The Golden Gate International Exposition was authorized by California and President Roosevelt on Feb 18, 1936; Liebes later designed textiles for the fair.
On February 18, 1936, the Golden Gate International Exposition was officially authorized by the California legislature and signed into federal recognition by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This world's fair, held on the man-made Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, would become one of the great showcases of Pacific Rim culture, industry, and modern design of the late 1930s.
Dorothy Liebes was subsequently commissioned to design textiles and color schemes for exhibits at the exposition when it opened in 1939, bringing her signature use of bold color combinations and unconventional materials—including metallic threads, cellophane, and bamboo—to a vast international audience. The exposition became one of the most important public showcases of her aesthetic philosophy, cementing her reputation as a leading designer of the American West Coast modernist movement.
Her involvement in a federally sanctioned exposition of this scale demonstrated how thoroughly Liebes had integrated into the highest tiers of American design and civic culture by the mid-1930s, just years after her career-launching Stock Exchange commission.