Internationally known sculptor Thaddeus G. Mosley Jr., for decades one of Pittsburgh’s most beloved artists, died Friday at age 99.
Mosley and his monumental abstract sculptures made from salvaged wood have been a constant presence on the local art scene since the 1950s. According to a statement released by his family, he died at his North Side home after a period of hospice care.
“Our hearts are broken to share the passing of our father, Thaddeus Mosley,” said Khari Moseley, a Pittsburgh City Councilor and one of Mosley’s six children, in a statement.
“He was a dedicated family man, ubiquitous community pillar, and an inimitable creative force who embodied the hard-working ethos of his blue-collar Western Pennsylvanian roots and the innovative essence of the classic jazz music that served as his spiritual inspiration,” the councilor said in the statement.
For decades, Mosley went to work daily at his sculpture studio in an industrial park in the city’s Chateau neighborhood. He carved by hand, with a mallet, maul and chisels, in a studio teeming with sculptures, like a forest of leafless trees.
“To me, a day is a day. They just have different names for them,” he quipped to an interviewer in 2018.
Success after 90
Mosley’s public artworks include the 14-foot-tall “Phoenix,” at the corner of Centre Avenue and Dinwiddie, and “Mountaintop,” at Herron and Milwaukee streets, both in the Hill District. He also has public works at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Eastside Bond Plaza, and the campus of Carnegie Mellon University, and several of his distinctive sculptures are on permanent display at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center.
The latter placement is apt, as Mosley and August Wilson, then a struggling poet, met in the ’60s as members of a group of Black artists who congregated in the Hill.
Nate Guidry
/
Courtesy of the Mosley Family
Mosley in his studio
Another career highlight was a 2009 solo exhibition at Mattress Factory that recreated his studio and included some 100 of his sculptures.
But while Mosley has long been well-known in Pittsburgh — he was named Pittsburgh Center for the Arts’ Artist of the Year in 1979 — the self-taught artist achieved much of his acclaim after age 90. At 92, his work was featured in the prestigious Carnegie International.
The following year, he secured representation by the contemporary art gallery Karma, whose New York location is currently hosting “Glass,” an exhibition of Mosley’s small-scale glass sculptures.
In recent years, Mosley’s work has been exhibited in museums around the U.S. and as far afield as the Musée National Eugène Delacroix in Paris, and Bergen Kunsthall in Norway.
His legacy will continue to grow. Next month, his bronze “Touching the Earth” will be the inaugural installation at Arts Landing, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s new Downtown civic space. (The work was commissioned by the Public Art Fund for a 2025 exhibition at New York’s City Hall Park.)
“Weight in space”
Mosley was born in 1926, in New Castle, one of five children of Helen Fagan Poole and Thaddeus Mosley Sr., a coal miner. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and studied journalism at the University of Pittsburgh, from which he graduated in 1950.
In the 1950s, he was a sportswriter at the Pittsburgh Courier, then the nation’s largest Black newspaper. He later spent nearly 40 years working as a mail sorter for the U.S. Postal Service.
It was during that time that he began his art career, at first by hand-carving two-by-fours in imitation of animal sculptures displayed on coffee tables at the old Kaufmann’s department store Downtown. He eventually moved into abstraction, with influences including African tribal art and the pioneering Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi.
“My main idea, of course, is the idea of weight in space, and that idea is that the piece, the sculpture, should look like it’s levitating, it should look like there is movement,” Mosley said.
Bill O’Driscoll
/
90.5 WESA
Sculptures by Thad Mosley at the site of Downtown’s Arts Landing in August 2025.
Other inspirations included classic jazz. Pictures of Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughn were among the images that papered the cinder-block walls of his studio.
His art career brought him friendships with other art figures with Pittsburgh ties, including August Wilson, pianist Ahmad Jamal and artist David Lewis.
Mosley’s work is in the collections of numerous museums, including the Carnegie Museum of Art; New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.
Other career highlights include “Following Space: Thaddeus Mosley & Alexander Calder,” a two-person presentation in 2024 with one of his art heroes at the Seattle Art Museum; and his 2021 solo exhibition “Forest,” at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland, which traveled to Art + Practice, in Los Angeles, and Nasher Sculpture Center, in Dallas.
Mosley also taught art, at the Touchstone Center for Crafts in Farmington, Pa., as well as at workshops and lectures settings from elementary and graduate schools to prisons, according to the statement from his family.
His family also noted that he served as “a motivational father figure on Pittsburgh’s North Side for dozens of young African-American men who were close friends and associates of his two youngest sons, Anire and Khari.”
Mosley is survived by his six children, Anire, Khari, Martel and Lorna Mosley, Rochelle Sisco and Tereneh Idia; as well as eight grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and his longtime companion, Teruyo Seya.
A private memorial service for the family will be followed by details about a public celebration of life. In lieu of flowers, the Mosley family asks supporters to contribute to a Thaddeus Mosley Memorial Fund, to be established by the family.
