As fixations often do for record collectors, J. Malls' obsession began with just one disc.
Sifting through the stacks at Jerry's Records in Squirrel Hill, Malls found an album of Martin Luther King speeches. Sixties-era MLK spoken-word records are common, but the art on this one stood out. It was an ink drawing of King, his mouth mid-remark, his arm outstretched. In the white space cattycorner to him, a crowd marched, as if King were conjuring them, genie-like. Also unique: The record sleeve included a brief bio of its artist, Mozelle Thompson, who was raised in Pittsburgh.
"I have an interest in local music, local artists [and] this diaspora of Pittsburgh creative people," says Malls, who is also a DJ. "I wanted to discover more about this guy."
The fruits of Malls' nearly two-year quest will be on display at Most Wanted Fine Art gallery, which in November will exhibit some of the 90 Thompson-designed album covers Malls has collected. Ranging from jazz and blues to country, classical and theatrical, the designs show stunning colors and expressive figures from a deceased, forgotten artist whose work once went up against the iconic cover of The Beatles' Revolver for a graphic-design Grammy. In unearthing Thompson's work, Malls also uncovered a story of racial strife and self-destruction.
Mozelle Thompson was born in the Hill District in 1926 to an African-American family, one of eight children. The family later moved to Garfield. As a teenager, he was taught by Jean Thuborn, the resident watercolor artist and art teacher at Peabody High School (now Barack Obama Academy). Thompson's early efforts were much heralded in the community.
"I remember we had a[n art] show in our garage and even the principal came," says Thompson's younger sister, Greta Griffin, currently of Wilkinsburg.
Thompson also began winning national contests for young artists. A 1944 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, reporting on a $200 prize he'd won, claimed Thompson was "said to be one of the most promising young artists in the country." Most stories about the young Thompson quoted Thuborn. "It's was almost like she was his publicist," says Malls.
Art seemed to be Thompson's ticket to a better life. He attended the Parsons School of Design, in New York, on scholarship and studied in Paris. He returned to Pittsburgh to work as a window-display designer at the Downtown Gimbels, but soon was back in New York, working as a freelance illustrator.
From 1953 to 1969, Thompson designed book covers, children's books, posters of Broadway shows and at least 100 album covers, for discs by artists including Lightnin' Hopkins, Cab Calloway, Hank Williams, Ella Fitzgerald and Elvis Presley.
Malls sought Thompson's signature in stacks of records. (Thompson always signed his work.) Most of his work was for one of the country's largest record companies, RCA, a relationship that apparently started with his sleeve for a '53 recording of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.
Thompson's most common medium was painting, and he often illustrated the lush fantasy worlds evoked by theater and classical pieces. His cover for a recording of Mendelssohn's compositions inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream is a swirl of imagery, with a donkey-headed man in a forest, and fairies hidden beneath leaves and flowers. His sleeve for an Arabian Nights-themed musical shows Aladdin on his magic carpet and a fire-haired genie levitating above a story-book Middle Eastern cityscape, glittering in white, pink and gold.
Thompson also did simpler designs; his illustration for a Hank Williams compilation shows the singer hunched over his guitar, the background in blue as if to evoke his lonesome tone.
The work that garnered a Grammy nomination was also minimalistic, for a Chicago Symphony recording of Charles Ives works. It was a caricature of the composer's face looming over a question mark (for his composition The Unanswered Question) and a Revolution-era U.S. flag (for his Variations on America).
Whether opulent or nuanced, the designs were artistically advanced, especially for an era in which many album covers were hokey photos of smiling singers. "I'd put him among the best people working at that time," says Malls. The Most Wanted exhibit, in Thompson's old neighborhood, brings his art back home.
Greta Griffin recalls her brother having a comfortable lifestyle: "He was making good money; he was always well dressed." She remembers him as the older brother who visited for the summer and bought her nice new clothes for the upcoming school year.
But his younger brother, Charles Thompson, recalls Mozelle's career differently. "He was always struggling for money, and it bothered him," says Thompson, currently of Long Island. "He'd get a big job, $200 or $300, and then he'd spend it all. He had no consistent income. He was a struggling artist."
To a point, Thompson's story mirrors that of Pittsburgh's most famous artistic ex-pat — Andy Warhol, born two years after him. Both were raised in working-class households, excelled in art as children, studied it in college, fled to New York to pursue design careers and begat portfolios including scores of record covers. But in the '60s, as Warhol's career accelerated, Thompson's stalled. One likely reason was race.
Charles Thompson recalls his brother illustrating a well-received poster for a Broadway show. This led to a meeting with another group of producers. They had one look at Thompson, a bespectacled black man, and said, "Mr. Thompson, we can't hire you."
Thompson also didn't network as other commercial artists did. "He'd always dread getting asked to lunch," says Charles Thompson. "If the executives who'd hired him found out that he was black, they'd stop hiring him or they'd start giving him much less money."
Though neither sibling remembers Thompson working in the civil-rights movement, his final work synchs with it: He provided covers for Buddah Records' "Black America" spoken-word series, including the MLK album, and illustrated a children's book based on the lyrics of "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the gospel anthem adopted by the civil-rights movement.
The latter was his final completed project. In 1969, Thompson somehow exited the window of his Manhattan seventh-floor apartment and died from the fall. Police ruled it a suicide, but Griffin says she and her parents were not convinced. "We couldn't see him doing that," she says.
Charles Thompson says that his brother was "tired of being taken advantage of in a world that would never appreciate him. Sometimes, he had trouble paying for rent, for food." Also, a long-time male companion, with whom Mozelle Thompson shared the apartment, had left for California, leaving him distraught. "Still, I don't think he would have done it if he hadn't been drinking," says Charles Thompson.
The Black America series includes a speech by author James Baldwin, whose fiction often depicted talented black men who go far in a white man's world only to succumb to internal anxiety (including one who leaps to his death in New York). Thompson drew the cover, showing six free-floating ink drawings of Baldwin's head, his eyes wise and his smile sly.
The record begins: "It seems to me that the artist's struggle for his integrity is a kind of metaphor, must be considered as a metaphor, for the struggle that is universal and daily of all human beings on the face of this terrifying globe to get to become human beings."
