Icon Award honoree Thaddeus Mosley has a public art exhibition in the Pittsburgh Cultural District.
Thaddeus Mosley receives the inaugural Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Icon Award for Outstanding Artistic Contributions
The inaugural Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Icon Awards will be presented to Carol R. Brown, the Trust’s first president and CEO, philanthropist Teresa Heinz and sculptor Thaddeus Mosley, at The Big 40 Gala on Saturday, September 7, at the Benedum Center.
Read more here
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Cross Current, Interior Decipher, Rhizogenic Rhythms, and Illusory Progression by Thaddeus Mosley, installation view, 8th and Penn, Pittsburgh, August 29, 2024 –August 31, 2025. Courtesy the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. Photography by Chris Uhren
Thaddeus Mosley
New Artwork Unveiling
Thursday, August 29, 11 am
8th & Penn Avenue in the Cultural District
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Join the artist and witness the debut of Cross Current, Interior Decipher, Rhizogenic Rhythms, and Illusory Progression—four monumental bronze sculptures that will take root in the Cultural District as our latest artistic landmark.
Read more and register here
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Portrait photo by Jason Schmidt
Thaddeus Mosley in The New Social Environment #866 “Thaddeus Mosley: Recent Sculpture”
August 1, 2023 at 1pm ET
Artist Thaddeus Mosley joins Rail contributor John Yau for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Mark He.
Produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Register and read more HERE
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Thaddeus Mosley, Perge Modo, 2020, bronze, 87 × 56 × 29 inches; 221 × 142.2 × 73.7 cm, edition 1 of 3, 1AP
A Conversation: Thaddeus Mosley and Hamza Walker
at Karma, Los Angeles
Saturday, July 15, 3–4pm
7351 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90046
Karma is pleased to present a conversation between artist Thaddeus Mosley and Hamza Walker, director of LAXART, on the occasion of Mosley’s exhibition at Karma, Recent Sculpture.
Read more and register HERE
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Thaddeus Mosley: Forest, installation view, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, May 13–August 20, 2023. Photo by Conny Fridh
Thaddeus Mosley: Forest
at the Nasher Sculpture Center
May 13—August 20, 2023
For six decades, Thaddeus Mosley has taken felled trees near his home in Pittsburgh and transformed them into inventive abstract forms to create large sculptures, five of which are presented in Forest.
Made from walnut and created from 2015 onward, these works reward close looking. The range and expertise of Mosley’s woodworking techniques—carving, chiseling, and joining—are revealed as light shimmers along each work’s surface. From a distance, they stand together and unlock shapeshifting experiences before the eye. Mosley describes his compositional experimentation as the pursuit of presence, “the alchemy of turning something neutral into something alive.”
Read more HERE
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Portrait photo by Jason Schmidt
Artist Talk: Thaddeus Mosely
at the Nasher Sculpture Center
Saturday May 13, 2023 at 1:30 pm
Nasher Sculpture Center
2001 Flora Street
Dallas, Texas 75201
For six decades, Thaddeus Mosley has taken felled trees near his home in Pittsburgh and transformed them into inventive abstract forms. The Nasher’s presentation of abstract walnut sculptures, created from 2015 onward, rewards close looking. The range and expertise of Mosley’s woodworking techniques—carving, chiseling, and joining—are revealed as light shimmers along each work’s surface. From a distance, they stand together and unlock shapeshifting experiences before the eye. Mosley describes his compositional experimentation as the pursuit of presence, “the alchemy of turning something neutral into something alive.”
Read more and register HERE
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Thaddeus Mosley, Circular Fable, 2021, walnut in 3 parts, 48½ × 17¼ × 16½ inches; 121.92 × 50.8 × 2.54 cm
A Conversation between Thaddeus Mosley & Alexis Lowry
at Karma, New York
Saturday, March 4th, 4–5pm
22 East 2nd Street
New York, NY 10003
On the occasion of the exhibition Thaddeus Mosley, Recent Sculpture, Karma is pleased to present a conversation between the artist Thaddeus Mosley and curator at Dia Art Foundation, Alexis Lowry.
