them and then deliver them to us. Thus many people have garnered a new livelihood from the weeds which formerly came to bloom only to blow away year after year. It is true that some of these fibers have been used previously by those with sufficient imagination and ingenuity to understand their strength as cord, rope, for harnessing of country houses, and so forth, but never have they been used as generously as we use them now in textiles.” [8]
Funk lived and worked in Puerto Rico for six years before returning to Pennsylvania with her family. Her work in Puerto Rico led Funk to be awarded as one of ten Young Women of the Year in 1949 by Mademoiselle magazine and to take home prizes from the American Institute of Decorators. Her designs with the Fiber Textile Shop were exhibited nationally and internationally in the 1953 Women in Art exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, at the Feria Muestrario Internacional in Valencia, Spain, and at the Exposicion Internationalle de Haiti, Port-au-Prince, among others. Two of her pieces utilizing Puerto Rico’s natural fibers were shown in Textiles U.S.A., the groundbreaking 1956 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and were acquired by the museum for its permanent collection. Woven window shades produced by the Fiber Textile Shop were used in the Starlight Room at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria and at the Midland Petroleum Club in Midland, Texas. Photographs of Funk’s pioneering work in Puerto Rico, emphasizing the textures and materiality of the fibers in mats, screens, and lampshades, was kept in Liebes’s archive in a file labeled “Artwork by Others.” On the back of each photograph, each material and color were carefully noted in Liebes’s handwriting (Figs. 2–9).
“On the island, we could not lean upon the laurels of ancestral weavers to win respect and markets for our products, as do most other Latin-American countries,” Funk wrote in Craft Horizons. “Nor had we any interest in simply adding day by day, by the hundreds, quantities of the familiar merchandise that has flooded the markets before us. On the contrary, we meant to capture—perhaps by color, perhaps by texture—something of the very essence of Puerto Rico in every textile which came from our looms. The way to do this, we found, was through a deep appreciation of the inherent values of our raw materials. And it is also in this way that we are securing markets for textiles truly Puerto Rican in inspiration and execution.” [9]
NOTES
[1] Mary Roche, “Puerto Rico Weaves,” The New York Times, June 20, 1948, included in Dorothy Liebes’s scrapbook collection. Scrapbook 1948, Series 8, Box 28, Folder 3, Dorothy Liebes Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
[2] Alexa Griffith Winton, “Introduction,” A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes, eds. Susan Brown and Alexa Griffith Winton (New York: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), 8.
[3] Liebes, Dorothy, “All is grist . . . to our mill,” Craft Horizons 10, no. 1 (Spring 1950): 17.
[4] “Local Woman Develops Puerto Rican Art,” The Sunday News, January 2, 1949, 4.
[5] Geraldine Funk, “Weaving with Wild Fibers,” Craft Horizons 9, no. 2 (Summer 1949): 17.
[6] Ibid., 16.
[7] Ibid., 17.
[8] Ibid., 19.
[9] Ibid., 16–17.
