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\n\tThe late sculptor Thaddeus Mosley came to art world fame in 2018, following his inclusion in that year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tFilmmakers 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<\/em>, traces the development of Mosley\u2019s 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 Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i alongside images of the African objects that had inspired them stopped him in his tracks. As he explained to ARTnews<\/em>\u2019s Alex Greenberger, \u201cI didn\u2019t know that Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i was influenced by African tribal art at that time. But I was very struck by how the curvatures [of Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i\u2019s works] reminded me of Senufo birds.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tCooper and Fridh spent eight years with Mosley, through his final months, documenting his studio as he left it. Last summer, they brought another director, Andr\u00e9 Robert Lee, onto the project, which is being produced by Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine\u2019s company Change Content, along with Group Thrpy\u2019s Shelby Ross. The Fines won an Oscar for their 2012 short Innocente<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThaddeus Mosley represents a rare kind of artistic devotion,\u201d Lee, one of the documentary\u2019s directors, said in a statement. \u201cHe spent decades making work because he believed in the process\u2014not because anyone was paying attention. His story reminds us that creativity is defined by the act of continuing to create\u2014the work itself becoming a lifeline.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tOver 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, \u201ca friend since forever,\u201d is deemed \u201ckeeper of trees anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tMosley\u2019s daughter, Tereneh Idia, and his son, Khari Mosley, also participated in In the Time of Trees<\/em>, as did Mosley\u2019s friends, including Pittsburgh Steelers legend Franco Harris and Bill Strickland, who founded the Manchester Craftsmen\u2019s Guild, a Pittsburgh-area arts nonprofit, in 1968.<\/p>\n In the Time of Trees <\/em>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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/documentary-sculptor-thaddeus-mosley-now-in-production-1234793821\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/unnamed-4.jpg?w=1000″] The late sculptor Thaddeus Mosley came to art world fame in 2018, following his inclusion in that year\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2071226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2071226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2071226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2071226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2071226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}