Thaddeus Mosley (b. 1926, New Castle, PA) is a Pittsburgh-based artist whose monumental sculptures are crafted with the felled trees of Pittsburgh’s urban canopy, via the city’s Forestry Division. Using only a mallet and chisel, Mosley reworks salvaged timber into biomorphic forms. With influences ranging from Isamu Noguchi to Constantin Brâncuși—and the Bamum, Dogon, Baoulé, Senufo, Dan, and Mossi works of his personal collection—Mosley’s sculptures mark an inflection point in the history of American abstraction. These “sculptural improvisations,” as he calls them, take cues from the modernist traditions of jazz. “The only way you can really achieve something is if you’re not working so much from a pattern. That’s also the essence of good jazz,” Mosley says of his method.
Mosley is the recipient of the 2022 Isamu Noguchi Award. His work has been exhibited and acquired by major museums and foundations since 1959, including the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Bergen Kunsthall; Art + Practice, Los Angeles; Baltimore Museum of Art; Harvard Business School, Boston; Sculpture Milwaukee; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh. His work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
[excerpted from Karma website: www. karmakarma.org]
