Isaiah Zagar’s love for art and unquantified talent for creating mosaics is visible throughout Philadelphia.
Zagar’s signature eye-catching stones, glass and ceramic artwork graces more than 200 public walls around the city, including the masterpiece known as Philadelphia Magic Gardens on South Street.
Around the same time Zagar finished up Magic Gardens almost 20 years ago, he and his wife Julia bought an old auto body repair shop at 10th and Watkins streets. It was a place Zagar could continue to produce art, a little more than a mile from where the Zagars live near 8th and South Street.
“As he was finishing this main site here at 10th and South Street, he said, ‘What do I need to do next? I need to keep moving,’ ” said Philadelphia Magic Gardens Executive Director Emily Smith. “With Isaiah, most of the work is about his mental health and he needs to keep working at all costs. If he stops working, his mental health goes pretty quickly into a decline. If he’s working, he’s usually doing much better.”
Zagar began creating mosaics up and down and inside and out of the hollow auto warehouse as the colorful tiles spewed outside of the building along Watkins Street. However, the inside – about 10,000 square feet — still remained much of a mystery.
“They bought that building in 2007,” Smith said. “I talk about it like it’s Willy Wonka. He moved in. The door was for the most part closed and he worked within his studio and he just mosaic-ed the whole thing inside and out. He worked on that for about 14 years before he was no longer really able to work.”
No golden tickets will be needed as the Watkins Street Studio will be opened to the public. Ninety-minute guided tours ($25) are now being offered on Tuesday mornings and at other select times. It’s the first of many glimpses promised by Philadelphia Magic Gardens to share one of Zagar’s most extravagant and impressive offerings.
“He started that when he was 68 years old and we didn’t know it at the time, but he had Parkinson’s disease,” Smith said. “But he still went through this process for 14 years making this monumental piece of artwork.”
The Zagars donated the building to Philadelphia Magic Gardens to make it all happen. Smith said the family wanted to share the artwork with the community so it could be enjoyed together. Isaiah Zagar is now 86 and his declining health has prevented him from creating art.
“When he could no longer make the artwork, he talked to the team here at Magic Gardens and said he and Julia would like to donate the space to the nonprofit so it could get opened to the public and start doing programming,” Smith said. “It’s a masterpiece of wild, amazing mosaic art and it’s three times the size of Magic Gardens Museum here. It’s just hidden, tucked away at 10th and Watkins. To start a project at 68 and to have done it with Parkinson’s disease at that point is really wild. We’re really only starting to understand it now because we didn’t know it at the time.”
The nonprofit is hoping to channel more activities into the newly acquired property to showcase the amazing art of Zagar. The group plans on creating wellness programs including meditation, yoga and sound baths as well as workshops and spring art sale on April 27 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
“There’s a lot of stuff at Watkins Street of Isaiah’s mosaics, or folk artwork or other strange random pieces of artwork that we are wanting to get out of the building,” Smith said. “It’s good artwork but we need to move it out. We’re trying to open (the property) up more and more to the community. We are testing it out slowly. It’s a year of experimentation. We want to see what fits the space.”
The journey of opening Zagar’s final work has been both exciting and emotional for all involved.
“We’re very close with the Zagars,” Smith said. “We’re like a big family here. Isaiah’s health has been in decline for quite some time and we’ve all been working very closely together and moving through the transition of Isaiah no longer working has been very beautiful in a way because we’re all in it together.
“There’s a lot of joy as well. I think one of the reasons why the Zagars wanted to donate this space to us is so they could enjoy the space with the public during their lifetime. They didn’t want to wait. They wanted to make sure they could see other people enjoying the space and breathe the building back to life during their lifetime. That was really important to all of us and something we take really, really seriously.”
