Thaddeus Mosley: Radial Forms: Early Work 1954–68 — Thaddeus Mosley

Even in his earliest sculptures, Thaddeus Mosley (1926–2026) engaged the concerns that would 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. Radial Forms features 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. 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 would continue to develop for the following six decades. Inaugurating Karma’s Tribeca gallery, this presentation is the first dedicated to this formative period and the first posthumous exhibition of his work.

By the time Mosley began working with wood in the early 1950s, he was already immersed in the arts—he sought out modernist sculpture at the Carnegie; learned about African art at the University of Pittsburgh; and watched 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 decided to try making his own. He scavenged local hardwood from trees that park rangers had cleared from Pennsylvania forests and left by the roadside. Mosley sometimes picked up logs in South Park, the Pittsburgh suburb where collector G. David Thompson lived. On one occasion, Thompson found him admiring, from behind a fence, an Alexander Calder sculpture on the garage roof and invited him inside to view his modernist collection. Noticing watercolors by Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso—artists whose work, depicted on posters, hung in his own home—Mosley told Thompson, “They are my main art, too.” Then a postal worker by night, he spent his days shaping the logs he had recovered with chisel and gouge, working in the basement of his Pittsburgh home.

Since his earliest, figurative works, Mosley has practiced 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 said. “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 smoothed a branched segment of walnut, transforming its blunt limbs into fins and an arcing neck. Head (1956), hewn from a block of sycamore, was among the works Mosley presented in his first public exhibition, at the inaugural Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh in 1960.

In the years that followed, Mosley moved from tabletop scale to larger, freestanding structures that rose from the ground, drawing on influences including Isamu Noguchi, Alberto Giacometti, and traditional West African wood sculpture. By the 1960s, he had also begun to push beyond static figuration toward implied movement as his visual language turned toward abstraction. Balanced on a single appendage, The Dancer (1961) demonstrates what he would later call “weight in space.” In Radial Forms (1964), he renounced subject matter altogether, foregrounding the delicate equilibrium of the tall, stacked elements and the rippling textures of his chisel marks. As Mosley continued 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 saw Mosley’s work in a local group show and was so impressed that he offered the artist a solo exhibition at the museum. Mosley spent the following years preparing for his 1968 institutional debut. He worked from the studio of his new house on the South Side of Pittsburgh, the walls of which he had 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 channeled 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 opened at the Carnegie in June 1968 amid a political turning point for his city. Civil rights protests had 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 had long participated in. Despite the wider recognition his exhibition brought him, he opted to keep his job at the postal service alongside his independent studio practice. Guided by the techniques and concerns of his earliest work, Mosley continued 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 published 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.