Thaddeus Mosley

Even in his earliest sculptures, Thaddeus Mosley (1926–2026) engaged the concerns that drive his lifelong practice, including materiality, form, and equilibrium. Over a career rooted in Pittsburgh, Mosley hand-carved salvaged hardwoods into rhythmic forms that range in scale from intimate to monumental. Featuring sculptures, paintings, and collages from 1954 through 1968—the year of Mosley's debut solo show, held at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh—Radial Forms is the first presentation dedicated to this formative period and the first posthumous exhibition of his work. During these years, Mosley synthesized local and global influences into a singularly expressive abstract idiom, laying the foundation for a rigorous sculptural practice that he continues to develop for the following six decades.

By the time Mosley begins working with wood in the early 1950s, he is already immersed in the arts—he seeks out modernist sculpture at the Carnegie; learns about African art at the University of Pittsburgh; and watches Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and other luminaries perform at jazz clubs in the Hill District. After noticing wood sculptures in a Scandinavian design display at Kaufmann's department store, Mosley decides to try making his own. He scavenges local hardwood from trees that park rangers have cleared from Pennsylvania forests and left by the roadside. Mosley sometimes picks up logs in South Park, the Pittsburgh suburb where collector G. David Thompson lives. On one occasion, Thompson finds him admiring, from behind a fence, an Alexander Calder sculpture on the roof of his garage and invites him inside to view his modernist art collection. Noticing watercolors by Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso—artists whose work, depicted on posters, hung in his own home—Mosley tells Thompson, "They are my main art, too." Then a postal worker by night, he spends his days shaping the logs he has recovered with chisel and gouge, working in the basement of his Pittsburgh home.

Since his earliest, figurative works, Mosley practices direct carving—a technique informed by Constantin Brâncuși—allowing the natural forms of his material to guide his hand rather than working from preparatory models. "Wood, especially fallen trees, offers its own direction," he says. "I carve in response to what I find in it, not what I want it to be." In Untitled (Seal) (1954), his first sculpture, Mosley smooths a branched segment of walnut, transforming its blunt limbs into fins and an arcing neck. Head (1956), hewn from a block of sycamore, is among the works Mosley presents in his first public exhibition, at the inaugural Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh in 1960.

In the years that follow, Mosley moves from tabletop scale to larger, freestanding structures that rise from the ground, drawing on influences including Isamu Noguchi, Alberto Giacometti, and traditional West African wood sculpture. By the 1960s, he has also begun to push beyond static figuration toward implied movement as his visual language turns toward abstraction. Balanced on a single appendage, The Dancer (1961) demonstrates what he later calls "weight in space." In Radial Forms (1964), he renounces subject matter altogether, foregrounding the delicate equilibrium of the tall, stacked elements and the rippling textures of his chisel marks. As Mosley continues to abstract the figure, his paintings of this period, such as Untitled (Love Letter Series) (1962–64), depict the head with stark, angular brushstrokes that recall the incisions of his carving.

In 1965, Carnegie director Leon Arkus sees Mosley's work in a local group show and is so impressed that he offers the artist a solo exhibition at the museum. Mosley spends the following years preparing for his 1968 institutional debut. He works from the studio of his new house on the South Side of Pittsburgh, the walls of which he has covered with photographic references—"action pictures capturing the split seconds of energy and gesture," recounted David Lewis in his 1997 Mosley monograph, "modern dance in performance, the great figures of jazz, artists in their studios, African art as ritual, the exotic forms of clay buildings in the Sudan and the Cameroons . . ." Mosley channels the kinetic energy of these images into mixed-media collages and the new sculptures he carved for the Carnegie, among them See-See (1967) and Trane Pipes (1967–68), which draw as readily on the improvisation of jazz as on the forms found in both African art and European modernism.

Mosley's exhibition opens at the Carnegie in June 1968 amid a political turning point for his city. Civil rights protests have erupted in Pittsburgh's Black neighborhoods and across the country in April following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a climactic event in a struggle for liberation Mosley has long participated in. Despite the wider recognition his exhibition brought him, he opts to keep his job at the postal service alongside his independent studio practice. Guided by the techniques and concerns of his earliest work, Mosley continues until his passing in 2026 to transform salvaged wood into new, abstract form, leaving behind a body of sculptures that balance earthly heft against a sense of motion.

In conjunction with this exhibition, Karma Books publishes Radial Forms: Early Work 1954–68 and a facsimile edition of Compositions in Black and White, first printed in 1955. Expanding on the presentation of Mosley's work at Karma, Radial Forms features essays by Catharina Manchanda and Ed Roberson as well as a collection of accounts from Mosley's friends, family, and contemporaries on his life and work during the 1950s and '60s. Compositions in Black and White, edited and featuring contributions by Mosley, is a book of short stories, poetry, criticism, journalism, and photography originally published by the Writers and Photographers Guild of Pittsburgh. Karma's facsimile circulates these texts and photographs for the first time since their initial publication.