For more than 70 years, Mosley carved figures using mallets and chisels out of salvaged wood from Pennsylvania forests before finding acclaim in his ninth decade with shows at the Mus\u00e9e National Eug\u00e8ne Delacroix in Paris, Bergen Kunsthall in Norway, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n
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Thaddeus Mosley in 1957. (Courtesy Karma and the estate of Thaddeus Mosley) <\/p>\n
Mosley frequently characterized his method as \u201csculptural improvisation.\u201d Inspired by Constantin Brancusi, African tribal art, and Isamu Noguchi, for whom he had a particular affinity, as well as classical jazz, he approached his work by letting the forms of his raw materials speak to him. Instead of making variations on a theme or imposing a shape onto logs of wood, Mosley used a chisel and gauge to respond to the natural gradations of its surface.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI try to make things that generate their own spirituality so that people might feel something about it,\u201d Mosley wrote in a 2021 exhibition catalogue<\/a> of his work at Karma Gallery. \u201cWhat presence is to make something have a life of its own \u2014 the alchemy of turning something natural into something alive.\u201d<\/p>\n Mosley was born in 1926 in New Castle, Pennsylvania, a small city about 50 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, as one of five children to a coal miner. He served in the US Navy during World War II and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1950 with a degree in English.<\/p>\n He stayed in the steel city to become a sportswriter for the Pittsburgh Courier, a weekly African-American newspaper. Then he worked other jobs, including a four-decade career as a mail sorter for the United States Postal Service, while beginning to carve two-by-four planks of wood into animal figures that were displayed at a Downtown Pittsburgh department store.<\/p>\n A close-up encounter with Noguchi\u2019s work in 1959 proved significant. A friend photographing the sets of a Pittsburgh performance of Martha Graham\u2019s ballet Appalachian Spring invited Mosely to carry some equipment in order to get a better look at Noguchi\u2019s set design for the show. Mosley began making more abstract pieces in the vein of Noguchi and other sculptors like Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMy main idea, of course, is the idea of weight in space, and that idea is that the piece, the sculpture, should look like it’s levitating, it should look like there is movement,\u201d Mosley said<\/a> in an interview<\/a> with the Seattle Art Museum.<\/p>\n A decade later, Mosley met Noguchi at a lecture the Japanese American artist gave at the Carnegie Institute, now the Carnegie Museum of Art. Noguchi was already aware of his work; then-director Leon Arkus championed Mosley\u2019s art by exhibiting a solo show and displaying one of his pieces on the museum’s stairs.\u00a0<\/p>\n He remained virtually unknown outside of Pittsburgh, despite several group and solo shows at the Carnegie Museum and a number of large public sculptures commissioned throughout the city. That began to change in 2018 when his work was included in Carnegie International, the 57th edition of the international art show, at the age of 92.\u00a0<\/p>\n Soon, commercial galleries started calling and Mosley went on to display sculptures in New York, London, Amsterdam, Norway, Western Massachusetts, and Maine. His exhibition at Karma Gallery in 2020, just before the pandemic hit, paid tribute to his artistic heroes while also referencing his longtime love of jazz. \u201cI never know exactly what I\u2019m doing. That\u2019s also the essence of good jazz,\u201d a press release for the exhibition said<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n