Read more and register HERE
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Illusory Progression, 2020, and Rhizogenic Rhythm, 2020, Installation view, Schwartz Common, Harvard Business School. Photo by Steve Briggs
Thaddeus Mosley in Contemporary Black Artists and Public Art
webinar hosted by the Harvard Business School
Thursday March 2, 2023 at 12 pm EST via Zoom
Featuring artists Thaddeus Mosley, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, and Carrie Mae Weems in conversation with Professor Henry McGee, Senior Lecturer of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; and leading art collector and museum trustee Raymond J. McGuire (MBA 1983)
Read more and register HERE
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Portrait photo by Jason Schmidt
Thaddeus Mosley receives the 2023 United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Art
USA Fellowships are annual $50,000 unrestricted awards recognizing the most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines, at every stage of their career. Each year, individual artists and collaboratives are anonymously nominated to apply by a geographically diverse and rotating group of artists, scholars, critics, producers, curators, and other arts professionals. Applications are reviewed by discipline-specific panels who select the finalists, which are then approved by our Board of Trustees.
Read more here
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Installation view of La Suite de l’Histoire. Courtesy the artist and Karma.
Thaddeus Mosley in La Suite de l’Histoire
at the Musée National Eugène-Delacroix
October 19–24, 2022
Musée National Eugène-Delacroix
6, rue de Furstemberg
75006 Paris, France
Musée National Eugène-Delacroix exhibits new and recent work by American sculptor Thaddeus Mosley, presented on the occasion Paris+ par Art Basel’s new Sites program, La Suite de l’Histoire, curated by Annabelle Ténèze, Director of Les Abattoirs.
Read more HERE
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Thaddeus Mosley, Perge Modo, 2020, bronze, 87 × 56 × 29 inches; 221 × 142.2 × 73.7
Thaddeus Mosley in “Courage Before Expectation” Group Show
at The FLAG Art Foundation, curated by Keith Rivers
March 12, 2022 – June 4, 2022
545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor
10001 New York
Opening reception: Friday, March 11, 6-8 PM
The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to present Courage Before Expectation, a group exhibition curated by former NFL linebacker turned art patron Keith Rivers, on view March 12-June 4, 2022, on the 9th floor. Inspired by quotes that intersect Rivers’s life in sports and his love of contemporary art, the exhibition explores the pursuit of dreams, unlikely trajectories, and includes Etel Adnan, Mark Bradford, Sonia Gomes, Philip Guston, Carmen Herrera, On Kawara, Kerry James Marshall, Thaddeus Mosely, and Laura Owens.
Read more HERE
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Thaddeus Mosley in “File Under Freedom” Group Show
at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway
February 4, 2022 – March 27, 2022
Rasmus Meyers allé 5
N-5015 Bergen
In Spring 2022 Bergen Kunsthall presents an extensive thematic exhibition about improvisation in art and music. With recently produced and rarely shown historical works, as well as archive material, the exhibition explores ideas on freedom, expressed by improvising musicians and contemporary artists. The exhibition is accompanied by an active live program with music, talks and screenings.
Free improvisation involves both aesthetic and social imperatives in its striving towards freedom expressed both musically and politically. Improvised music is often seen as a Utopian space, a democratic place for collaboration and human interaction. Free jazz arose in the 1960s in the USA, among a generation of pioneering musicians who not only revolutionised jazz but whose art was also a search for identity among black musici¬ans and created space for opposition and protest. Other movements of free improvisation have tried to distance themselves from the traditions of jazz in the search for a broad philosophy of freedom.
Read more HERE
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Thaddeus Mosley: Forest, installation view, Baltimore Museum of Art, October 17, 2021–March 27, 2022
Thaddeus Mosley in Forest
at Baltimore Museum of Art
October 17, 2021—March 27, 2022
Thaddeus Mosley: Forest, on view from October 17, 2021 to March 27, 2021 is a focus exhibition of monumental abstract wood sculptures by the Pittsburgh-based artist.
