Downtown Pittsburgh’s newest public artworks are by one of its most venerable artists.
Thaddeus Mosley, 98, is the artist behind the four big abstract bronze sculptures whose temporary home is the corner of 8th and Penn, right by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s outdoor Backyard space.
Mosley works primarily in wood, hand-carving downed hardwood trees into towering and often sinuous abstract forms that seem to defy gravity. He works with just a mallet, chisel and gauge.
The newly situated Downtown sculptures — “Cross Current,” “Interior Decipher,” “Rhizogenic Rhythms” and “Illusory Progression” — each stand 7 to 9 feet tall. The originals, all recent works, were then cast in bronze with outdoor display in mind.
Trust director of galleries and public art Anastasia James curated the exhibit as part of an effort to bring more public art Downtown. She called Mosley “the obvious choice.”
“He is an artist who has lived and worked in Pittsburgh his entire life, and yet he is internationally recognized,” James said. (She added that Mosley's North Side studio was the first artist's studio she ever visited, more than 20 years ago, as a high school student at Shadyside Academy.)
Mosley, who was born in New Castle, Pa., in 1926, has local exhibition credits dating more than 60 years, to the early days of the Three Rivers Arts Festival, which showed his work elsewhere Downtown.
Mosley worked for years for the U.S. Postal Service, all the while developing his art. He’s had solo exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art and Mattress Factory museum. But wider recognition for his talent has only intensified the past decade.
In 2023 alone, Karma, the gallery that represents Mosley, gave him solo shows at its spaces in Los Angeles and New York. And in Paris, the Musée National Eugène Delacroix showed his work in its gardens.
Also that year, he was the subject of a New York Times interview.
And elsewhere in recent years, he’s had solo or two-person exhibits at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Art + Practice, in Los Angeles; and the Nasher Sculpture Center, in Dallas.
Mosley’s sculptures are in the collections of museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, and the Carnegie, which included works by him in its 57th Carnegie International.
Nor are the Downtown sculptures Mosley’s first outdoor public artworks in Pittsburgh. His “Phoenix,” standing at Centre and Dinwiddie, in the Hill District, was commissioned in 1979, and in 2021 three of his bronzes — then a new medium for him — were installed in East Side Bond Plaza, in East Liberty.
But the Downtown site is probably the most heavily traveled of them all and, as James noted, it’s near not only the Backyard but also Pittsburgh’s creative and performing arts magnet school CAPA 6-12.
“I really wanted people of all different backgrounds and experiences to be able to see Thad’s work in his own hometown in a significant way,” she said.
About 100 people attended Thursday’s event formally presenting the sculptures. Mosley wore a light-blue sport jacket, pink shirt and white straw fedora. Speakers included Trust president and CEO Kendra Whitlock Ingram and Pittsburgh city councilor Bobby Wilson, who read a proclamation naming August 29 Thaddeus Mosley Day. It was written by the artist’s son Khari Mosley, who serves with Wilson on council.
The four sculptures are on loan from Karma. They will remain at 8th and Penn through next August, the Trust said.
