Dancing with the Distance

Award winning artist and beloved professor, Janice Lessman-Moss is renowned for her intricate weavings. The Kent State University Museum exhibition, Dancing with the Distance showcases more than thirty of her works. The weavings, which span a period of twenty years, display the evolution of her craft and were created on a variety of different looms from hand looms to digital jacquards and power looms. Her mastery of technology extends not just to the use of high-powered looms for weaving but also to the design of the patterns. She creates her elaborate layering of circles and sinuous lines on the computer using Adobe Photoshop. The designs are then converted into the final work by a combination of painting and dyeing the threads and programming the woven pattern into the loom. The weavings are masterful in their technical brilliance but also engrossing in their visual appeal. Lessman-Moss’s work as an artist has constantly been informed by her work as a professor. Her exploration of different technologies has enabled her to teach generations of students not simply how to weave but how to create art that responds to the possibilities of the loom.

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition was designed by Aoife Mooney, associate professor of visual communication design at Kent State, with essay contributions by Dr. Shana Klein, art historian and assistant professor in Kent State’s School of Art, Marianne Fairbanks, artist and assistant professor of design studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Dr. Sara Hume, professor and curator at the KSU Museum. A video accompanying the exhibition was created in collaboration with Kent State University TeleProductions.

Dancing with the Distance is made possible by the generous support of Dr. Linda L. McDonald and the Ohio Arts Council.