Remembering Isaiah Zagar

Opinion

Isaiah Zagar, arguably Philadelphia’s most prolific, inspired, daring, death-defying, adored and debated artist, died this week, just shy of his 87th birthday.

He was one of the last and in many ways best personification of the spirit of peace, love and intercambio, interconnection, that made South Street in its heyday a truly unique cultural expressway and a national treasure.

His death is a loss that the city should and will feel profoundly. Yet Isaiah did everything in his power, every day, to make sure that when his body was gone, his art never would be. One of the last things he said — as his extended family huddled around him in the South Street row home where nearly every surface, floor to ceiling, undulated with the explosively colorful art of the king of shards — was “I did it.”

And he did.

A skilled print-maker, painter, and sculptor inspired by the human form and the human condition and the meanings of words even when his dyslexia made him see them backwards, when he found that his work wasn’t being seen in traditional museums, he began recreating and combining the images on the display areas available to him — city walls.

He began with the walls in the three buildings he and his wife, Julia, a wise and patient fellow New York native, bought on South Street after much of the Street was condemned for a highway that was never built (thank God). Hippies like them began squatting in the buildings, creating a neighborhood of be-ins, sit-ins (and lots of other “ins” which Isaiah sometimes attended near or buck naked, to make a point about fearlessness and freedom). They had a store at 402 South, next to Jim’s Steaks, a row home further up the street and a studio space on the 1000 block. And once those interior walls were covered — and his self-portraits and images of him and Julia had been incorporated into chair backs, throw rugs, decorative tiles and anything else Isaiah’s artisan mind dreamed up — he started seeking out any wall in and around his neighborhood in Queen Village, Bella Vista and South Philadelphia that nobody was paying attention to.

He invented a way to reinvent these walls with a kind of psychedelic stucco — he Isaiah-ed them — creating uniquely textured murals with pieces of broken pottery and mirrors held together with grout in bold water-ice colors, encrusting even the most menacing surfaces until they appeared to have detonated with color and light, and then frozen in place forever.

Philadelphians, and visitors from all over the world, have been discovering Isaiah’s work, and the unique place it holds in Philly’s visual and artistic history, for decades, primarily through the 3-D art environment he created at 1020 South — partly his studio space, partly land he artistically squatted on for years, coating the walls on either side in mosaic climbing like beautiful mold, until the owner was pressured to let the community buy it — now called “Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens.”

Some also watched, and then lamented, the recent destruction of his landmark commissions, the block-wide shell around the Painted Bride Arts Center in Old City, recently destroyed after a protracted, stupid neighborhood legal battle. Others of us have more personal relationships with individual Isaiah walls.

My wife and I were lucky enough to meet Isaiah before his work reached critical mass, almost exactly 30 years ago, when we were a young married couple on tiny Mildred Street in South Philly. There was a cinderblock wall on our block, between Bainbridge and Fitzwater, which a neighbor had adorned with an American flag which then got tagged by graffiti artists. (Graffiti was a big problem citywide, and there were new ideas how to combat it; the Anti-Graffiti Network was being recast as the Mural Arts Program.) And then, one day in late winter 1996, a biblical-looking man in his 50s — wiry, with long hair and long graying beard — showed up on our street to turn our desecrated flag wall into a one-piece art gallery. Many days he arrived with an older gentleman, who we later learned was his father, in tow, and he had him sit down on our street’s one bench, which was across from the mural in progress.

Until this point, Isaiah’s murals had been largely geometric in nature, swirling and spinning colors and shapes and letters. The wall on our street was shorter than most — only seven feet high — so Isaiah could easily reach the top of it, and he decided to try something different: among the swirls, he created glimpses of 10 figures, each with a face comprised of multiple ceramic tiles he painted and re-fired, sunk together into a blob of cement so they could be attached to the wall. Surrounding the heads were hundreds of pieces of mirror, floor tile, bathroom tile, pieces of glass — much of it left over from residential or industrial jobs and then willed to Isaiah. He first stuck all the hard pieces to the wall with glue, let them sit, then came back the next day with big white buckets filled with Day-Glo colored grout, and a couple of volunteers to help him spread it.

The resulting mural danced a pachenga of deep greens and shocking pinks. From across the street, you looked at all the faces and shapes with fascination. When you walked close, you could also see yourself, broken into pieces of mirror (which, in an art-critic nutshell, is what Isaiah’s work was all about; it seemed endlessly self-referential until you approached and experienced yourself a new way). The colors changed with the day’s light, and while it may not have been to the artistic taste of everyone on my quiet block of South Philly immigrants, it was always something to behold and it never got graffitied. The taggers respected that they had been beaten.

After the wall was done, Isaiah and his father, Asher, came every morning to sit on the bench, drink coffee, and look at it. My wife and I got to know them better partly because Asher often needed to use our bathroom.

