{"id":256772,"date":"2026-07-31T23:34:26","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T23:34:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/256772\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T23:34:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T23:34:26","slug":"philadelphia-magic-gardens-celebrates-halloween-in-august","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/256772\/","title":{"rendered":"Philadelphia Magic Gardens celebrates Halloween in August"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>                                                                                                                                                                                                                        An unexpected eulogy in papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9<\/p>\n<p>Chaires visited Philadelphia for two weeks in 2024 as part of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.phillymagicgardens.org\/exhibitions\/julia-zagar-residency-for-women-artists\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Julia Zagar Residency for Women Artists<\/a>, founded by Zagar\u2019s wife, Julia, in 2016 and run by the Magic Gardens. Chaires was the first artist to participate after the program was paused during the COVID-19 pandemic.\n<\/p>\n<p>She returned to her studio in Puebla and spent most of 2025 making cartoner\u00eda portraits of Isaiah, Julia and the people around them.\n<\/p>\n<p>Chaires could not have known that six months before \u201cViviendo a trav\u00e9s de la Muerte\u201d would open \u2014 her first solo exhibition anywhere \u2014 her Dia de los Muertos portraits of Zagar as a comically dead figure would be posthumous.<a href=\"https:\/\/whyy.org\/articles\/isaiah-zagar-philadelphia-magic-gardens\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"> Zagar died in February at the age of 86<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen we walked into her studio to pick up the work, we had no idea that this was the body of work that had been created. We were all just sobbing,\u201d Smith said. \u201cIt was in the springtime, and we were still really going through it.\u201d\n  <\/p>\n<p>Some of the figures show Zagar paired with his students and collaborators, based on photos. Another shows Zagar as he often portrayed himself in doodles as a manic figure with multiple arms, accompanied by the phrase \u201cArt is the center of the real world.\u201d Another is a seated portrait of a young Isaiah and Julia.\n        <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An unexpected eulogy in papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 Chaires visited Philadelphia for two weeks in 2024 as part of the Julia&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256773,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70],"class_list":["post-256772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}