Craft is where she finds it

Artists frequently draw inspiration from their immediate environment. "I don't live by the Grand Canyon," says the accomplished craft jeweler Jan Yager. "I have to find my beauty where I live."

No, she decidedly does not.

And, yes, she assuredly has.

Yager found her beauty within a one-block radius of her studio at Spring Garden and Ninth Streets, in three abandoned lots flourishing with weeds and crack vials.

"This field has been a design laboratory," she says in the PBS series Craft in America, all three parts airing tonight, her installment, "Landscape," beginning at 9 on WHYY TV12. The series is an 11-year labor of love for its creator and co-executive producer Carol Sauvion, who grew up in Chestnut Hill.

"Jan's work is very, very important for its authenticity and intelligence," says Sauvion, a noted authority on craft. "Jan says knowing how to do a craft and expressing yourself through the work is a matter of national security, and I agree. We're turning into a nation of people who don't know how to do things, where everything is brought into this country."

Craft focuses on Yager's "Tiara of Useful Knowledge," which she created for the program and is touring as part of an eight-city traveling exhibition currently in Little Rock. (Philadelphia is not on the itinerary.) Yager and the piece will be featured in a companion book to be published this fall. The tiara, made of oxidized sterling silver and 18-karat and 14-karat gold, consists of eight detachable brooches, two stick pins, a tie tack, pendant and headband.

The work's title refers to historic Philadelphia institutions - Yager is a devoted student of the city's rich past: the American Philosophical Society's 1743 charter "for Promoting Useful Knowledge" and the Academy of Natural Sciences' 1812 mandate "to connect people to nature." The jewelry is inspired by available plants, ragweed, switch grass and other urban flora found in those lots and based on substantial research of their history.

Yager has a fierce love of weeds.

Some of these weeds are "called invasive species and are viewed as noxious. I see them as beautiful," she says, her Ben Franklin frames perched low on her nose, her graying hair tucked behind a long scarf, her signature style statement. "After all, aren't we also invasive species? Except for Native Americans, none of us started here."

She is taken with lamb's quarters, dubbed "the world's worst weed," but packed with nutrition. "The world's worst?" Yager, 55, asks, aghast. "Would you say that about a person? I think it's a wonderful plant."

Yager has a talent for making refuse beautiful. She's created a necklace out of cigarette butts and shell casings; her second-floor studio aerie is situated across from a shooting range. She's fashioned crack-vial pieces that echo a colonial ruff, a Masai collar honoring slaves, and an American Indian breastplate, a trinity echoing the colonial era.

Craft brought the Detroit-area native to the region in 1983, specifically, the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show. Yager was known for making elaborate necklaces out of podlike metal pieces, and always included one splendid rock. Her work then, as now, fused craft and nature, while echoing history and crossing cultures to reference ideas and tribal expression.

In 1990, she granted herself a sabbatical. "No work. I just read. I felt I needed to make another intellectual and artistic leap," she says. "I had devoted a large portion of my life to craft without knowing much about its history." In school, first at Western Michigan University, and then the Rhode Island School of Design, "I studied classic art history. I felt I needed to know what had happened in craft before in order to go forward."

The sabbatical lasted two years. Yager's work took a decisive turn. Though she had always enjoyed tremendous success, Yager abandoned craft shows for good, and began designing work that required significant research and time.

"She took a chance," says Sauvion, who long sold Yager's work in her Freehand Gallery in Los Angeles. "She believed in herself and her work to make the leap. She's someone who makes jewelry which is expressing very important ideas." Yager's efforts were rewarded with commissions, museum acquisitions and grants.

"I'm not producing the kind of volume that warrants doing shows. This work is not for the individual. It's totally about larger issues," she says. "I create authentic art that is of its time and of its place, of my place. I subscribe to the theory that whatever you're looking for, it's right there." Her pieces are included in many top museums' permanent collections.

At a goldsmithing conference in St. Louis, an Englishman approached Yager and asked if she was interested in having a one-woman show.

Brazenly, the craft artist answered, "I'm only interested if it's at the Victoria and Albert Museum," referring to the celebrated London collection of decorative arts.

"That is the institution I am speaking of," he responded.

In 2001, she was treated to a one-woman show of 50 pieces at the V&A. She created a tiara, "thinking I would like to make something for the queen." Through research, she learned that most are botanically inspired, harking back to the Greek and Roman laurel wreaths. The "Tiara of Invasive Species" was her contribution to the form.

Coming full circle, that tiara is currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the very institution that brought Yager to the city.

Now, she happily brings her mission to television. As one note above her desk reads: "The arts are not an option."