I wrote a piece about the wall for Philadelphia magazine, which introduced new people to Isaiah’s work. It also mentioned that my wife, Diane, and I had a very large, unpleasant green stucco wall on our house — on which someone had artlessly spray-painted “Oops Loves Linda” — and if Isaiah wanted to come by and do his king of shards thing on our place, we’d be thrilled. And one spring day, he arrived. Diane was walking home from the Wawa when she saw him standing on Pemberton in front of our wall, staring at it, with a piece of tile in his hand. He was deciding where to start.

Within days, he had created an intense, complex masterpiece, incorporating not only pieces of tile and mirror and a number of faces he had painted, but all kinds of found and donated objects. In talking to him while he worked, I realized just how much dumpster diving and scrounging for constructive scraps he did to keep his work lively, because there were only so many materials hard and hardy enough to be grouted into an exterior wall. He showed up each morning with everything from recycled marble letters to tiles with inverted Vishnus.

Sometimes he had pieces of pottery and plates that he proceeded to break up with a hammer, until one afternoon his wife, Julia, came by the site and spied him doing it.

“Isaiah!” she yelled, like the wife on a TV sitcom about former hippies who now had a store and young kids, “we have to sell those!”

One day Isaiah arrived with a series of dark clay “soul portraits” which had been created by elementary school students but rejected because they were too “ethnic.” (That was his version of the story, anyway, although he could be an artistically embellishing narrator — anything that would work to call attention to a piece.) In honor of the kids, he made one of the figures on the wall only three feet high, so a young person could engage with it. He finished on a Thursday, let the pieces set for a day, and then told us on Saturday we should bring the family for the grouting. It was a group event.

My father-in-law, Ed, and I stood on ladders and grouted the colors Isaiah told us to use. My four-year-old niece, Emma, in rubber gloves bigger than her whole arms, grouted around the small figure. I recall this as one of the happiest days of my life — WRTI jazz on the radio, the sun shining through colored grout pieces on our eyelashes. Until that moment of urban bliss, I never realized heaven would be so shiny.

We weren’t just getting a mural, we were collaborating with the artist — who every once in a while would chuckle when telling us where to put the grout and realize we were working for him. This was a great part of Isaiah’s charm: No matter how ambitious a piece, he considered it all a collaboration. With the people whom he got the tile from, with his coworkers, with people who walked by and engaged him in conversation, and the next day something one of them said might appear on the wall. We covered nine or 10 feet of the three-story wall — as high as his extension ladders would go — and then he just stopped.

Isaiah had recently gotten his first major grant — the Pew Foundation was the first to recognize his personal form of urban renewal had merit — and he had just as quickly spent it all, covering as many walls as possible. He told us that if we wanted him to go the rest of the way to the roof, we would have to pay for the scaffolding to be put up (or rent or preferably buy him a small hydraulic scissor lift). And even though we were a young couple without a lot of money, we figured out a way to pay for it. Because we wanted to see him get to the top. He did, and just before he got there, we watched in surprise as he placed letters near the chimney: “House of the Two Writers.”

We were so touched, even after a writer for the City Paper came by to do a story on the mural, and Isaiah jokingly told her that I forced him to put our names on it. After that, we were friends for life.

Because we lived in the same neighborhood, our friendship played itself out mostly on chance meetings walking down the street or seeing him doing another local wall. He was extremely well-read, always knew what books Diane and I were working on (as well as my deadlines, including when I had missed them).

The Zagars would invite us to art openings and some family events, and they connected us with some of their South Street friends, many of whom had relocated to different parts of the city (as Rick and Ruth Snyderman, and their Snyderman Works Gallery, followed Painted Bride to Old City, and helped establish First Friday — very much in the South Street tradition.) He let us use his studio for a book party in 1998, which turned out to be one of the first times he put art pieces on the ground of the then-abandoned lot next to his studio and set up a little outdoor tour — an early iteration of what mushroomed in every direction and color into the Magic Gardens.

We watched as Isaiah’s work proliferated (as did Mural Arts on many other walls all over the city, but fewer in Isaiah’s neighborhood). But we also saw his frustration, because he was still an outsider artist — just much better known — and many of the walls he had done were not necessarily his (or the city’s) to keep. He also had vast ambitions that drove him every morning of every day. He was endlessly artistically hungry for his own work, for work he could do collaboratively. He worked with an amazingly diverse group of artists, would-be artists, and devoted trainees in Philadelphia, and in cities all over the world where he and Julia travelled (and bought things for the shop). He believed — so much he wrote it everywhere, including in gold paint on the front door of his house — that “Art is the Center of the Real World” and “Philadelphia is the Center of the Art World.”

Isaiah developed a grand idea — which likely started as a delusion, but he was good at making his delusions come to life — that he could turn his studio into a museum. But he didn’t really know how to do it. And in the process of trying to invent this museum, Isaiah apparently became over-involved with one of his volunteers.

