Pittsburgh sculptor dies at 99

Thaddeus Mosley, a sculptor whose abstract works made from reused wood that earned him a cult following later in his career, died on Friday in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was 99. His death was announced by his family, with his son, Pittsburgh City Councilman Khari Mosley, calling him “a dedicated family man, a ubiquitous community pillar and an unparalleled creative force.”

Many of Mosley’s sculptures are made from salvaged chunks of walnut, sycamore, and cherry wood that he shipped to his Pittsburgh studio. He carved these materials using chisels of varying sizes, making the wood smooth and curvaceous, often letting the grain of the wood determine the movement of the tools he used to carve.

The resulting sculptures often weighed hundreds of pounds, but in Mosley’s hands they looked light and ethereal. talking art news Last year, he said his process was a lot like judo, adding, “You know where the center of gravity is. A lot of the ideas are based on the concept of weight in space.”

The sculptures earned Mosley a loyal fan base. He has long been considered a Pittsburgh legend and has been praised by many black artists. Painter Sam Gilliam once called him “the keeper of the trees.”

But it wasn’t until Mosley appeared in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Carnegie International exhibition in 2018 that he began to attract the attention of mainstream audiences. Since then, the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art and other institutions have come to acquire his works.

Critics have heaped praise on him recently. John Yau wrote in a 2020 report: “Moseley’s work has been vigorously promoted by the black writer, artist and musician community, and he has earned a place among his famous peers.” allergic review. “He doesn’t need the recognition of the art world to keep going, but the art world does need him for more reasons than I can count.”

Unlike other sculptors who worked on a large scale, Mosley worked alone for much of his career, without the help of studio assistants, using small cranes to transport his materials when necessary. His process is meditative and slow, allowing him to communicate with the wood he uses for his art. New York’s Karma Gallery, which represents him, held an exhibition in 2025 that featured just 12 sculptures – his entire oeuvre in the two and a half years preceding the show.

In the 1950s, when Mosley’s artistic career was just beginning, he sourced wood from fallen trees rather than buying it. “Early on, I didn’t think too much about how the tree grew; I just saw it as a raw material,” he told us bomb. It was not until much later that he began purchasing lumber from local sawmills.

He said that no matter where I got his material from, his general approach to it was the same. “I still try to generate the first ideas, the first shapes,” he says in the book. bomb interview. “Remember, this is not a painting, so there are limits to what you can change with the sculpture. Even if some parts don’t fit together, I have to find the center of gravity.”

Thaddeus G. Mosley, Jr. was born in 1926 in New Castle, Pennsylvania. His father was a coal miner; his mother was a seamstress. His father’s demanding job required the future artist’s family to move regularly, and Mosley began attending school while living in Grove City. But the town proved alienating, so Mosley’s mother moved the future artist and his four siblings back to Newcastle. The separation put a strain on her marriage, and eventually, when Mosley was 8, his parents divorced.

Realizing, as Mosley once said, “these mines are not for me” pittsburgh quarterlywho committed himself to academics in high school. After graduation, he joined the U.S. Navy and moved to New York and then to Pittsburgh, where he attended English and journalism classes at the University of Pittsburgh. He recalled being one of the few black students in his class. “Of course it bothers me,” he said in quarterly interview.

In 1948, as an assignment for a world history class, he read a book that included images of the work of the Romanian-born modernist Constantin Brancuşi, whose sculptures evoking flying birds and kissing lovers were carved from spare, elegant metal and stone. Although Mosley did not know at the time that Brancusi, like many other European modernists, had been inspired by African art, Mosley intuitively saw the connection, noting that the curved shape of his Brancusi was closely related to the Senufo bird.

As Mosley’s career continued, he would continue to explore his interest in African art, purchasing tribal masks and more. He also recognized the contribution of African art to the development of European modernism. “Without West Africa,” he once said, “there would be no Cubism.”

After graduating from college, Mosley found a part-time job in a company pittsburgh courierwrites sports news. Soon after, Mosley began his artistic career. In the 1950s, he visited a Kauffman department store and saw Scandinavian wooden design objects that looked like birds. Thinking he could do the same, he began carving his own wood sculptures as well.

But for most of his career, being an artist wasn’t a full-time job. He worked for the United States Postal Service for 40 years, retiring in 1992. The stability of his job gives him time outside of office hours to think about the art he creates. “I can save all my energy, all my thinking power to work,” he told me art news. He said he didn’t make any money from his art until the first Karma exhibition in 2020.

Mosley first entered the wider art world during the 2018 Carnegie International, the Carnegie Museum of Art’s prestigious survey of global art, in which Mosley himself frequently participated. Curator Ingrid Schaffner included Mosley, then 92, among a group of art stars that included El Anatsui, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Alex Da Corte.

Mosley’s star rose from there, allowing him to take on larger commissions. He casts wood sculptures in bronze and has exhibited them in places such as New York’s City Hall Park, where he included them in a 2025 exhibition at the Public Art Foundation Gate 3a 15-foot-tall portal that looks like a portal made of bone.

He also continued to work on a small scale. His current exhibition at Karma, New York, features small sculptures made from large blocks of glass that are precariously balanced on each other. With just the slightest touch, these objects can fall apart. Despite the odds, these elements held together.