Jan Yager

Jan Yager (October 9, 1951 – August 14, 2024) was an American artist who made mixed media jewelry. She drew 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 incorporated rocks, bullet casings, and crack cocaine vials into her works, and found 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, 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". Provided by Wikipedia