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'Art & Soul Tour' explores traditional art & textiles of Mayan culture

AT A GAS STATION, I asked an attendant if I could use the ladies' room. The attendant glanced around, then headed for the office.

Isaiah Zagar (left) and his wife, Julia, in Chajul, Guatemala. They've conducted their tour for 13 years. (Kitty Caparella / For the Daily News)
Isaiah Zagar (left) and his wife, Julia, in Chajul, Guatemala. They've conducted their tour for 13 years. (Kitty Caparella / For the Daily News)Read more

AT A GAS STATION, I asked an attendant if I could use the ladies' room. The attendant glanced around, then headed for the office.

He pulled out a machete. I gulped.

He chuckled, then used it to pick the lock to the ladies' room and inspect it before I could go in.

At that point, I knew I was in Guatemala.

It was a dream trip with Julia and Isaiah Zagar, aficionados of Latin American culture and icons of South Street. He's the sculptor responsible for glittering mosaics found on walls around the neighborhood and beyond, including the Magic Garden, a wonderland of mosaics and found objects protruding from stucco on South Street near 10th. She owns Eyes Gallery, a treasure of indigenous art, much of it from South America, on South near 4th.

Julia Zagar teamed up with Deb Colburn, who owns Nomad, a similar shop in Boston, to take 10 of us earlier this year on their 13th annual "Art & Soul Tour" to one of their favorite countries in Central America. The part-tour, part-buying trip was the result of so many customers asking them: "Could we go in your suitcase?"

In Guatemala City, Barbara Knope, an anthropologist at Museo Ixchel, introduced us to aspects of 2,000-year-old Mayan culture focusing on textiles, symbols and dress.

In the Guatemalan highlands, Mayan women traditionally wore garments woven in their respective villages. These days, with improved communication and contact among the communities, some women also wear blouses or skirts from other villages. Knope calls this the younger generation's bow to fashion. To their proud grandmothers, wearing another village's textiles was a cultural no-no.

For nine days, we traveled by bus through lush mountains and rural villages, active volcanoes in the distance, as we met the artists, expats, eco-farmers, costume makers and artisans who make folk art, textiles, jewelry and furniture, and grow coffee and macadamia nuts mostly in cooperatives that now form the backbone of the fair-trade movement.

Passing us on highways and rut-filled dirt roads were recycled U.S. school buses uniquely painted in every color but yellow. Utility poles were painted with stripes representing various political parties.

Inspired by Peru

The Zagars began befriending indigenous people when they were Peace Corps volunteers in Peru in 1966 and '67. The art-school graduates worked with Aymaras from Chucuito on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca to develop one of the first USAID co-ops to sell alpaca garments, textiles and other handmade goods and crafts.

They say that experience changed their lives.

"Art school taught us an appreciation of many cultures, but the Peace Corps gave us a business background to market clothing, book design and home design," said Julia Zagar.

Julia, then an abstract sculptor, fell in love with the culture of ancient Peru, the folk art and handwoven textiles, the kind she'd admired in New York museums. And the couple saw how people working together could affect their community.

Isaiah was inspired by the way Chucuito laborers built walls, embedding all kinds of materials inside before applying stucco. When the walls deteriorated, he saw how the embedded materials - bottles, hay, wood, rocks and other debris - emerged. This was an early inspiration for the Magic Garden, which would become his signature work.

In 1968, after their Peace Corps stint, the Zagars had their first son, Ezekiel, and opened their first business, Eyes Gallery, a month apart. Julia recalled that their dream was to make a living showing and selling folk art by the talented artisans of Peru, Guatemala and Mexico in what was then a deserted neighborhood of Philadelphia. The 400 block of South Street was run-down - but cheap. Drawing on their Peace Corps experience, they wanted to attract other artists and artisans to turn around the area.

"We were excited about making something out of nothing," she said. "We were young and foolish."

The result made local history: An outdoor market opened at Headhouse Square. The city's plans to level South Street for the proposed Crosstown Expressway were nixed. And the South Street Renaissance bloomed with a thriving commercial district of new restaurants, craft shops and more.

Isaiah worked on mosaics as Julia discovered new indigenous artisans, textiles and crafts on her buying trips. Eyes Gallery became a go-to shop for unusual sculpture and handmade clothes and objects, attracting buyers and designers from New York and beyond.

Sometimes Isaiah joined the buying trips and would draw images of items they wanted to show at the gallery - "things people hadn't seen and they'd collaborate on new ideas," said Julia.

"Sometimes, he would draw dolls because it was a wonderful way to show their weaving through their dolls."

