Raymond Saunders

Raymond Saunders studied at California College of the Arts, Carnegie Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon School of Art. Training under Joseph C. Fitzpatrick is recorded. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is painting. Employment is recorded with California State University, East Bay and California College of the Arts. Work by Raymond Saunders is recorded in the collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship and Rome Prize.

• Name — Raymond Saunders • Born — 28 October 1934 • Birthplace — Homestead, Pennsylvania, U.S. • Died — 19 July 2025 • Place of death — Oakland, California, U.S. • Field — Painting • Education — * Carnegie Institute of Technology • California College of Arts and Crafts • Awards — * Rome Prize (1964) • Guggenheim Fellowship (1976) • National Endowment for the Arts (1977, 1984)

Raymond Jennings Saunders was born in Homestead, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, on October 28, 1934. He attended Pittsburgh's public school system. It was there that he met Joseph Fitzpatrick, an art teacher who encouraged Saunders to pursue art. Saunders received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1960. He trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on a scholarship and studied at the Barnes Foundation before going on to earn his Master of Fine Arts degree from California College of the Arts in 1961.

Saunders lived and worked primarily in Oakland, California. Saunders was a past professor of painting at California College of the Arts, Oakland, and professor at California State University, East Bay, in Hayward, California. Saunders worked in a large variety of media, but is mainly known for work that encompasses painting and transversal media juxtaposition, sometimes bordering on the sculptural (as in Pieces of Visual Thinking, 1987) but always retaining the relation to the flat wall key to modernism in painting. Saunders' painting is expressive, and often incorporates collage (mostly small bits of printed paper found in everyday life), chalked words (sometimes crossed out), and other elements that add references and texture without breaking the strong abstract compositional structure. This lends a sense of social narrative to even his abstract work which sets it apart from artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, or Cy Twombly, with which it has obvious affinities. In 1967, Saunders declared "black is a color". Throughout his career Saunders has questioned the premise that black artists produce something that should be uniquely identified as "black art". In his own work, he looked to separate his practice from the restrictions of identity-driven art, "I am an artist. I do not believe that art work should be limited or categorized by one's racial background." Besides his painting, Saunders is known for his late 1960s pamphlet Black is a Color, which argues against metaphoric uses of the concept "black" in both the mainstream abstract and conceptual art world and Black Nationalist cultural writing of the time.

Saunders died from aspiration pneumonia at a hospital in Oakland on July 19, 2025, at the age of 90.

Saunders had his debut New York solo in 1962. He had one painting, "Night Poetry," in the Third Philadelphia Arts Festival in 1962. In the late 1960s, he was represented by the Terry Dintenfass Gallery and had a one-man show in 1966, in an era when New York art galleries were almost exclusively exhibiting white men. He exhibited internationally, spending time in Paris and exhibiting at the Latin Quarter's Galerie Resche. International exhibits of his work have included venues in France, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Singapore, Korea, Japan, China. He was included in "Thirty Contemporary Black Artists," at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1969. His work appeared in two Whitney Museum exhibits: "Contemporary Black Artists in America" in 1971; and "1972 Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Painting." Saunders's work was included in the 2025 exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 at the National Gallery of Art. Saunders' painting of Jack Johnson (1972), now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art), was used as the cover of Powell's Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century. He had a one-show at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1974. Saunders work was highlighted in "Aesthetics of Graffiti" (1978) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1981 an eponymously titled show of his work was mounted at the Seattle Art Museum.

Saunders curated Paris Connections in 1992 at San Francisco's Bomani Gallery. He also curated American Color: A Late 20th Century Perspective at Louis Stern Fine Arts in 1995.

Saunders' work overall combines expressionism and abstraction with his own personal ideas and experiences. His paintings pick up on these influences within their background, busy surfaces, and suggestion of race. Going through the Pittsburgh public school system, Saunders continued to use iconic suggestions of blackboards and chalk within his pieces. Additionally, Saunders uses his familiarity with Jazz to distort the underlying commentary in his pieces. With intertwining details of his history as well as popular narratives, Saunders expresses imbalances and stability within the black community in an urban area. Relating to Black art history as a whole, Saunders was one of the many black artists who worked from his personal experience. Although, he had an extreme distaste for critics who grouped black artists together as social commentators. In his article "Black is a Color", Saunders argues that grouping these artists who discuss social misconduct within the black community does more harm than good. This idea of the Model minority has been prevalent in many other art movements, as it is sometimes seen as a minority's responsibility to pronounce their experience and establish a change. Saunders, in a 1994 interview with SFMOMA, stated his ideas of the artistic process, and breaking away from any niche critics put him within. He states that "[anything] other than what you think you accomplished, is really not important" in which the processes the artist takes and what they believe the true meaning of the piece is solely what is important. This idea of the artists' reflection on their work coincides with the prior ideas shared in "Black is a Color". Additionally, Saunders argues that "the way that I work, it is by design and by default" and that the process of making art and practice of becoming an artist is what makes an artwork special.