By Grace Gilson
Isaiah Zagar, the legendary, award-winning Jewish mosaic artist whose shimmering, kaleidoscopic installations transformed streets and buildings across Philadelphia and founded the city’s Magic Gardens, has died.
Zagar passed away on Thursday, Feb. 19, of complications from heart failure and Parkinson’s disease at his home in Philadelphia. He was 86.
“The scale of Isaiah Zagar’s body of work and his relentless artmaking at all costs is truly astounding,” Emily Smith, executive director of the Magic Gardens, told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Most people do not yet understand the importance of what he created, nor do they understand the sheer volume of what he has made.”
Located on Philadelphia’s South Street, the Magic Gardens immersive experience spans three city lots and includes indoor galleries and a large outdoor labyrinth.
Zagar’s other best-known artwork was “The Skin of the Bride,” a sprawling 7,000-square-foot mosaic mural that covered the former Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia’s Old City district. It was demolished last year.
Born Irwin Zagar in Philadelphia, Zagar grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he received his bachelor’s degree in painting and graphics at the Pratt Institute of Art.
“When you’re a Jew growing up in Brooklyn, they don’t name you Isaiah,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1980. “They name you Ira, or Irving or Irwin.”
In 1959, when Zagar was 19, he received a summer art scholarship to go to Woodstock, New York, where he encountered the works of famed “outside artist” Clarence Schmidt who would later become his mentor.
During that summer, Zagar also studied Jewish religious texts which later inspired him to change his first name to Isaiah, according to the Daily Mail.
In 1963, he met fellow artist Julia Papiroff at the Pratt Institute. The pair were married three months later and joined the Peace Corps as conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War.
After a three-year stint in Peru, the Zagars moved to South Philadelphia in 1968, where she opened Eye’s Gallery on South Street and he created his first art installation by embellishing the building’s facade.
Over the following decades, Zagar used broken tiles, mirrors and bottles to adorn roughly 50,000 square feet of walls and buildings across Philadelphia with his iconic mosaic art.
In the late 1990s, he transformed two empty lots near his South Philadelphia home into an immersive mosaic and sculpture installation that would later become the iconic Magic Gardens.
Zagar’s works are featured in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. More than 200 of his mosaic pieces can also be found across several states and in Mexico and Chile.
In 2008, Zagar’s son, the filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar, released the documentary “In a Dream,” an intimate portrait of his father’s struggles with mental health and drive to build the Magic Gardens.
He worked on the film with Jeremy Yaches, a producer whom he met while in Hebrew class at the Jewish day school now known as Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy, according to a 2022 profile in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.
“Isaiah was more than our founder; he was our close friend, teacher, collaborator, and creative inspiration,” Emily Smith of the Magic Gardens wrote in a post on Facebook. “He was unlike anyone we have ever met and will ever meet. Above all things, he was an artist. In his lifetime, he created a body of work that is unique and remarkable, and one that has left an everlasting mark on our city.”
Smith said Zagar continued working on art on a daily basis, even while his health declined.
In a 2014 interview with WHYY New, Zagar described his approach to art in the following manner: “There is not a difference between the single cell and the human being. It’s an evolutionary process. My approach is one of evolution, in the sense that I want to work till I die in making art.”
Zagar is survived by his wife and two sons, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The family requests that contributions in his memory go to the Magic Gardens preservation fund (phillymagicgardens.org/join-and-support/).
The Magic Gardens announced that a memorial service for Zagar will be planned for a future date.
Grace Gilson wrote this article for the JTA global Jewish news source.
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