November 5, 2026
The African American artist Thaddeus Mosley died earlier this year at the age of 99, having produced more than 700 wooden sculptures, glass works, paintings, collages and other pieces across some 70 years. Mosley lived and worked in relative anonymity in Pittsburgh, where for decades he kept a night job at the local post office so that he could primarily devote his days to making sculptures composed of wood salvaged around the city. The finished pieces took on totemic forms, the marks from Mosley’s carving accentuated by the material’s organic texture, rippling surfaces and variegated coloring. The artist’s big break arrived in 2018, when he was 92, with a symposium on his practice as part of the Carnegie International. Soon after, he joined Karma gallery, which will stage an exhibition of his work, opening next week at its TriBeCa space. The show will focus on Mosley’s earliest sculptures, collages and paintings, made between 1954-68. Many of the works have never been exhibited before and are inspired by African carvings — which Mosley first encountered in a high school world-studies class in the ’40s — and by the fluidity of jazz, the music the artist loved his whole life.
