Thaddeus Mosley valuation
Pittsburgh sculptor who carved fallen walnut and cherry into stacked, balancing forms for more than sixty years.
Thaddeus Mosley (1926–2026) was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania, served in the US Navy, and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1950 with a degree in English and journalism.
What a work by Thaddeus Mosley is worth
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Bio
Thaddeus Mosley (1926–2026) was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania, served in the US Navy, and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1950 with a degree in English and journalism. In the 1950s he wrote and photographed for the Pittsburgh Courier, Ebony and Jet, and for decades he worked as a mail sorter for the US Postal Service. As a sculptor he was self-taught. He began in the late 1950s, after seeing wooden birds and fish in a department store display and deciding to make his own rather than buy them. His sculptures are carved from logs of walnut, cherry and other woods salvaged from Pittsburgh's fallen and felled trees, stacked and balanced into tall abstract forms that owe something to African sculpture, to Brancusi and Noguchi, and to the jazz he loved. The Carnegie Museum of Art gave him a solo exhibition in 1968, and he was one of thirty-two artists in the Carnegie International of 2018.
The sculptures are unique and mostly large, carved from a single log or built from several carved pieces stacked and joined, some on carved bases. Wood moves with the seasons, so checks and splits in the grain are part of the material, but new cracks, insect damage and the state of any joints should be recorded. Provenance through his New York gallery, Karma, or directly from the artist is what a buyer looks for.
New Castle, the Courier and the Carnegie
In 2021 the Baltimore Museum of Art organised Forest, an exhibition of five sculptures carved from discarded walnut trees gathered in Pittsburgh neighbourhoods. The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas gave him a solo exhibition in 2023.
His honours include the Pennsylvania Governor's Award for Artist of the Year in 1999 and the Isamu Noguchi Award in 2022, and his work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art.
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