NEW YORK, NY.- Public Art Fund unveiled Touching the Earth, the first solo outdoor exhibition in New York City by celebrated sculptor Thaddeus Mosley. Set within Manhattan’s City Hall Park, the exhibition showcases eight bronze sculptures cast from his original wood carvings made between 1996 and 2021. The exhibition foregrounds Mosley’s lifelong investigation of sculptural form and material, revealing how his intuitive process gives shape to abstract reflections on nature, the body, and geography. Ranging in size from human-scale to monumental, the works transform the park into a site of dialogue between organic forms, abstraction, and the urban environment.

The works on view in Touching the Earth embody 98-year-old Mosley’s lifelong dedication to the expressive potential of natural materials. Recreated directly from his hand-carved wood sculptures, each bronze preserves the organic knots and grain found in the timber. A skilled craftsman in wood, Mosley has long studied its properties, thoughtfully selecting different varietals including hickory, walnut, and bass for their distinct structural and aesthetic qualities. His profound material knowledge, coupled with a practice of "listening to wood," informs the sculptures’ biomorphic forms, which emerge through a responsive, intuitive process that foregrounds the inherent character of the material.

“I channel my energies into a narrow sculptural focus: materials, form, rhythm, surface, relation to earth, capacity to soar,” Mosley says. “Wood, especially fallen trees, offers its own direction. I carve in response to what I find in it, not what I want it to be.”

The largest work in the exhibition, Gate III, is a 15-foot archway that beckons entry at the southern end of City Hall Park, inviting visitors to walk beneath and around it. Sculptures with physically evocative titles such as Inverted Dancer and Benin Strut usher visitors through other areas of the park. Framed by the neoclassical architecture of City Hall, the city’s surrounding skyscrapers, and the park’s natural landscape, the site offers a layered context. The exhibition draws attention to the contrast between the organic and the built environment, while also inviting reflection on the body’s movement through space, experience of time, and how human beings shape, and are shaped by, their surroundings.

Chosen by the curator, the exhibition’s title, Touching the Earth, is drawn from an essay by bell hooks, whose reflections on the spiritual and cultural value of nature in Black life connect directly with Mosley’s practice. Mosley sees a return to nature not as retreat, but as reverence to a grounding force. For the artist, sculpting is a 1:1 relationship with his body–tools, timber, and time moving together in rhythm. His sculptures, often compared to jazz improvisation, strike a balance between formal structure and intuitive flow, weight and lift, theme and variations.

“Thaddeus Mosley is a lifelong sculptor, expert in his material world,” says Jenée-Daria Strand, Assistant Curator at Public Art Fund. “His ability to transform logs into dynamic forms is derived from decades of studying African diasporic practices across genres, coupled with his intuitive sensibilities. This exhibition honors his decades-long mastery and offers new audiences a powerful introduction to his practice.”

Mosley has current exhibitions on view at Karma in New York City, and the Seattle Art Museum in Washington.

Thaddeus Mosley: Touching the Earth is curated by Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand.

Thaddeus Mosley (b. 1926, New Castle, Pennsylvania) creates monumental sculptures crafted from the salvaged wood from Pennsylvania’s forests. Using only a chisel and gauge to maintain the integrity of the original log, Mosley reworks timber — primarily from indigenous Pennsylvanian hardwoods such as cherry and walnut — into biomorphic forms. Through a process of direct carving, the artist’s marks respond to and rearticulate the natural gradations of the material’s surface. With influences ranging from Isamu Noguchi to Constantin Brâncuși — and the Bamum, Dogon, Baoulé, Senufo, Dan, and Mossi works of his personal collection — Mosley’s “sculptural improvisations,” as he calls them, also take cues from the modernist traditions of jazz. “The only way you can really achieve something is if you’re not working so much from a pattern. That’s also the essence of good jazz,” he says of his method. Mosley lives in Pittsburgh.

Following Space: Thaddeus Mosley & Alexander Calder is on view at the Seattle Art Museum through June 1, 2025. Mosley will have a solo exhibition at City Hall Park organized by Public Art Fund opening June 3, 2025. His work has been presented in institutional solo exhibitions at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2023); Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2022); and Baltimore Museum of Art (2021), as well as group exhibitions at the Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2022); Harvard Business School, Boston (2020); Sculpture Milwaukee (2020); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2018); and Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2009), among others. Mosley’s sculptures are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.