Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens creator Isaiah Zagar has died

From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!

Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens creator Isaiah Zagar has died.

Zagar was known locally and internationally for his exterior tile mosaics that transformed neighborhoods.

Emily Smith, the executive director of the organization, announced Thursday morning on Instagram that Zagar died from complications of heart failure and Parkinson’s disease. He was 86.

“He was unlike anyone we have ever met and will ever meet,” Smith wrote in a statement. “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.”

Zagar was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he studied art at Pratt Institute and met his future wife, Julia. After a three-year stint in Peru as part of the Peace Corps, the couple moved to South Street in 1968 and became part of the community effort to thwart a highway project through that neighborhood.

In the 1990s, he began building Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, an immersive art environment on a formerly vacant lot on South Street. He used broken dishes, bicycle parts and other found objects as his materials. The site cemented his reputation as an artist with an ambitious and eccentric vision.

After giving the Magic Gardens over to a non-profit organization to run as a visitors attraction, Zagar turned his attention to another immersive mosaic project in a garage on Watkins Street.

Zagar is also known for his elaborate mosaic work that wrapped the former Painted Bride Art Center in Old City, a project that consumed him for nine years. The building was demolished in December after a lengthy court battle.

Zagar said his projects were born of the same impulse.

“There is not a difference between the single cell and the human being. It’s an evolutionary process,” Zagar said in a 2014 interview with WHYY News. “My approach is one of evolution, in the sense that I want to work till I die in making art.”

According to Smith, Zagar worked every day on artmaking, even as his health deteriorated.

In 2019, he sent a handwritten  letter to the judge presiding over the sale of the Painted Bride, pleading that the building be retained as an art space.

“It was difficult to find among the many abandoned warehouses and nondescript buildings. I realized this could be my donation to the Bride. I would mosaic the building: ‘The Skin of the Bride,’ Zagar wrote. “The murals all around the building became a touchstone, a sense of place.”

Zagar signed the letter to the judge with a doodle, a multi-armed figure he often used to denote himself.

Zagar’s son, Jeremiah Zagar, made a documentary about his father in 2008 titled “In a Dream.” The film captured Zagar’s lifelong struggle with mental health issues.

“While Isaiah lived with ups and downs of mental health struggles, and later with Parkinson’s Disease, he endlessly turned to his art-making to not only express himself, but as a tool to survive,” Smith wrote.

Philadelphia artist Kay Healey worked with Zagar at the Magic Gardens from 2009 to 2012, and later asked him to create a mural at her home. She said he will be remembered for his total commitment to art.

“One of his mottoes was, ‘Art is the center of the real world,’” she said. “There’s this sense that art is just something frivolous, like the icing on the cake, and for him it’s not. It was central to who we are as humans and how we relate to each other.”

The Magic Gardens announced that a memorial service for Zagar will be planned for a future date.