Janice Lessman-Moss

(Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1954 - )

American

As a young student, Janice Lessman-Moss loved to draw and created all the posters and murals her class needed. Her teachers encouraged her art interests, but when she went off to college, she had no idea that art would figure so prominently in her future. She focused on interior design, then took art classes part-time, which is where she met her future husband, Al Moss, who was an art major at the University of Pittsburgh (the city where they both grew up). When both Al and Janice enrolled in the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, she looked at the course schedule and discovered a textiles class. She was curious, despite having little familiarity with how the medium might be used artistically. “So, I took an introductory textile class and fell in love,” she says. “I liked manipulating the materials and engaging the metaphors inherent to the process. There was something to work with, to build both the plane and the surface, as well as the content, and that integration is really my primary love.”

Lessman-Moss earned an Associate’s degree from Endicott College in 1974, and then her BFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1979. Immediately after, she went on to complete her MFA at the University of Michigan in 1981, before quickly being hired by Kent State University. Since arriving in 1981 to teach textiles in the School of Art at KSU, she quickly established herself as a widely acclaimed textile artist. As head of the Textile Department, she taught for many years, and mentored and inspired several distinguished contemporary artists in our region, including Hildur Asgeirsdottir Jonsson and Rebecca Cross. She recently retired as Professor Emeritus.

The integration of digital technology proved pivotal in Lessman-Moss’s artistic practice. In 2000, soon after digital equipment had become available for hand weavers, she was given an opportunity to purchase a $60,000 digital jacquard loom for the Kent State textiles program inbthe School of Art through the Fashion School, which had a large technology budget. Although she had used computer assisted looms before, this equipment was significantly more advanced. The artist has continued to utilize digital processes ever since, developing novel processes that marry mathematics, geometry, digital design, hand work, intuition, and imagination.

In 2019, Lessman-Moss received both a United States Artist Fellowship and the Cleveland Arts Prize’s lifetime achievement award. In 2018, she won the Arts Alive Lifetime Achievement Award from Summit Artspace. She has additionally won the Ohio Arts Council Governor’s Award in Art (2016) and received the OAC Individual Artist Fellowship nine times. Academic accolades include the Distinguished Teaching Award from Kent State University (2018), the OAC/Soros Artist Exchange Grant from the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, Czech Republic (1995), and the Arts Midwest/National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Crafts (1988).1

1 This biography has been adapted from Cleveland Arts Prize, “Janice Lessman-Moss,” 2019, “https://clevelandartsprize.org/JaniceLessmanMoss.html.

Kent, Ohio

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