Isaiah Zagar, an artist who bedazzled thousands of square feet of Philadelphia with mind-bending mosaic murals, pieced together from shards of mirrors and crockery and encrusted with bottles and bicycle wheels, his most notable work being the labyrinthine Magic Gardens Museum, died on Feb. 19 at his home in Philadelphia. He was 86.
The cause was complications of congestive heart failure and Parkinson’s disease, according to Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, a nonprofit that Mr. Zagar founded and that owns and administers his most celebrated property, a 3,000-square-foot museum, gallery and sculpture garden at 1020 South Street.
The immersive Magic Gardens Museum, assembled from multiple buildings and vacant lots, is labeled with inscriptions, studded with collected folk-art pieces and threaded with salt-water-taffy-colored grout.
Starting in the late 1960s, Mr. Zagar produced more than 50,000 square feet of mosaic murals in Philadelphia and dozens of murals in other states and in Latin America. Some of his work is held in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Mr. Zagar’s frequent source of materials was the dumpster, and his favorite subject was himself. Working across genres, he rendered his own bearded image variously in paint, ink, buttons, tiles, newspaper clippings, crayon, sequins, netting, rubber stamp impressions, coffee grounds, Mexican tin amulets and pulverized orange peels.
He wife, Julia Zagar, appears with him in hundreds of his portraits, the couple exuding the radiant solidarity and naked intimacy of Adam and Eve, or of John and Yoko. “Whenever I draw myself, I am elated,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1980. “My whole stance in making art is joy.”
The incandescent emotionalism of his work, however, was as much a gift as a symptom of his tormented past. Mr. Zagar was treated for bipolar disorder, which in 1968 landed him at the age of 29 in a psychiatric ward in Philadelphia. While hospitalized, he found comfort polishing the institution’s brass fixtures.
That would be the beginning of a career cleaning the surfaces of mirrors, he noted in a 2008 documentary film, “In a Dream,” an unflinching chronicle of his troubled life that was directed by Jeremiah Zagar, the younger of his and Ms. Zagar’s two sons. The artist described enduring sexual abuse as a child and later engaging in self-harm and adultery.
Mosaics became a kind of therapy. Following his breakdown, he and Ms. Zagar moved to South Street in Philadelphia, in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood that had lost much of its property value after municipal leaders proposed running an expressway through it. (The proposal was defeated.)
The couple bought a decrepit building at Fourth and South Streets for $10,000, living there and selling handicrafts collected on their travels in Latin America. While Ms. Zagar managed the store, Eye’s Gallery, Mr. Zagar turned the building into a canvas.
These activities put the Zagars at the vanguard of a neighborhood revival. They continued to buy derelict properties on or around South Street that Mr. Zagar spent years transforming and using as studios or renting them out.
The monumentality and popularity of Mr. Zagar’s art, however, was no guarantee that it would last. In July 2022, Eye’s Gallery was damaged by a fire that broke out at a cheesesteak restaurant next door. Soon after, the Zagars sold their building to the restaurant, which had ambitions to expand, and relocated their gallery across the street. (They had long since moved their residence to another Zagar-appointed townhouse, at 826 South Street.)
Though Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens helped salvage and repair the mosaics left behind, not all of Mr. Zagar’s creations were treated so lovingly.
In 2025, after a protracted legal battle, “Skin of the Bride,” a 7,000-square-foot mural he constructed on three sides of the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood, was razed to make way for a mixed-use tower. Sixty boxes of tiles collected from the exterior are stored at the Magic Gardens Museum. According to a 2024 Inquirer article, a majority of the estimated 220 Zagar murals that remain in Philadelphia are on private property and are therefore vulnerable to demolition.
Isaiah Zagar (he adopted that first name later) was born Irwin Zagar on March 18, 1939, in Philadelphia and grew up in Brooklyn. (“When you’re a Jew growing up in Brooklyn, they don’t name you Isaiah,” he told The Inquirer. “They name you Ira, or Irving or Irwin.”) His father, Asher Zagar, was an electrical and mechanical engineer. His mother, Gertrude (Schwartz) Zagar, raised him and his two younger sisters and later ran a paint store in York, Pa., after her husband retired.
Mr. Zagar studied painting and graphics at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, but found his most influential mentor in Clarence Schmidt, a self-taught artist who had built a sprawling house on five mountainous acres in Woodstock, N.Y., and covered it in cracked glass. Mr. Zagar first visited the site, known as the House of Mirrors, when he was 19.
After graduating from Pratt in 1959, he spent a year at a Benedictine monastery in Latrobe, Pa., paying for his room and board by producing etchings based on the visions of the prophet Jeremiah as detailed in the Bible.
He then returned to New York City. In 1963, while living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he encountered the work of the artist Julia Papiroff at a gallery show and reached out to her. The couple married three months later and moved to Peru to work as Peace Corps volunteers, which exempted Mr. Zagar from military service during the Vietnam War.
In Peru, the Zagars set up a cooperative through which local weavers could export alpaca products that the couple helped develop. It was then that Mr. Zagar changed his name to Isaiah, his wife said, because the artisans, who were mostly Indigenous Aymara people, had trouble pronouncing Irwin.
In addition to his wife and his son Jeremiah, Mr. Zagar is survived by his elder son, Ezekiel, a musician and cook, and by his sisters, Marsha Zagar Fletcher and Sheila Zagar.
“He had a lot of luck in his life,” Julia Zagar said, referring to the timing that brought her husband to South Street and that allowed him to make his mark. The couple had narrowly missed buying a loft on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1960s. It would have been a prudent investment. But had that deal gone through, Philadelphia would have certainly looked much less lively.
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