Celebrate Thaddeus Mosley: Touching the Earth, our newest public exhibition in City Hall Park! Join us for a drop-in event with opening remarks and a chance to explore the artist’s installation for the first time.
The exhibition is located in City Hall Park. The closest subway stops are the R City Hall station and the 6 Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall station.
Email [email protected] with questions and requests for accessibility. Please send any needs for services or accommodations to support your participation in this program, including ASL interpretation, by May 25.
About the Artist
Thaddeus Mosley (b. 1926, Pennsylvania) creates monumental sculptures crafted from the salvaged wood from Pennsylvania’s forests. Using only a chisel and gauge to maintain the integrity of the original log, Mosley reworks timber—primarily from indigenous Pennsylvanian hardwoods such as cherry and walnut—into biomorphic forms. Through a process of direct carving, the artist’s marks respond to and rearticulate the natural gradations of the material’s surface. With influences ranging from Isamu Noguchi to Constantin Brâncuși—and the Bamum, Dogon, Baoulé, Senufo, Dan, and Mossi works of his personal collection—Mosley’s “sculptural improvisations,” as he calls them, also take cues from the modernist traditions of jazz. “The only way you can really achieve something is if you’re not working so much from a pattern. That’s also the essence of good jazz,” he says of his method. Mosley lives in Pittsburgh.
Mosley’s work has been presented in institutional solo exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum (2024); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2023); Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2022); and Baltimore Museum of Art (2021), as well as group exhibitions at the Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2022); Harvard Business School, Boston (2020); Sculpture Milwaukee (2020); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2018); and Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2009), among others. Mosley’s sculptures are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
