"IN A DREAM" - THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ISAIAH ZAGAR
“In a Dream: Love is a Work of Art” is a fascinating documentary about Isaiah Zagar, and Outsider artist who has spent the last four decades creating mosaic art on a massive scale in Southern Philadelphia. “In a Dream” was filmed by his son Jeremiah.
There is no doubt in my mind that Zagar is mad and marches through life to the march of his own internal drumbeat as most Outsider artists do. His strange obsessive creativity falls into the same category as the massive mosaic-covered sculptures of Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in Tuscany and the strange imagery of Helen Martins who created the Owl House in the dusty little town of Nieu Bethesda in South Africa’s Karoo.
I’ve been to the Owl House. The cement owls, figure and camels, some facing Mecca, and the interior walls of the house covered with ground glass are a clear indication of an extraordinary mind or madness at work. In the end Miss Helen committed suicide by drinking caustic soda in the midst of her fantasy world of glittering glass particles, lamps and mirrors, stars, moons, spires and cement statues. Athol Fugard’s play “The Road to Mecca” and the wonderful book “This is my World” by Susan Imrie Ross is good sources if you are not familiar with The Owl House
Back to Isaiah Zagar. The sheer scope and scale of the murals Zagar creates is almost beyond belief. I have done some mosaics and this craft form is hard work being on your feet for hours for long periods. Cutting the tiles, placing them in some pattern, grouting and cleaning takes hours of back breaking labour. I’m wondering how Zagar keep this up at the age of seventy.
It is clear that Zagar is an eccentric, tormented man. Critics dismiss him as an Outsider artist. “No museum was willing to exhibit my work, so I put it on public display in the street,” said this Brooklyn-born bohemian in an Interview. “I use art as a spider web, to trap people and change how they look, feel, dream.”
In 1968, having moved to Philadelphia after several years in Peru (where he and his wife Julia had worked as Peace Corps Craft Developers), he went through a personal crisis. "I attempted to commit suicide. ...I had a nervous breakdown, and it changed me radically. I could no longer solve anything about the problem of judgment, of terminating an object. I could no longer sense right and wrong.
"That's when I started to take up mosaics." Picking up discarded stuff he started putting things together and sealing them to the walls with cement, as a way of radically accepting his new, all-inclusive eye.
For the past forty years Isaiah Zagar has covered more than 50,000 square feet with mosaic murals in the vibrant, bohemian neighbourhood of South Philadelphia. Each wall had been buffed--mirror bits, crockery, tiles and cement--so passersby would not cut themselves on protruding edges. The murals, a hodgepodge of Old Testament prophecy, words and colour, chronicle his private life.
The only person able to distract Isaiah from his mad obsession is Julia, his muse, provider and wife of four decades. “He’s kind of a rare flower, a thistle maybe” she says of him in an interview in the documentary “In a Dream”. The murals chronicle his love for Julia, and subtly hint at the darker corners of an extraordinary imagination.
Julia runs a Latin American crafts shop; Isaiah embellished the derelict buildings they bought and rents out. These buildings which Zagar calls his “Temples of Art” squat along the South Street corridor in Philadelphia. He has blanketed their outer walls with shimmering mosaics of broken mirror, shattered tile, cracked crockery, bicycle wheels, signs and symbols
After transforming his own home and storefront, Zagar progressed to other locations. He's done numerous rowhouse sides and fronts, the side of a church, several community gardens, an arts centre, a high school, and most completely, his own Kater Street studio building, from its basement all the way up to a rooftop garden.
The Magic Garden, Zagar's largest South Street mural, is an indoor/outdoor maze of mosaics inlaid with various pieces of poetry. One line reads, "I built this sanctuary to be inhabited by my ideas and my fantasies." Another says, "Remember walking around in this work of fiction."
Embedded in many of his works are the words "Art is the Center of the Real World". His murals reflect an appreciation for the imaginative human and sensual element in the potentially bleak urban environment of blighted, decrepit neighbourhoods which is transformed to an area filled with quirky magic and mystery.
Zagar's ongoing revelation-cum-rallying cry: "Philadelphia is the Centre of the Art World/ Art is the Centre of the Real World." To have some understanding of his work Google “Magic Garden - Isaiah Zagar” and view the life’s work of a special genius that truly belongs in this gallery of Visionaries, Maniacs and Wild Eyed Dreamers. It is a mad dance of imagery, beauty and colour that is truly captivating.
After more than four years of not doing any mosaics I started on something for ♥ Girl’s birthday which is in January. The first panel is done and my hand hurts from snippety snipping tiles and my back is breaking.
Move over Isaiah Zagar
