Philadelphia Magic Gardens presents Lost Landscapes: The Skin of the Bride

Seeing the other side

The building, sold to a developer in 2022 and slated for demolition despite a five-year effort to save it and the mural, remains shuttered and vacant. And “The Skin of the Bride”—at least, the pieces that a crew from Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens (PMG) managed to chisel off intact—resides in 60 bankers’ boxes in a South Philly warehouse.

An exhibit at the Magic Gardens—the South Street gallery and site of Zagar’s immersive indoor-outdoor mosaic environment—tells the story of this epic art project from inception to fruition to bittersweet salvation. Through archival photographs, timelines, newspaper articles, and a short video narrated by Zagar’s wife, Julia, “Lost Landscapes: The Skin of the Bride” prompts observers to think about the meaning of public art and what is lost when it vanishes from our view.

To create the Painted Bride mosaic, Zagar would wake at 5am and spend 10-15 hours a day clambering on scaffolding as he cemented mirror shards, repurposed ceramics, and his own hand-detailed tiles to the wall.

To salvage it, a small crew led by Magic Gardens’ Preservation and Facilities Manager Stacey Holder spent several weeks on scissor lifts in fall 2023, using hammers and chisels to carefully remove the most prized elements of his mosaic: tiles that included Zagar’s hand- or footprints; pieces in which he’d pressed patterns of doilies or etched hand-drawn figures; glazed stoneware by Mexican artist Jorge Wilmot.

“There are a lot of really unique, significant storytelling elements in the mosaic,” Holder says. “We wanted to remove them and perhaps use them in repairs [to other Zagar installations] because they’re such common elements throughout the mosaics.”

Dismantling the mosaic that was both Zagar’s largest work and an icon of Philadelphia public art was “so heartbreaking,” says Emily Smith, PMG’s executive director, especially after years of trying to thwart the building’s sale, secure its status as a historic location and work with the new owner to preserve the mosaic in his plan to develop apartments on the site. All of those efforts ultimately failed.

“We want people to know it was a worthwhile fight,” Smith says. “It shows how difficult it is to protect [public art].”

The exhibit includes six small framed mosaics, extracted from the Bride and created by the preservation team under Zagar’s supervision; they are for sale at $400 each. One includes a cast of the artist’s footprint, covered with a patina of green; another includes a bas-relief figure Zagar made by hand.

In the background, the video plays in a recursive loop, Julia Zagar’s voice asking, “What is the value of preserving something beautiful?”