We know all this, and so many other things about him, for a very Zagar family reason: Isaiah’s youngest son, Jeremiah, wanted to be a filmmaker, and Julia had also encouraged him to spend more time with his father, to see just how ambitious and challenging his life was. So, for years from high school through his early 20s, Jeremiah filmed his father and his family — at work, at play, and occasionally in love and war. The years of footage was edited into an amazing 2008 documentary, In A Dream, which introduced his father’s art, and his artistic struggles, to a wider international audience, showing at festivals and theaters and later on HBO (and launching Jeremiah’s career). It was also the first time many people in Isaiah’s life learned about his challenges with mental illness — he was hospitalized for bipolar disorder in his 20s after he and Julia returned from Peace Corps service in Peru, suffered periodic bouts of depression, and otherwise almost constant hypomania. (When I asked Julia and Jeremiah if Isaiah ever considered medication to help with any of this, they both pointed out that he would often say “I don’t need drugs, I AM drugs.”)

The film also documented his breakdown in the early 2000s, after the family learned he had developed a relationship with a mural helper, and the process of creating what became the Magic Gardens had gone awry. It’s one of the most powerful and honest pieces of filmmaking — loving and aching and beautiful — you’ll ever see.

During and after the film, people close to Isaiah realized he needed a different kind of help to continue and preserve his work — and his life. After a separation, he and Julia got back together. A lawyer from local firm Ballard Spahr, Joanne Phillips, helped them work through the complicated issues of Isaiah having created an entire outdoor art exhibit on land he didn’t technically own, but had been taking care of for years. A nonprofit was created so that the growing number of people, from all over the world, who wanted to experience the indoor and outdoor environment Isaiah had curated at 1020 South Street could visit it. (They could occasionally visit with him when he was on-site, but after 2020 allegations that he had been sexually inappropriate, Isaiah always had to be chaperoned by staff.)

And even as the epic battle to save the Painted Bride was lost, the bigger war to make sure Isaiah’s work would outlive him — which he wanted, so badly — has been won. Not only are the Magic Gardens thriving, but another of his studio and storage spaces, the stunning Magic Gardens Studio at 1002 Watkins, is now available for tours and public programs, as well as the work of cataloguing all of Isaiah’s art, and teaching his techniques.

The family was even able to make the best of a 2022 fire at Jim’s Steaks that compromised their store, Eye’s Gallery. For ex-hippies, the Zagars were always pretty good with real estate. The insurance settlement for the fire allowed Jim’s to buy out the store and restore all the murals in it — many of Isaiah’s earliest — and now they will be seen by the thousands of people who pour in for cheesesteaks. When your art is so closely tied to a city — Julia and Jeremiah noted that Isaiah and his work was only possible in Philadelphia, outsider art in a city of outsiders — you just never know how people will experience it.

The Magic Gardens also has a mission (and they can always use more financial support) to maintain all of Isaiah’s existing walls, no matter who now owns the buildings they are on. I learned the extent of their work in an odd way. In 2003, Diane and I sold the “House of the Two Writers” because the two writers needed more space and moved around the corner. We have watched with interest as several people lived in our house, and were respectful of the mural. But there was always a small crack in the middle of the mural, where the two buildings that comprised our old house were joined. And, eventually, pieces of the mural started falling. It was our good fortune, and Isaiah’s, that the current owner of our old house had an association with the Gardens and they agreed to fix it for free. (In fact, they would have no matter what, that’s what the nonprofit does.) So, not long ago, they researched and then executed the necessary repair work to keep the crack from reopening, and with Isaiah’s direction (he was still working, sometimes just coming to a site and consulting, until days before his death) the wall was fixed, and you would never know it had ever cracked. It was one more Isaiah miracle.

The day after Isaiah died, I found myself sitting in the kitchen of the Zagar family house on South Street. The room was crowded with people who loved Isaiah, of all ages, colors and hairstyles — all munching on the perfect food for the occasion, rainbow-colored bagels for the man who saw and created permanent rainbows in so many of our city’s dank alleys and grey walkways.

I didn’t get a chance to say a last goodbye to Isaiah, but I had bumped into him on the street several months before we lost him, and we hugged and reminisced. He asked if I had finished that book yet; he really wanted to read it. His helper — he needed assistance because of Parkinson’s disease — took a cellphone picture of us in which we both look like hell, but we look like ourselves.

A shot of us I like better was taken months before at his 85th birthday party, which was an amazing event, every person in his life still living was there — like the last big dance scene in O Lucky Man, a cast party for a life well lived, and an artist who got to see his work embraced and honored while he was still alive to appreciate it.

Contributing editor Stephen Fried is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author who teaches at Penn and Columbia. He thanks poet Daisy Fried (no relation) for digging up her old City Paper story about the mural on his old house.