Portrait of American artist Raymond Saunders (Seventies) (picture by Anthony Barboza/Getty Photos)
Described as a cult-like determine within the arts neighborhood of the San Francisco Bay Space, the place he had lived and labored for the reason that early Nineteen Sixties, Saunders is finest identified for his assemblage-style blackboard surfaces bearing white chalk and chalk-like notations, smears of vibrant paint, and accrued discovered ephemera. His mixed-media work is understood to have influenced artists together with Jean-Michel Basquiat and has usually drawn comparisons to Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines (1954–64) work.
Raymond Saunders, “Flowers from a Black Garden no. 51” (1993) (© Property of Raymond Saunders, courtesy the Property ofRaymond Saunders, Andrew Kreps, and David Zwirner)
Saunders’s demise got here simply days after the closing of his first main museum retrospective, Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Backyard, held on the Carnegie Museum of Artwork in his hometown of Pittsburgh. The present introduced him lengthy overdue recognition in a mainstream artwork world that has usually neglected or lumped collectively artists primarily based on their shared id, a sample Saunders railed in opposition to in his landmark 1967 pamphlet “Black Is a Color.” Within the printed essay, printed in response to an article by Ishmael Reed in regards to the Black Arts Motion, Saunders criticized the pigeonholing of Black artists, arguing that they need to not really feel obligated to middle their artwork and their successes on their race. “Can’t we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end?” Saunders wrote.
(Left) Raymond Saunders, “Things Were Never $1.50” (1995); (proper) Raymond Saunders, “Untitled” (1998) (© Property of Raymond Saunders, courtesy the Property of Raymond Saunders, Andrew Kreps, and David Zwirner)
Whereas rejecting oversimplistic characterizations of id, the artist usually produced work that explored the topic of race and his personal day by day observations as a way to know himself and the world round him. Items like “Beauty in Darkness” (1993–99) juxtaposed segregationist signage, enterprise posters, spiritual imagery, pages from youngsters’s books, and paintbrushes, disparate components that however cohere within the composition. Different works referenced distinguished Black artists and cultural figures like “Charlie Parker [formerly Bird]” (1977) and “Malcolm X: Talking Pictures” (1994); in “Untitled (Bird Lives)” (1995), a chalk-drawn symbolic Basquiat crown is featured amongst illustrations referencing Jazz musicians Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie.
“I’m American. I’m Black. I’m a painter. So all those things enter into what it is that becomes what I present,” Saunders mentioned in a 1994 interview.
Set up view of “Untitled” (1995) featured in Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Backyard on the Carnegie Museum of Artwork (© 2025 Property of Raymond Saunders, picture by Zachary Riggleman/Carnegie Museum of Artwork, Pittsburgh)
Born on October 28, 1934 in Homestead, Pennsylvania, Saunders was raised along with his three sisters by a single mom. After his household moved to the close by metropolis of Pittsburgh, he started taking artwork courses by the Carnegie Museum’s Saturday morning youth program. There, he met certainly one of his earliest mentors, public college arts educator Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, who helped him earn a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Positive Arts. Whereas there, he additionally studied on the Barnes Basis by the College of Pennsylvania.
Like Fitzpatrick’s different mentees, who included Andy Warhol and Mel Bochner, Saunders went on to check on the Carnegie Institute of Know-how (now Carnegie-Mellon College), the place he acquired a Bachelor of Positive Arts diploma in 1960. He then moved to California and earned a Grasp of Positive Arts diploma from the California Faculty of Arts and Crafts (now California Faculty of the Arts) in 1961.
Saunders relocated briefly to New York Metropolis, the place he had his debut solo exhibition in 1966 at Terry Dintenfass’s East 67th Road gallery, identified for representing a number of Black artists, together with Jacob Lawrence and Richard Hunt, throughout a interval when town’s galleries confirmed primarily White artists.
Set up view of Discussion board 27: Raymond Saunders (April 13, 1996–July 7, 1996) on the Carnegie Museum of Artwork, Pittsburgh (picture courtesy Carnegie Museum of Artwork)
The artist described his course of for making artwork as “ongoing,” partially due to his reluctance to maneuver on from a piece: “I have other work that I sort of have around because I’m sort of wanting to continue it and know that the moment it gets out here, I can’t get it back.”
Julie Casemore, director of the namesake gallery in San Francisco, echoed this sentiment in a press release to Hyperallergic: “His complex practice was always evolving and he was at work on multiple pieces in the studio at any given time,” she mentioned, including that “he painted flowers every day.”
Saunders later moved again to California, the place he started educating at California State College, Hayward (now East Bay) in 1968. He then joined the school of his alma mater, the place he taught till his retirement in 2013 and held a professor emeritus title. San Francisco artist Dewey Crumpler, who had a decades-long friendship with Saunders, described him as “a powerful influence” on the Bay Space arts neighborhood and past. Crumpler initially met Saunders in 1967 as his pupil on the California Faculty of the Arts; eight years later, the 2 grew to become colleagues.
“His sophisticated use of the color black served both as a metaphor and a platform for personal liberation,” Crumpler mentioned.
Set up view of Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Backyard on the Carnegie Museum of Artwork, Pittsburgh (© 2025 Property of Raymond Saunders, picture by Zachary Riggleman/Carnegie Museum of Artwork, Pittsburgh)
