Meet the Artists of COMMUNITY: Janice Fischer

Janice Fischer spent her career studying how cells "talk" to each other. Now she spends her time crocheting snakes, thousands of glass beads at a time. We're delighted to include her work in COMMUNITY, S|O Gallery's inaugural exhibition.

Born in New York City and raised in New Jersey, Janice got to Texas as fast as she could. She earned her PhD in biochemistry at Harvard in 1988, did postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley and MIT, and joined the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin in 1993. In her lab, she used fruit fly genetics to uncover how cells signal one another to build structures like eyes, with work funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the American Cancer Society, and the March of Dimes. She taught genetics to tens of thousands of UT students, earned numerous teaching awards, directed the university's Biology Instruction Office, and co-authored the McGraw-Hill textbook Genetics: From Genes to Genomes. She is now a professor emerita of Molecular Biosciences.

As Janice puts it, lab research is all about careful observation and obsessive repetition, and she likes making things that call for both. She discovered bead-crochet rope, and after moving to Johnson City in 2016, the Hill Country inspired her to turn that craft into snakes.

Each snake starts as a flat design in software that bead-crochet artists share with one another. The program wraps the pattern into a cylinder and works out the exact order in which to string the beads, often thousands of them, so the pattern appears when the rope is crocheted. Janice holds herself to one rule: every design must resemble a real snake. That means puzzling out how to capture the essence of a snakeskin pattern within the limited resolution of tiny Miyuki glass beads, in a rope slim enough to hold its shape and be worn as a necklace.

The result is part science, part art, and entirely Hill Country. Come see Janice's snakes up close, and ask her about them at the Artist Reception.

See Janice’s work in COMMUNITY at S|O Gallery, 213 N Nugent St, Johnson City, TX 78636. Grand Opening: Friday, November 27, 2026, 4–7 pm (opening night of Lights Spectacular) and Artist Reception: Saturday, December 5, 2026, 4–7 pm. This exhibition runs through January 23, 2027.

Janice Fischer