Museum Mile

Item Description

Bid on this membership to Philadelphia's Magic Gardens! 

Explore the fully-mosaicked gallery spaces and labyrinth sculpture garden at your own leisure. Visitors can spend as little as 20 minutes or stay for hours, viewing the thousands of diverse tiles, intricate sculptures, and varied texts embedded in the walls. Garden Guide interpreters are available to give brief introductions to Philadelphia's Magic Gardens and answer questions.

With your PMG Membership you will receive:

• Unlimited General Admission to the Magic Gardens during regular operating hours.
• 3 Guest Passes, so you can share the experience with your friends.
• One free voucher to a PMG Tour, which takes place on Saturdays at Noon and 4pm and on Sundays at 4pm.
• 10% off any in-store purchase of our Gift Shop merchandise and Isaiah Zagar's artworks up to a $550 value.

Visit www.phillymagicgardens.org for more information.

Visitor Experience

Philadelphia's Magic Gardens (PMG) is a mosaicked visionary art environment, gallery, and community arts center that preserves, interprets, and provides access to Isaiah Zagar's unique mosaic art environment and his public murals. The Magic Gardens site, Zagar’s largest artwork, includes a fully tiled indoor space and a massive outdoor mosaic sculpture garden that spans half a block on Philadelphia’s famous South Street. Inside, visitors can view folk art statues, bicycle wheels, colorful glass bottles, Zagar's hand-made tiles, and thousands of glittering mirrors. The installation pays tribute to Zagar's artistic influences, along with community and personal experiences.

Open to visitors daily, PMG has become a unique Philadelphia destination, hosting year-round, low-cost public programs within its own distinctive venue and the surrounding community. PMG, a nonprofit organization, inspires creativity and community engagement by educating the public about folk, mosaic, and visionary art.

History

Zagar has devoted himself to beautifying the South Street neighborhood since the late 1960s, when he moved to the area with his wife Julia. The couple helped spur the revitalization of the area by purchasing and renovating derelict buildings, often adding colorful mosaics on both their private and public walls. The first such project was Julia's still-thriving folk art store, the Eyes Gallery at 402 South Street.

Zagar started working on the Magic Gardens in 1994 in the vacant lot nearby his studio. He began by constructing a massive fence to protect the area from harm and then spent the next fourteen years excavating tunnels and grottos, sculpting multi-layered walls, and tiling and grouting the 3,000 square foot space. The installation pays tribute to Zagar's many artistic influences, as well as the events and experiences of his life. Enveloped in visual anecdotes, the mosaicked walls refer to his wife Julia and sons Ezekiel and Jeremiah through playful images and words, but also reference important elements of the wider world — Las Pozas and Day of the Dead, the dance community of Philadelphia, and even the airplanes of the nationwide 9/11 tragedy.

Item Special Note

Valid through August 2013.