The late sculptor Thaddeus Mosley came to art world fame in 2018, following his inclusion in that year’s Carnegie International. At the time, the self-taught artist was in his early 90s, having spent the past seven decades working diligently, and mostly alone, on monumental freestanding totems in his Pittsburgh studio. He died in March at 99.
Filmmakers Sarah Cooper and Conny Fridh began filming Mosley in 2018, a turning point in his long, circuitous career. Their forthcoming documentary, now titled Thaddeus Mosley: In the Time of Trees, traces the development of Mosley’s artistic life, which was set off by a world history course at the University of Pittsburgh. Mosley enrolled there in 1948, intending to study English and journalism. A book featuring photos of modernist sculptures by Constantin Brâncuși alongside images of the African objects that had inspired them stopped him in his tracks. As he explained to ARTnews’s Alex Greenberger, “I didn’t know that Brâncuși was influenced by African tribal art at that time. But I was very struck by how the curvatures [of Brâncuși’s works] reminded me of Senufo birds.”
Cooper and Fridh spent eight years with Mosley, through his final months, documenting his studio as he left it. Last summer, they brought another director, André Robert Lee, onto the project, which is being produced by Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine’s company Change Content, along with Group Thrpy. The Fines won an Oscar for their 2012 short Innocente, about an unhoused and undocumented teenage artist in Los Angeles, and have been involved with several other award-winning documentaries over the past 20 years.
“Thaddeus Mosley represents a rare kind of artistic devotion,” Lee, one of the documentary’s directors, said in a statement. “He spent decades making work because he believed in the process—not because anyone was paying attention. His story reminds us that creativity is defined by the act of continuing to create—the work itself becoming a lifeline.”
Over the years, Cooper and Fridh filmed interviews with more than a dozen people who knew Mosley. They include art world figures like Ingrid Schaffner, who curated the 2018 Carnegie International, and Brendan Dugan, the founder of New York gallery Karma, which began representing Mosley in 2020 and organized several exhibitions of his work. In 2020, Karma published a book about Mosley that included a poem by Sam Gilliam, in which Mosley, “a friend since forever,” is deemed “keeper of trees anywhere.”
Mosley’s daughter, Tereneh Idia, and his son, Khari Mosley, also participated in In the Time of Trees, as did Mosley’s friends, including Pittsburgh Steelers legend Franco Harris and Bill Strickland, who founded the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, a Pittsburgh-area arts nonprofit, in 1968.
In the Time of Trees will run approximately 90 minutes, and the team behind the films plans to finish editing this fall, in time to submit it to film festivals later this year.
