Our Story
Julia Zagar and her husband, the famous mosaic artist Isaiah, established Eye’s Gallery in 1968.
Sparked by The Zagar’s love for Latin American folk art, Eye’s Gallery expanded into three floors of unique items handpicked from around the world. Isaiah and Julia, artists and urban pioneers, moved into a sparsely populated area of Philadelphia known then as Lower South Street, after serving in the Peace Corps as craft developers to the Aymara and Inca people of the Andes mountains in Peru.
Julia and Isaiah helped the native communities organize their crafts for foreign markets. They taught them to measure, how much the products and the workers’ labor were worth, and how to meet Western clothing quality and size scale requirements.
The Peace Corps gave Julia and Isaiah a small amount of money monthly for their necessities. The couple spent half this money purchasing handmade items from the locals and sold them to other Peace Corps workers and the few tourists who passed through the mountain village, 14,000 feet above sea level.
They invested the profit in acquiring more materials for the villagers. The Zagar’s business grew quickly and soon they had 60 employees producing beautiful folk art and knits to meet the demand. Upon returning to the US in 1968, Julia and Isaiah started from scratch.
They settled in Philadelphia and renovated a vacant building on South Street in which to live and work. That building came to be the Eye’s Gallery. Artistically, Isaiah shifted from painting to making mosaics and today his work can be seen all around South Street and Philadelphia.
On July 29th, 2022, a devastating fire tore through Jim’s Steaks, the business next door to Eye’s Gallery. After an incredible loss, much of the interior of the building, including Isaiah’s mosaics were destroyed.
A year later on April 15, 2023, Eye’s Gallery was able to reopen in their new location on 327 South Street.