Now, 43 years later, the Zagars still visit Latin America but also India, Nepal and Morocco, where they've discovered like-minded devotees of ethnic culture such as Boston shop-owner Colburn and Ian Gonzalez, dubbed a "global cultural entrepreneur" in Guatemala.

"One of our loves was handmade items, which are disappearing as the children of craft people leave villages to go to the cities to find jobs," Julia said.

Zagar and Colburn have visited Guatemala often, but Gonzalez took the tour in a new direction, visiting co-ops making new products, and to outdoor village markets where locals buy whatever they need - clay pots, embroidery needles, food - and sell anything they weave or adorn with textiles, such as picture frames, place mats, runners, clothing, hats and wall hangings.

Reaching out

Gonzalez is a member of a new generation helping impoverished villages raise their standard of living by helping them develop new craft designs, business skills, and health and safety practices. Village artisans also are learning how to sell their goods in the international market - yet preserve their Mayan culture.

During a visit to Adan Beads, one of many co-ops around Lake Atitlán, about 2 1/2 hours from Guatemala City, Julia Zagar and Colburn got down on the floor to inspect the pile of necklaces, bracelets and earrings spread before them, prompting the rest of us to join them.

Gonzalez, the U.S.-educated son of an American professor and a late Guatemalan architect and furniture designer, helped Cristobel Adan Ramirez, who manages Adan Beads, obtain a contract to make designer bracelets for an exclusive Fifth Avenue firm.

Gonzalez and his wife, Lucretia, a former advertising and financial executive, operate lacasaguatemala.com, a onetime retail store-turned-international exporter. They work with as many as 450 artisans in 13 regions of Guatemala, a country smaller than Tennessee with a population of 13.5 million (a million more than Pennsylvania).

More than half of the Guatemalans live below the poverty line, with 15 percent living in extreme poverty. The elite live in gated communities.

In 2006, Gonzalez brought in students from the Rhode Island School of Design to brainstorm with villagers to develop new environmentally safe products. A year earlier, European designers taught unemployed laborers how to recycle throwaway bottles into collectible polished art pieces. The result, called tranSglass, landed on a 2005 cover of Time magazine.

Today, co-ops making these stunning new designs count Neiman Marcus, Abercrombie & Fitch, the Museum of Modern Art and Anthropologie among their best customers.

We also stopped at weaving co-ops that hired widows from the 36-year civil war that ended in 1996. The co-ops are trying to generate income for the widows and their descendants while preserving the tradition of the backstrap loom. A leather strap is wrapped around the waist of the weaver and the loom tied to a permanent structure, such as a tree. Weavers either sit or kneel.

"It would take a woman a month to make her own blouse," said Ron Spector, the Canadian founder of one of the co-ops, called Thread of Hope.

Mayan women can weave only a yard or less a day on a backstrap loom, while a foot-operated treadle loom is four times faster. The women can't compete with the industrialized looms of Asia.

By importing bamboo fibers and using locally grown plants to dye them, Spector said, the co-op cut out toxic chemicals and raised the value of the textiles so the women could earn more income.

"Now, we can make a jacket for $150 and sell it for $600" in the handmade boutique market, said Spector.

Zagar bought a deep-red chenille poncho for herself, and scarves for her shop. The rest of us descended like locusts - not for the first time during the trip - buying soft, high-quality, exquisitely colored chenille shawls, scarves, ponchos and purses at wholesale prices.

At a shelter workshop, manager Francisco Sojuel showed us Christmas ornaments, place mats, a basket for thread with a textile cover that serves as a pin cushion and other items made by physically and mentally handicapped adults, who worked nearby cutting long strips of newspaper and magazines for their next project. Gonzalez and Sojuel are trying to develop a product the much-needed program could sell internationally.

One of our favorite stops was the shrine of Maximon, a life-size figure dressed in a white suit and hat, sitting with one hand on a cane - and the other held out for a payoff. The figure in the alcove was surrounded by plastic and silk flowers, with a neon sign above.

The hard-living, alcohol-drinking, cigar-smoking icon - some call him a bully, some call him a saint - is revered. People from all levels of Guatemalan society light candles seeking favors of love, wealth, employment and happiness. Shamans sit outside the shrine in front of fires to counsel those seeking Maximon's intercession.

Statues of Maximon were being sold at roadside stands, open-air markets and antique stores throughout Guatemala. The Eyes Gallery has acquired two statues of Maximon, said Julia.

And I just had to buy a replica Maximon, dressed in black, to go with my new, door-opening machete.

Kitty Caparella - now a wandering traveler, writer and artist - reported on the Mafia, bikers, violent traffickers, terrorists and other mayhem at her beloved Daily News for 38 years.