Raymond Saunders, whose collage-based work and set up works grappled with the complexities of lived expertise, racial identification, and broader sociopolitical constructions, died on July 19 in Oakland, California. He was 90 years outdated. The information of his demise was introduced in a joint assertion from Casemore, Andrew Kreps, and David Zwirner galleries, which co-represented the artist. The trigger was aspiration pneumonia, the New York Occasions reported.
Described as a cult-like determine within the arts group of the San Francisco Bay Space, the place he had lived and labored for the reason that early Nineteen Sixties, Saunders is greatest identified for his assemblage-style blackboard surfaces bearing white chalk and chalk-like notations, smears of vibrant paint, and amassed 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, 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 identification, a sample Saunders railed in opposition to in his landmark 1967 pamphlet “Black Is a Coloration.” Within the printed essay, printed in response to an article by Ishmael Reed concerning 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 those degrading limitations, and acknowledge the broader actuality of artwork, the place shade is the means and never the top?” Saunders wrote.
Whereas rejecting oversimplistic characterizations of identification, the artist usually produced work that explored the topic of race and his personal every day observations as a method to know himself and the world round him. Items like “Magnificence in Darkness” (1993–99) juxtaposed segregationist signage, enterprise posters, non secular imagery, pages from kids’s books, and paintbrushes, disparate parts that however cohere within the composition. Different works referenced outstanding Black artists and cultural figures like “Charlie Parker [formerly Bird]” (1977) and “Malcolm X: Speaking Photos” (1994); in “Untitled (Fowl 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 these issues enter into what it’s that turns into what I current,” Saunders mentioned in a 1994 interview.
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 way of the Carnegie Museum’s Saturday morning youth program. There, he met one in every of his earliest mentors, public faculty arts educator Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, who helped him earn a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Nice Arts. Whereas there, he additionally studied on the Barnes Basis by way of 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 Expertise (now Carnegie-Mellon College), the place he obtained a Bachelor of Nice Arts diploma in 1960. He then moved to California and earned a Grasp of Nice Arts diploma from the California School of Arts and Crafts (now California School 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 Avenue 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.
The artist described his course of for making artwork as “ongoing,” partially due to his reluctance to maneuver on from a piece: “I’ve different work that I form of have round as a result of I’m form of eager to proceed it and know that the second it will get out right here, I can’t get it again.”
Julie Casemore, director of the namesake gallery in San Francisco, echoed this sentiment in an announcement to Hyperallergic: “His complicated follow was all the time evolving and he was at work on a number of items within the studio at any given time,” she mentioned, including that “he painted flowers day by day.”
Saunders later moved again to California, the place he started instructing 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 robust affect” on the Bay Space arts group and past. Crumpler initially met Saunders in 1967 as his pupil on the California School of the Arts; eight years later, the 2 grew to become colleagues.
“He was spectacular from the second I noticed him wearing an embroidered grey flowered sweater and white balloon-bottom pants,” Crumpler recalled in an e mail to Hyperallergic. “He was too hip for phrases.”
“His refined use of the colour black served each as a metaphor and a platform for private liberation,” Crumpler mentioned.
