Meet YAEL KANAREK
Yael Kanarek is a New York-based artist and designer whose work explores the beauty and meaning of language as wearable art—words and letters meant to be seen, touched, and worn close to the body.
Photo credit: Gili Getz
Born in New York and raised in Israel, she returned to the city in the early 1990s to build a career spanning digital media, sculpture, and fine jewelry. Her art has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum, The Jewish Museum, and SFMOMA, and she has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and LABA – The Laboratory for Jewish Culture, where she designed Gufanit, a Hebrew typeface created specifically for her jewelry collections.
KANAREK Fine Jewelry is the studio practice she founded in 2014 to bring language into contemporary luxury design. Working by commission and specializing in Hebrew, with pieces also in English and other languages, each work is a sculptural composition—letters, words, names, prayers, and blessings cast in precious metals and conceived as heirloom. The studio is dedicated to text jewelry: wearable inscriptions that trace identity, belief, and origin.
"Language is a physical act. We shape breath into sound and sound into symbols—inscribing them across the world and onto our bodies. Through language, we express where we come from, what we love, and how to find our way. When cast in gold, words become heirlooms—tokens of intimacy, vessels of scripture, and a language of love that links us to our ancestors and future generations."
— Yael Kanarek
To explore her broader practice in art and text, visit yaelkanarek.com and beittoratah.org.