September 4, 2024
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
The next time you’re Downtown, check out Thaddeus Mosley’s outdoor sculpture display in the Cultural District.
Mosley, 98, a longtime Pittsburgh artist, is renowned for his work in wood — specifically, sculpting biomorphic forms from felled Pennsylvania hardwoods from Pittsburgh’s urban canopy. He began working in bronze in 2020 so his sculptures could be displayed outdoors.
Mosley’s new solo exhibit, “Cross Current, Interior Decipher, Rhizogenic Rhythms, and Illusory Progression,” located at Eighth Street and Penn Avenue, includes four monumental sculptures, each with its own unique story and form. They will be on display through August 2025.
To create these bronze sculptures that are cast from wood, Mosley uses lost-wax casting — an ancient, highly sensitive metalworking technique in which mold made from an original sculpture yields a wax replica, which is then covered in a second fireproof mold and burned out with molten metal.
“My sculpture, the beauty of it, for me, is the textures that direct your eye and give a sense of rhythm…and vitality to the piece,” Mosley said in a release. “I like the evidence of the hand, evidence of the tool.”
“Weighing several hundred pounds more than their wooden counterparts, these metal sculptures nevertheless seem to float,” according to a Pittsburgh Cultural Trust release on the exhibit. “This duality of heft and levity, precarity and monumentality illustrates the principle Mosley has termed weight in space, in which unwieldy materials are sculpted and arranged to appear to levitate. The translation from wood to bronze only underscores the works’ semblance of weightlessness.”
This exhibition is curated by Anastasia James, director of Galleries & Public Art —Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and presented in collaboration with Karma in New York.
Mosley was born in New Castle on July 23, 1926. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in the Navy. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a double major in English and journalism in 1950.
He worked at the U.S. Postal Service in the 1950s, while also freelancing with The Pittsburgh Courier and other publications. At this time, he also started making sculptures.
He had his first solo exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1968.
Even though Mosley’s work has been exhibited at and acquired by museums and foundations since 1959, it’s only in recent years that he’s been getting some international attention, according to a 2023 profile of Mosley in The New York Times. Among his many exhibits, he displayed his work at the 2018 Carnegie International. He joined the Karma Gallery in Lower Manhattan in 2019 and exhibited his bronze sculptures in Paris in 2022. In 2023, he had a traveling show at Art + Practice in Los Angeles.
His sculptures are held in the collections of some of the finest museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum in New York, Carnegie Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, also in New York.
Mosley was honored at the SculptureCenter in Long Island City, New York during its annual gala in April. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust will honor Mosley for his outstanding artistic contributions at the Trust’s “The Big 40’’ Gala on Saturday, Sept. 7.