Thaddeus Mosley (b. 1926, Pennsylvania) transforms wood into inventive abstract forms that source inspiration from the art of the African diaspora, jazz, and the European modernist avant-garde. Using only a mallet, chisel, and masterful joinery techniques, Mosley, largely self-taught, reworks felled timber from local sawmills into monumental biomorphic expressions inspired by ancient and modern cultures from around the world. Mosley was nick- named “the forest” by abstract painter Sam Gilliam, who noted he is the “keeper of old trees, round trees, big trees, heavy trees.” The BMA’s exhibition will feature five recent large-scale sculptures centered in the John Waters Rotunda, offering visitors a unique opportunity to circumnavigate Mosley’s dazzling abstract forms.
Curated by Jessica Bell Brown, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art
This exhibition is supported by The Pulimood Charitable Trust and the Art Fund established with exchange funds from gifts of Dr. and Mrs. Edgar F. Berman, Equitable Bank, N.A., Geoffrey Gates, Sandra O. Moose, National Endowment for the Arts, Lawrence Rubin, Philip M. Stern, and Alan J. Zakon.
Read more HERE
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Geometric Plateau, Sculpture Milwaukee
Sculpture Talks 2021 | In Dialogue: Trenton Baylor and Michelle Grabner
October 8th, 2021
7 PM
Join us for a dialogue between Milwaukee artists Trenton Baylor and Michelle Grabner. Trenton will elaborate on his sculptural practice followed by a discussion about the work of Thaddeus Mosley’s, Geometric Plateau, on view for Sculpture Milwaukee there is this We, (Summer 2021 – Fall 2022).
Thaddeus Mosley is a Pittsburgh-based, self-taught artist whose monumental sculptures are crafted with the felled trees of the city’s urban canopy; wood from local sawmills; and reclaimed building materials. Exclusively using a mallet and chisel, he reworks these salvaged pieces of timber into his signature biomorphic forms through a largely intuitive and improvisational process. A trio of three works commissioned for the 2020 edition of Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center, New York marked the artist’s first foray into bronze casting in his six decade long career; a turning point in the development of how his timber works are expressed. Geometric Plateau marks the artist’s latest foray into this iteration of his work.
Sculpture Talks bring together regional, national, and international artists, curators, and professionals to discuss the medium of sculpture focusing on the artists included in Sculpture Milwaukee.
Co-sponsored by the Milwaukee Art Museum’s African American Art Alliance and Sculpture Milwaukee hosted at MARN’s Arts + Culture Hub.
Register and read more HERE
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Portrait photo by Jason Schmidt
Senator John Heinz History Center
Pittsburgh, PA
Thaddeus Mosley receives the 2021 History Makers Award in Art.
The History Makers Award honors distinguished individuals with Western Pennsylvanian roots for their exceptional contributions to the region, the nation and the world.
Read more HERE
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Illusory Progression, 2020 and Rhizogenic Rhythms, 2020
Thaddeus Mosley in
C. Luden Ringnes Sculpture Collection
Harvard Business School, Boston
Self-taught artist Thaddeus Mosley was born in 1926 in New Castle, Pennsylvania. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in the U.S. Navy. He went on to major in English and journalism at the University of Pittsburgh and graduated in 1950. Mosley worked for the U.S. Postal Service for 40 years and wrote for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s leading Black newspapers. In the 1950s Mosley began making sculptures, and in 1968 he had his first solo exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Using wood from reclaimed building materials and local sawmills, as well as fallen logs sourced from Pittsburgh’s Forestry Division, Mosley’s carved abstractions, or “sculptural improvisations,” as he calls them, show the influence of jazz on his artistic process. He often listens to music while he sculpts. “My woods and stones and I generate themes together,” Mosley says.
