page_title: Jan Yager
section_title: Time and Place
hierarchical_section_title: Jan Yager / Development of Yager's work / Time and Place
caption_attribution_description: English: Crack Vial Neck Strand by Jan Yager with Prehistoric Bone Neck Strand, "A.D. 1990 Crack Vial Neck Strand and A.D.1000 Southwest American Indian Bone Tube Neck Strand.” Crack Vial Strand, Length: 18in / 46cm, diameter of beads .6in/1cm. Materials: (32) found clear crack cocaine vials, (32) white and clear crack cocaine caps, (1) Crack cocaine cap cast into sterling silver, strung on a segmented sterling silver chain. Techniques: gathered, sanitized, sorted, drilled, strung. Artist Statement: "I was stuck by the similarity in size and shape of the prehistoric bone tube neck strand to contemporary plastic crack cocaine vials found on the sidewalk outside my studio in North Philadelphia. Human-made forms, nearly a thousand years apart, inspired me to create a contemporary version. Both are composed of "readily available materials" common to their own time and place.
context_page_description: Jan Yager 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,
  and the Victoria and Albert Museum 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.
context_section_description: 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. 
  After a wide search for inspiration, Yager narrowed her focus to the sidewalk outside her studio in North Philadelphia. Yager began to “beachcomb” the area in a search for inspiration in the things she saw every day. She found spent bullet casings, broken auto glass, and plastic crack vials and caps. Then she began to notice and closely study the plants that persisted in growing in cracks in the sidewalks.
caption: Crack Vial Neck Strand, 1990, by Jan Yager with Prehistoric Bone Neck Strand
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