Isaiah Zagar

Who He Was

Isaiah Zagar (1939 to 2026) was a mosaic artist who spent nearly six decades covering Philadelphia's walls with tile. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Brooklyn, he studied painting and graphics at the Pratt Institute and served in the Peace Corps in Peru with his wife, Julia, before the two settled on South Street in 1968. He began by decorating the front of their building, then kept going. Over the following decades, he set broken tile, mirror, bottles, and found objects into concrete on an estimated 50,000 square feet of walls and buildings, more than 200 works in all. In the 1990s, he turned two empty lots next to his studio into Philadelphia's Magic Gardens, an immersive mosaic environment that is now a museum and nonprofit. The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts hold his work. He died in February 2026 at age 86.

Why He Matters

Zagar worked with the same materials a tile setter uses- mortar, tile, grout, and a trowel- and showed how far they can go beyond a bathroom floor. His murals were part of a neighborhood effort in the 1970s to stop a highway from being built through South Street, and they became the street's visual signature in its revival. Tile is usually judged by how well it disappears into a room. Zagar's career reminds us that the same skills can also make a wall people travel across the country to see.