At age 95, Mosley continues to work in his studio six hours a day. Illusory Progression and Rhizogenic Rhythms were commissioned for the 2020 Frieze Sculpture exhibition at Rockefeller Center in New York. Carved out of salvaged timber and then cast in bronze, these biomorphic sculptures playfully interact with one another and their surroundings. Mosley’s inventive works not only push the boundaries of the medium, but also engage with the history of sculpture. As the artist has described, “One of the most important aspects of my own work is how different segments interact. Because of [sculptor Isamu] Noguchi, I’ve aimed for work that levitates or is slightly off balance.”
Mosley has received numerous commissions over the years, including a public sculpture for Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority in 1978. He has been an officer for the Pittsburgh Society of Sculptors and a board member of the August Wilson African American Cultural Center. Mosley’s work has been exhibited and acquired by major museums and can be found in many public collections, including the Mattress Factory museum, Martin Luther King Jr. Reading and Cultural Center, and Carnegie Museum of Art, all in Pittsburgh; Art Institute of Chicago; High Museum of Art in Atlanta; and Brooklyn Museum. He is represented by Karma, New York.
Read more HERE
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Thaddeus Mosley, Geometric Plateau, 2020, 6 parts, overall: 94 × 70 × 24 inches; 239 × 178 × 61 cm
there is this We
Summer 2021- Fall 2022
Thaddeus Mosley in Sculpture Milwaukee
E Wisconsin Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53202
Sculpture Milwaukee returns to the streets of downtown Milwaukee this summer for its fifth annual exhibition. This year features a dynamic roster of international artworks guest curated by Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates — described by the Tate Modern as “one of the world’s most influential living artists” — and Milwaukee-based artist Michelle Grabner, Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recent recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship.
For the first time, Sculpture Milwaukee presents a titled exhibition, introduces a guest artist program featuring emerging artist Lauren Yeager, and boasts increased community collaboration and partnered activities. The exhibition title, there is this We, is drawn from the opening line of the poem An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire by Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black poet to be awarded a Pulitzer prize.
“The poetics of perseverance and determination vibrate in the art that Theaster and I have selected,” remarks Grabner. “The exhibition’s title reflects the collective power of the works included in the 2021 exhibition, and honors a belief in social change through the provocations of the artistic imagination.”
Sculpture Milwaukee Board Chair Wayne Morgan reiterated that message, “This extraordinary exhibition could not be more timely. On the heels of the hardships wrought by the pandemic, as well as issues of racial inequities brought to the forefront via the Black Lives Matter social justice movement, Theaster and Michelle are inviting us to consider some incredibly challenging questions and give thought to how we intend to move forward as a community and as a country.”
A host of local collaborations are highlighted throughout the exhibition. A work by Betty Gold, to be permanently installed on the Milwaukee Art Museum campus, will be unveiled in tandem with Sculpture Milwaukee’s 2021 exhibition. Works by Salvador Jiménez-Flores were produced through the Arts/Industry program at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Artist Matthias Neumann will be traveling to Milwaukee to construct his work on site with the help of architecture students from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In addition, an array of community engagement programs are slated for the Summer and Fall in conjunction with new and returning partners, including the Urban Ecology Center, TRUE Skool, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, 3rd Street Market Hall, and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.
“We demonstrated last year we can safely create and implement a full, in-person cultural experience in the midst of the pandemic, while utilizing our unique exhibition to reflect and contribute to the most important community conversations. This has created a pathway for an even more robust experience in 2021,” remarks Executive Director Brian Schupper. “As Milwaukee continues its post-pandemic recovery, Sculpture Milwaukee is a destination in and of itself, and an invitation to re-discover and re-consider our shared urban center.”
The 2021 exhibition debuts new works by Thaddeus Mosley, Jason Pickleman, and Brad Kahlhamer. The full roster of artists in the exhibition also includes: Kevin Beasley, Betty Gold, Allison Janae Hamilton, Kara Hamilton, Salvador Jiménez-Flores, Deborah Kass, Matthias Neumann, Virginia Overton, Dan Peterman, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, John Riepenhoff, Christine Tarkowski, and Lauren Yeager.
there is this We is currently open to the public, and will run through autumn of 2022.
