Permit me to speak very hometown and personal about a universal and major American artist, who recently died at 99, just days ahead of his one hundredth birthday.

        This artist, who was also “this guy in our neighborhood,” died and it felt like I was stopped in the middle of the floor crying for days. I’d known about him since I was 16 years old; and I’m 86 now. He wasn’t the kind of person who wanted to be known. Yet, if you felt the expectations of others within yourself, then you could be sure that the hand of Thaddeus Mosley was pushing you.

        When I was in grade school, I went to art school on Saturdays to learn to be an artist, to learn to do what artists do. I learned the works on the museum walls, the pictures in the books. But I also met the man in that house up on the hill, with logs in his backyard, in the South Hills part of Pittsburgh. He was not on any of the walls, not in any books, and no one seemed to notice that he was doing what we were studying.

        I’d come across Thaddeus Mosely.

        It has been that way most of my adult life. I have been in that school, that studio outside of knowing, learning the real thing: not about it, but how it’s done, live it. Weight in space; don’t conceptualize my eyes out about it; show me how beautifully it can stand in place on the ground (even defying that very base), that you’ve worked it out, here—the present is proof. That was Thad’s school.

        Between 2016 and 2020, Karma Gallery in New York opened the eyes of the art world to what that school had done, to a world larger than its local Southside or Northside Pittsburgh address. The practicing world of other artists, writers, poets, musicians, who had been so admiring of Thad’s resistance to authoritarian ignorance of his work, had also been admiring and instructed in the integrity which that resistance earned Thad Mosely has run these lesson classes by example—the school which authorities can never shut down.

        It must be noted that Mosely’s oeuvre has persistently developed through a century’s shifting intellectual and academic supports and non-supports; from the arguments of DuBois, through Langston, to Morrison; through the shapeshifted lynchings of populist opinion; the natural existential levelings of the Depression; World War II and its WPA attempt to regroup; through the return of the get-back in the GI Bill; through the Civil Rights victory and betrayal—to come through each of their accompanying artistic moments with a consistent body of work mirroring an artist’s persistence in the whole era’s disturbing artistic questions:

         of realism vs abstraction. turned against itself

         surface vs dimensionism.      disbursed into fragment material

         issues of space in time

         weight in space

        How does a black coal miner’s kid jump out from the beginning, having known to ride those questions so well, so productively through all of this, to achieve such a high in a century of life, unnoticed productively, safely, until the end? In my opinion, Thad had to have some wonderful idea to sustain that steadfast power. We can see it in his art’s worked out insistence, its determination to stand up, its beauty.

        Thad knew that school doesn’t die. I got the feeling; he didn’t see death as a problem to art. Who could come up with that many ways to say that a piece of static wood which you are looking at, could dance about your visual space like that, and not move, no matter how you looked at it carrying on so unnervingly? Think about it. Listen to the music of that stillness it is dancing in—your head. his head’s containings.

        Thaddeus Gilmore Mosely was born July 23, 1926, in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and died at the age of 99 on March 6, 2026, in Pittsburgh. His work is represented by Karma and is in numerous museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the August Wilson African American Center, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Colby College Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Mattress Factory, the Portland Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Westmoreland Museum of American Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Ed Roberson is a poet who has received numerous awards including the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Pegasus Award, the Jackson Award from Poets and Writers, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and a retired professor in the English Department of Northwestern University, He was a close, life-long personal friend of Thaddeus Mosley.

Additional Works by Thaddeus Mosley