Jan Yager

Jan Yager (born 1951) is an American artist who makes mixed media jewelry.

She draws inspiration from both the natural world and the lived-in human environment of her neighborhood in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, emphasizing that art is a reflection of both time and place.

She has incorporated rocks, bullet casings, and crack cocaine vials into her works, and finds beauty in the resilience of urban plants that some would consider weeds.

Yager's design vocabulary is unusual in invoking "vast and collective networks of reference" that include the historic, the artistic, and the political.

Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art,

the Smithsonian American Art Museum,

the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,

the National Museum of Scotland,

Jan Yager was born in 1951 in Detroit, Michigan.

She graduated from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, earning a B.F.A. in jewelry and metalsmithing in 1974.

Yager gained national acclaim in the 1980s by combining her uniquely textured pillow-forms of 18k gold and sterling silver with water-polished natural stones,

a juxtaposition that shocked some viewers.

Many of the rocks and pebbles were collected while she was a student at RISD.

Initially she used the rocks that she found as inspirations for the forms she was creating for her jewelry.

She later attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), earning an M.F.A. in 1981.

She moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1983

and established a studio at 915 Spring Garden Street, at that time the oldest and largest artist studio building in Philadelphia.

In 1983, recognizing the "incomparable beauty found in nature", she began to include the rocks themselves in her "Rock Necklace" series.

An example of this work is Rock Necklace with Ridge (1987), made of sterling silver and a gray beach rock, now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian.

Yager's jewelry of this period was

exhibited and sold in both the New York trade shows and the American Craft Council wholesale/retail shows.

It was published widely and commercially successful, and popularized tools and techniques by influencing other artists.

In 1990 Yager gave herself a sabbatical.

She took time off to study and rethink her approach, asking herself the question, "What makes art authentic?"

She spent the next two years studying the history, philosophy, and practices of jewelry making, thinking about the ways in which an artwork is connected to the history of art, as well as the time and place in which it is made.

Her goal became the creation of work that was "rooted in history, yet undeniably of its place and time."

A prehistoric Native American bone necklace inspired her to examine her own environment for readily available materials.

and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, United Kingdom, which featured fifty of Yager's pieces in a solo show in 2001 entitled "Jan Yager: City Flora/City Flotsam".

In 2002, her Invasive Species American Mourning Tiara was chosen for "Tiaras", an exhibition of 200 tiaras at the V&A, and was featured on the back cover of the accompanying book.

In 2007, Yager was featured in the PBS documentary series "Craft in America: Memory, Landscape, Community".

Housing over 100 artists' studios, it was closed in 2015 after a small fire, and numerous code violations were discovered.

During graduate school Yager was introduced to industrial machinery and began to combine machine and hand techniques to create "objects to hold".

The surface texture of each piece was pressed into the metal initially with a drop hammer, and later a high-tonnage hobbing or coining press.

Then the textured metal was puffed out into pillow shapes using a small hydraulic press.

Each half-piece was sawed, soldered together, and finished by hand.

Pieces in this "Whomp and Puff" series were praised for both their inviting forms and their patterned and textured surfaces.

They were described as evoking the feeling of clay or fabric,

and having a "contemplative spirit".

Next, Yager began to combine forms as freely moving elements on distinctive thick segmented chains.

These pieces were seen as interesting and playful, inviting "the wearer to participate in the piece by deciding the positions of the various components".