NEW YORK, NY.- Thaddeus Mosley wears his 96 years with panache. He doesnt move 250-pound logs around his crowded Pittsburgh studio by himself any more. But its not because hes stopped working, or hired an assistant hes just making his abstract, treelike assemblages of carved cherry and walnut out of slightly smaller pieces.
Though theyre as unadorned and approachable as folk art, Mosleys sculptures get deeper and more complicated as you spend time with them, and as their sources in European modernism, African sculptural traditions, and the textures and shapes of the wood itself become clear.
Thad is the forest, Mosleys friend, artist Sam Gilliam, wrote in a 2020 poem, a keeper of trees anywhere old trees, round trees, big trees, heavy trees.
Mosley has been well known in and around Pittsburgh for more than six decades. But since 2019, when he joined Karma Gallery in lower Manhattan, he has been getting some long overdue attention internationally and in New York. Last year, he visited Paris for a show at the Musée Delacroix of bronze casts made from his wooden sculptures, and in March he will have his second solo show at Karma.
Brought up in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Mosley studied English and journalism at the University of Pittsburgh on the GI Bill and briefly worked as a sports reporter. But in the mid-1950s, he was inspired to take up wood carving by the sight of decorative teak birds in department store displays of Scandinavian furniture, and by the late 1950s, he had resigned from reporting in favor of a day job with the Postal Service that left him time for his art. We spoke in his studio and by telephone; these are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Q: Youve mentioned Noguchi, Brancusi and African sculpture as primary influences. Your work shares Brancusis soaring verticality, and the wood and the organic forms certainly evoke African sculpture. But what about the Black American experience? What part does that play in your work?
A: Well, I think its all sort of related. I think there is an affinity into infinity. One of my most popular pieces is Georgia Gate, that I did in 1975, which the Carnegie Museum of Art owns. Its based on the sculptures from a graveyard in Sumner, Georgia. I saw pictures of these sculptures in the 1950s, in Marshall Stearns book The Story of Jazz.
He was talking about the connection between American jazz and tribal history. When I saw these sculptures, I immediately thought of Brancusi. They were being done, I guess, around the same time Brancusi was coming up (in Romania). Of course, they were made by what youd call an outsider artist in Georgia. He wouldnt have known where Romania was, but when I saw those pieces I immediately thought of Brancusi.
Q: Do you feel any obligation to make that kind of connection, between American and European influences, more explicit?
A: I never worried too much about what other people wanted me to do. Like during the so-called civil rights movement, where people were just doing what they called Black Art, it had to relate to Black people and Black situations well, I still did what I wanted to do. I think just being who I am, and showing my influences, is showing enough.
Q: Did you get criticized for that?
A: More than me, people that were prominent, like Sam Gilliam, who was on the national stage, a lot of people were sort of putting him down, you know. And he was trying to say, like me because I think I have more examples of tribal art in my house than he did but he was saying: Look at the colors in my art, look at the colors of Kente cloth. It doesnt have to be something that you can understand immediately. I think that all art should have a little mystery, so that people will be drawn to figure out how you did it.
Q: Why do you say the so-called civil rights movement?
A: I always felt that the civil rights movement started as soon as there was an Afro American in the United States. Theres always been a movement, but no one paid much attention till it got on television.
Q: Youre also careful, as Noguchi was with his stone, to avoid interfering with the natural beauty of the wood you use.
A: I always say I have extreme advantages since I have such beautiful material. Sometimes I feel like just taking off the bark and standing up the log.
Q: I mean, you could do that.
A: But thats not what Im really interested in. Im not interested in finding the easiest way out. I like to challenge myself and see what I can come up with. And I think with Noguchi, the colors change, the texture changes, as well as the form. I do a little bit of that myself, of course. You dont know what the colors going to be, how much its going to change.
I had a collector buy a sculpture of mine. When he got it home where he could really see it in the living room, he called me and said, you know, This wood is different colors! I thought it was all one color when I bought it! I said, You bought a tree! Only way you change the color of a tree is you cut the wood in slices and have someone stain it to one color. Thats why furniture looks the way it does.
Q: Why wood?
A: Well, Ive always been a poor man
Q: I hope youre doing better now?
A: Oh, yeah, its the first time in my life I ever had two dollars to rub against each other. But anyhow, when I first started out I was looking at carvings from the Swedish displays and stuff, they were made out of teak wood and copper stems. Well, around Pittsburgh they have what they call a park service, and they go around all over the city and they cut down trees. Back in those days, you could just haul them away. So I had a ready supply. But also I love the color of the wood, I love the warmth, I love the grains.
Q: Youve been making and showing work since the 1950s, but would it be fair to say that the past few years have been a professional uptick?
A: Oh, yes, yes. I was in the (2018) Carnegie International (exhibition); I sort of had the hallway when you came in, so I was easily identified, you might say. But after that people got interested in me, and I decided to go with Karma Gallery, and they exhibited me there three years ago, two years ago, I forget when. Ill be having another show on March 4.
Between this show and showing in other venues like an outdoor show in Milwaukee; Art+Practice, which is Mark Bradfords place in L.A.; and the Nasher (Sculpture Center) in Dallas Ive had more exposure, probably, in two years, at least prominent exposure
Q: Than in the previous 40?
A: Fifty.
Q: How does that feel?
A: Well, I dont feel that the work has improved, but the situation has tremendously.
Q: Doesnt it feel any different in the studio now that your works getting so much more attention?
A: No, no. Im a person that, I want to see it done as best I can, even if no one sees it but me. I used to tell my children, always be on your best behavior, because you never know whos watching you.
Q: Why do you think you werent recognized earlier?
A: Well, first thing, you have to be out there to be noticed. But you have to look back at a time when there were some very good Afro American artists, like Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas, even people before Sam Gilliam. Ill digress here for a second I remember when I was in the first Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh, there was a Black gentleman, I guess about in his 50s, that did flower paintings. So another Black artist and I, we were standing near our work. He came up, and he said, Is this yours? I said, Yeah. He says: Dont stand around your work. Because if white people see that you did it, they wont buy it.
Q: Thats awful.
A: But that wasnt the situation for me. In the 60s, when I had my first show at the Carnegie, Lefevre Gallery and Art Seidenberg were in Pittsburgh, and they wanted to know if I could do two shows at once, if I could move to New York. But they wanted me to quit my job, and no one said how I was going to live. Nobody told me, well, were going to give you $50,000 a year in advance so you can work.
No way I was going to abandon my kids to have a so-called art career. No, I didnt want to do that, because of my own upbringing. My mother and father divorced when I was 8 years old. After that, things really went downhill economically for my family, and we kids, we had a tough time. So I said, well, if I ever have children, Im going to make sure that theyre as comfortable as I can make them, no matter how the marriages turn out, you know.
Q: Youve talked a lot about circumstance. You started working with wood because you could get it free; your sculptures are rarely more than 10 feet tall because thats the height of your studio ceiling. At this point, can you look back and call your life itself a kind of found material that you made the best of and found the beauty in?
A: I remember, the Carnegie Mellon professor David Lewis used to say years ago, You know, Thad, if you were white, your situation would be different. I said, Well, if most Black people were white, their situation would be different. I knew that I wasnt going to get the same recognition, have the same opportunity. But I tried, because its something I wanted to do, to take advantage of as many possibilities as I could.
Q: Well, thank you so much for talking. I hope to see you in New York in March.
A: I hope I exist that long! You know, Im going on 97, and so, like I say, I dont buy a lot of green bananas.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.