Raymond Saunders (1934–2025)

Raymond Saunders (1934–2025)

Raymond Saunders, whose coruscant mixed-media assemblages drew from a variety of movements but stood apart from all of them with their burning sociopolitical undertones, died of pneumonia on July 19 in Oakland, California. He was ninety. Saunders in his seminal 1967 pamphletBlack Is a Colorargued vigorously against the idea that the work of Black artists should necessarily address Blackness, urging the art world to “get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means, not the end.” Saunders, who wanted to be recognized not only as a Black artist but as an American artist, believed art was a way of expressing the otherwise inexpressible. “If we could speak it,” he said often, “we would not paint it.”

Raymond Saunders was born on October 28, 1934, in Homestead, Pennsylvania. His mother worked as a maid to support him and his three sisters. He never knew his father. Educated in the Pittsburgh public school system, which he would later credit as an influence above any artist, he was mentored by Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, who oversaw the city’s public school art program and encouraged him to apply for a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, which he won, going on to study also at the Barnes Foundation while in Philadelphia. Saunders subsequently earned his BFA from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1960 and his MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland the following year.

In 1966, Saunders received his first solo exhibition at Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York, where he would enjoy several more over the coming few years. In 1967, he pennedBlack Is a Colorin response to an article on the Black Arts Movement by Ishmael Reed, in which the poet championed Black artists making political work, castigating Reed for what he perceived as a reductive view. “Who’s supposed to be saving who?” wrote Saunders. “Mr. Reed appears to propose that the Black arts should save America, as though the act of salvation were a function of some rarefied preservation hall, and the Black artist a species of New Orleans entertainer, who can ‘make America swing again.’ But let’s face it—when has America ever swung? And why should it be the Black man’s responsibility?”

Saunders continued to work apace over the ensuing decades, his paintings often featuring rich black backgrounds, variously overlaid with hotly colored geometric shapes, looping white strokes whose fast blur recalled the dusty fade of chalk, and vivid splashes of pinks and blues that dripped and ran translucently. Found objects played a large part in his oeuvre, with such artifacts as scraps of scroll-patterned wallpaper, a neon yellow flyer advertising acts including Nuit Pyjamas and Night Mojito, a cardboard skeleton, or a sign excitedly proclaiming SHOWTIME above another blaring NO COLORED THRU THIS DOOR, affixed to night-black or chalkboard-green canvases—sometimes to chalkboards themselves—where, as Zoë Hopkins wrote onArtforum.comin 2022, “touched by Raymond Saunders’s wayward, hermetic mark-making, these objects are transfigured into a dazzling realm of play and expression.”

Saunders received his first major museum presentation in 1971 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and participated in the 1972 Whitney Biennial the following year. Solo institutional shows of his work over the next three decades were sporadic; beginning in the 2010s, his work was included in such landmark group shows as “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980,” which originated at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2011, and “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” originating at London’s Tate Modern in 2017. Underrecognized for most of his career, Saunders recently gained the broad acclaim he deserved. The first institutional survey of his work since 1996 and his inaugural museum retrospective—“Flowers from a Black Garden,” at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh—closed days before his death.

Concurrent with his career as an artist was his work as a teacher. Having begun teaching at California State University in 1968, Saunders taught painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts) from 1987 until 2013, when he retired as professor emeritus. His work is held in the collections of major institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Gallery of Art, both in Washington, DC; and Museum Brandhorst, Munich.