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Form Closed, 2019, walnut, 79 × 24 × 20 inches; 200.66 × 60.96 × 50.8 cm
Thaddeus Mosley in
Romancing the Surface
January 20 – March 6, 2021
GRIMM Gallery
Keizersgracht 241, 1016 EA
Amsterdam, Netherlands
grimmgallery.com
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Inverted Dancer, 2020, bronze, 102 × 36 × 21 inches; 259.1 × 91.4 × 53.3 cm, edition of 3, 1AP
Artist Talk: Thaddeus Mosley
in conversation with Kilolo Luckett
January 14, 6:00 pm
Register for the Zoom conversation here.
Taking cues from modernist jazz, Pittsburgh-based, self-taught artist Thaddeus Mosley wields a mallet and chisel to rework salvaged timber into monumental biomorphic sculptural forms. Three of Mosley’s human scale works, Region In Suspension (1996), Oval Continuity (2017), and Branched Form (2017) have been cast in bronze and installed at Eastside Bond plaza in East Liberty. Join us as we mark this significant installation of work by an artistic legend with a conversation celebrating Mosley’s body of work facilitated by art historian and curator Kilolo Luckett. Watch the conversation here.
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Left to right: Illusory Progression, Bronze, 94 × 34 × 20 inches; 238.8 × 86.4 × 50.8 cm, Edition of 3, 1AP. True to Myth, 2020, Bronze, 104 × 38 × 37 inches; 264.2 × 96.5 × 94 cm, Edition of 3, 1AP. Rhizogenic Rhythms, 2020, Bronze, 82 × 32 × 35 inches; 208.3 × 81.3 × 88.9 cm, Edition of 3, 1AP
Thaddeus Mosley in
Frieze Sculpture at
Rockefeller Center 2020
September 1—October 2, 2020
frieze.com
Three monumental freestanding sculptural editions, all specifically fabricated for Frieze Sculpture, entitled Illusory Progression, True to Myth, and Rhizogenic Rhythms have been sited on 5th Avenue in front of the Channel Gardens. These bronze works are the first multiple cast works in Mosley’s 60 year career and are based on his unique sculptures with salvaged Pittsburgh timber and discarded wood fragments and demonstrates what he describes as “weight in space.”
Exploring themes of women’s suffrage, migration, urban planning, and ecology, the free outdoor exhibition returns to the heart of Manhattan. A special exhibition of site-specific works by artists Ghada Amer, Beatriz Cortez, Andy Goldsworthy, Lena Henke, Camille Henrot and Thaddeus Mosley will comprise the second year of Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center. Usually held in the spring as part of the wider programming of Frieze New York, Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center was postponed and readapted this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Presented in partnership with Tishman Speyer, the major public art initiative places significant sculptural works by leading artists in open, public locations throughout Rockefeller Plaza, allowing for ample social distancing space in compliance with all City and State guidelines. Offering free admission to all, Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center will be on display from September 1–October 2, 2020.
Curated by Brett Littman (Director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City, New York), the second edition is inspired by the site’s and the city’s natural materials of earth, rock, and plants, and by the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, the original date when Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center was scheduled to debut.
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Thaddeus Mosley, installation view, Karma, New York, February 29–July 24, 2020
Inside the Arts with Thaddeus Mosley
Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts
The University of Alabama at Birmingham
Thursday, May 14, 5:00 pm CT / 6:00 pm ET
https://vimeo.com/424381741
Thaddeus Mosley will give a virtual gallery walkthrough of his current exhibition for the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s art museum’s Inside the Arts series. He will be joined by Tina Ruggieri, the Assistant Curator at AEIVA.
Registration for the virtual event is available here. The walkthrough will also be available for live streaming through the museum’s Facebook page.
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