Isaiah Zagar taught me to hold grief, love, and life through the art of mosaic

I moved close, and the wall winked back scraps of my clothes, my hands, my hair. I backed away and, like a pointillist painting, the cracked pieces resolved into figures, faces, text, panes of color and sinuous curves.

One glimmering corner led to a stretch of wall that spilled into an entire alleyway lined with a riot of tile and mirror, shape and hue. It felt magical, a giddy tumble through the looking-glass in the midst of city noise and grit.

It was the work, of course, of the prolific and visionary artist Isaiah Zagar, who died this month, having left his mark on more than 200 walls throughout Philadelphia.

Dreaming of a mosaic labyrinth

I don’t recall when I first spotted a Zagar mosaic—probably while wandering South Street as an angsty high-school kid in the area’s transgressive heyday, after Zagar and a cadre of local activists thwarted a city plan to run an expressway through the neighborhood. By that time, in the late 1970s, the area buzzed with artists, rebels, and a weekly midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the TLA.

In an artist outreach statement, Zagar told the story of how he started, with a small mosaic assemblage on South Street in 1969.

“After a visit to Florence, Italy, I began to dream of a labyrinthine mosaic gallery throughout all of Philadelphia. Many homeowners allowed me to embellish the walls in the back (and sometimes the front) of their row homes.”

Zagar saw how adults and children would gravitate to a mosaic-in-progress, how they would linger afterward. When I interviewed him in 2013 in conjunction with an ensemble exhibition, Art as Tikkun Olam at Temple Judea Museum, part of Reform synagogue Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, he said, “I see people crying in front of these things. I see people laughing in front of them. I see little children energized by the effect.”

What Zagar didn’t know was the impact his work would have on me.

The patient canvas

My partner and I had bought a 100-year-old house in Mt. Airy that included, along the east side of its unruly back yard, a 30-foot-long cement wall. An ideal canvas.

But in our first years of homeownership, we were lucky if we managed to mow the lawn. Ivy snaked across the far end of the wall; we ignored it. We were, instead, building careers, forming friendships, and living in the zombied trance-world of new parents—sleepwalking to the crib at 4 in the morning and searching the house fruitlessly for tiny socks.

“Someday,” Elissa would say. “Let’s make a mosaic on that wall.”

“Definitely,” I’d answer, sponging a confetti of spilled Cheerios from the floor.

We kept dreaming, though. When we broke a favorite mug or chipped a plate, we tossed the pieces into a box in the basement. One year, my birthday present to Elissa was a weekend workshop with Zagar. She kept her notes.

Years whooshed by. The baby trotted off to kindergarten, read chapter-books on the top bunk, morphed into an adolescent with braces and a knack for aerials. The mosaic mural was our never-never-land, the mirage that vanished each time we inched a little closer.

The shards of grief

And then, in the winter of 2015, our parents faltered. First, Elissa’s mother: we learned what the oncologist meant when she said, “The next time the cancer comes back, it will be bad.” Meantime, my father landed in an emergency room on a Friday evening in February, was diagnosed with pancreatitis, and spent nine weeks in the ICU.

The two of them—my dad, my mother-in-law—died exactly three weeks apart in April of that year. We stumbled through the summer, sobbing on a road trip as we read the father/son scenes from a new translation of The Odyssey, stunned by our own grief, the raw wound where our parents used to be.

The earth wobbled round; by the next spring, we felt a little steadier. The wall beckoned. It was time. The boxes of cast-off pottery in the basement overflowed. In those crates were pieces of our lives: the cobalt plate that was a gift from my mother-in-law, our first set of real, matched dishes; the sturdy mug in which I served my father tea.

We began in March: hours peeling ivy from the wall, scrubbing away pads of black-green moss. It felt cathartic to bang away at salvaged tile, to hear the sharp ring as something whole surrendered to the hammer’s blow.

For half a year of weekends, we smeared VersaBond on fragments and pressed them to the wall, an abstract design of circles within circles, with a sine curve of cracked mirror running through shades of slate and terra-cotta, sea green, dove gray.

Our housemate had shoulder surgery and learned to grout one-handed. The next-door neighbors came to help. Summer crisped to fall. We woke one terrible November morning to the news that Donald Trump had won. Friends donned goggles to take turns at smashing tile.

A world always rising, and falling apart

In that 2013 interview, Zagar told me, “I have been broken many times. The whole beginning of my work with shards began with a nervous breakdown.” He also said he believed that art can heal.

“It helps through empathy. If I look at the Disasters of War [prints] of Goya, I feel the empathy, I feel the pain,” he said. “I am healed in some crazy way. If I see Le Bonheur de vivre [Joy of Life] by Matisse at the Barnes, I am healed by the splendor of it. If I see Dali’s painting of the madness of World War II, I am also healed.”

It’s been nearly a decade since we finished our mosaic, almost 11 years since my father died. He was 86, the same age Zagar was when he passed. Democracy is trembling; the earth feels shattered in a hundred different ways.

“It’s always here and now that the world is rising to its possibilities and falling apart completely,” Zagar told me. “And it’s in each of us, too.”

On this late-February morning, the yard is still and quiet, trees cushioned in deep snow. I remember the click of my father’s typewriter, my mother-in-law’s fingers on her loom. When I look at our mosaic, the mirror shards reflect the sky.