A documentary about the American sculptor Thaddeus Mosley is now in production, ARTnews reported on 30 July 2026.

The film is titled "Keeper of Trees Anywhere," a phrase drawn from a 2020 poem by the painter Sam Gilliam, who wrote of Mosley: "Thad is the forest, a keeper of trees anywhere" (The New York Times). Gilliam, who died in 2022, was one of the most celebrated abstract painters of his generation; his tribute to Mosley speaks to a friendship rooted in the Black arts scene of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where both men lived and worked.

Mosley, born in 1926, has spent decades carving sculptures from salvaged wood — fallen trees, timber offcuts, discarded beams — shaping them into tall, rhythmic forms that draw on sources ranging from African sculpture to jazz. Now in his late nineties, he has been the subject of major museum exhibitions, including a career survey at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and his work is held in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. His sculptures have also appeared in Art Basel, the international art fair held annually in Switzerland, Miami and Hong Kong.

The documentary's title captures something central to Mosley's practice: the idea that a sculptor working with trees is also, in a sense, their custodian. Gilliam's line frames Mosley not as a single artist in a single studio but as part of a larger living system. For a filmmaker, that is rich territory — a life measured not in movements or manifestos but in the grain of reclaimed wood.

Details about the production team, release date and distribution have not yet been announced. ARTnews, a New York-based art-world publication, broke the news on its website at 11:30am GMT (ARTnews). No director or production company was named in the report.

For anyone who has stood in front of a Mosley carving — the surfaces scored and polished, the forms tilting upward as though listening — the prospect of a film about the man behind them is welcome. For those who have not, a documentary may be the nearest thing to a studio visit with an artist whose work has been, for most of his long career, quieter in the public eye than its quality deserves.