Time Sensitive - Thaddeus Mosley on Making Art to Be Appreciated for Centuries

Thaddeus Mosley on Making Art to Be Appreciated for Centuries

05/01/24 • 64 min

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Born and raised in Pennsylvania, the 97-year-old Pittsburgh-based artist and sculptor Thaddeus Mosley has a deep and enduring obsession with wood. In his late 20s, he began to use the material for art, carving sculptures in his basement studio, and with his sculpture-making now spanning 70 years, his enduring dedication to his craft is practically unparalleled. Represented by Karma gallery since 2019, Mosley has only now, in the past decade or so, begun to receive the international recognition and attention he has long deserved. In his hands, wood sings; he shapes and carves trees into striking abstract forms that often appear as if they’re levitating while honoring and preserving their organic, natural character. As with the work of his two main influences, Constantin Brâncuși and Isamu Noguchi, Mosley, too, strives to make sculptures that, in his words, beyond today, “will be interesting in a hundred tomorrows.”

On the episode, he talks about the language that poetry, music, and sculpture all share; his early years as a sports writer for a local newspaper; and his life-transforming relationship with the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Thaddeus Mosley

[4:13] Sam Gilliam

[17:24] Carnegie Museum

[21:08] Carnegie International

[21:08] Leon Arkus

[21:08] “Thaddeus Mosley: Forest”

[21:08] “Inheritance”

[24:20] Isamu Noguchi

[27:53] Constantin Brâncuși

[28:28] University of Pittsburgh

[28:28] Martha Graham

[46:15] Floyd Bennett Field

[46:23] Ebony magazine

[46:23] Sepia magazine

[46:23] Jet magazine

[46:23] Pittsburgh Courier

[54:34] John Coltrane

[51:37] Li Bo

[51:37] Dylan Thomas

[56:21] Bernard Leach

[57:45] Langston Hughes

[57:45] Countee Cullen

[57:45] Harriet Tubman

[57:45] Fannie Lou Hamer

[57:45] “The Long-Legged Bait”

[57:45] “Air Step - for Fayard and Harold Nicholas”

[57:45] The Nicholas Brothers

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Thaddeus Mosley

[4:13] Sam Gilliam

[17:24] Carnegie Museum

[21:08] Carnegie International

[21:08] Leon Arkus

[21:08] “Thaddeus Mosley: Forest”

[21:08] “Inheritance”

[24:20] Isamu Noguchi

[27:53] Constantin Brâncuși

[28:28] University of Pittsburgh

[28:28] Martha Graham

[46:15] Floyd Bennett Field

[46:23] Ebony magazine

[46:23] Sepia magazine

[46:23] Jet magazine

[46:23] Pittsburgh Courier

[54:34] John Coltrane

[51:37] Li Bo

[51:37] Dylan Thomas

[56:21] Bernard Leach

[57:45] Langston Hughes

[57:45] Countee Cullen

[57:45] Harriet Tubman

[57:45] Fannie Lou Hamer

[57:45] “The Long-Legged Bait”

[57:45] “Air Step - for Fayard and Harold Nicholas”

[57:45] The Nicholas Brothers

Previous Episode

Adam Pendleton on His Ongoing Exploration of “Black Dada”

Most widely recognized for his paintings that rigorously combine spray paint, stenciled geometric forms, and brushstrokes, the Brooklyn-based artist Adam Pendleton is also known for his “Black Dada” framework, an ever-evolving philosophy that investigates various relationships between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde. Many will recognize Pendleton’s work from “Who Is Queen?,” his 2021 solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which he has said was his way of “trying to overwhelm the museum.” This is a natural position for him: His works in and of themselves are often overwhelming. At once political and spiritual, they provoke deep introspection and consideration, practically demanding viewers to look, and then look again.

On this episode, he discusses the elusive, multifarious nature of “Black Dada”; “An Abstraction,” his upcoming exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York (on view from May 3–August 16); painting as a kind of technology; and why, for him, jazz is indefinable.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.
Show notes:

Adam Pendleton

[05:00] Joan Retallack

[05:00] Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths

[05:22] “Becoming Imperceptible”

[07:41] Ishmael Houston-Jones

[07:41] Joan Jonas

[07:41] Lorraine O’Grady

[07:41] Yvonne Rainer

[07:41] Jack Halberstam

[14:26] Fred Moten

[05:22] “Who Is Queen?”

[23:50] Hugo Ball’s Dada Manifesto

[23:50] Amiri Baraka’s “Black Dada Nihilismus”

[31:14] Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

[31:14] “System of Display”

[31:14] “Reading Dante”

[34:40] “Adam Pendleton” at Pace Gallery

[34:40] “An Abstraction” at Pace Gallery

[34:40] Arlene Shechet

[34:40] “Adam Pendleton x Arlene Shechet”

[40:30] “Blackness, White, and Light” at MUMOK

[45:07] “Twenty-One Love Poems” by Audrienne Rich

[50:40] “Occupy Time” by Jason Adams

[56:04] “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow” by Toni Cade Bambara

[57:13] “Some Thoughts on a Constellation of Things Seen and Felt” by Adrienne Edwards

Next Episode

Viet Thanh Nguyen on the Need to Recognize Coexisting Truths

At age 4, following the fall of Saigon, in 1975, Viet Thanh Nguyen and his family fled Vietnam and came to the U.S. as refugees. Throughout the turmoil and its aftermath, neither he nor his family could have imagined that he would go on to not only become an internationally renowned novelist—winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his debut novel, The Sympathizer (2015)—but also to serve as an executive producer of an HBO miniseries adaptation of the book, and become a widely respected voice on matters including anti-Asian hate, refugees and immigrants, war and genocide, and memory and memorials. In addition to The Sympathizer, Nguyen has written, among other books, the new memoir A Man of Two Faces (2023); The Sympathizer’s sequel, The Committed (2021); and the nonfiction title Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016).

On the episode, Nguyen talks about turning The Sympathizer into an HBO miniseries, the polarities between what he calls “narrative plenitude” and “narrative scarcity,” and jokes as a form of truth-telling.

Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Viet Thanh Nguyen

[3:43] “An Open Letter on the Situation in Palestine”

[3:43] Min Jin Lee

[5:48] F. Scott Fitzgerald

[7:11] The Sympathizer

[7:11] The Sympathizer HBO series

[7:11] Robert Downey Jr.

[7:11] Sandra Oh

[8:41] A Man of Two Faces

[8:41] Casualties of War