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 previous. The information of his loss of life was introduced in a joint statement from Casemore, Andrew Kreps, and David Zwirner galleries, which co-represented the artist. The trigger was aspiration pneumonia, the New York Times reported.
Described as a cult-like figure within the arts group of the San Francisco Bay Space, the place he had lived and labored because the 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 collected discovered ephemera. His mixed-media work is thought to have influenced artists together with Jean-Michel Basquiat and has usually drawn comparisons to Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines (1954–64) paintings.
Raymond Saunders, Andrew Kreps, and David Zwirner)
Saunders’s loss of life got here simply days after the closing of his first main museum retrospective, Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden, 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 based mostly on their shared identification, 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 those degrading limitations, and acknowledge the broader actuality of artwork, the place colour is the means and never the tip?” Saunders wrote.
Whereas rejecting oversimplistic characterizations of identification, the artist usually produced work that explored the topic of race and his personal each day observations as a method to grasp himself and the world round him. Items like “Beauty 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: 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 these issues enter into what it’s that turns into what I current,” Saunders stated in a 1994 interview.
Born on October 28, 1934 in Homestead, Pennsylvania, Saunders was raised together with his three sisters by a single mom. After his household moved to the close by metropolis of Pittsburgh, he started taking art classes by the Carnegie Museum’s Saturday morning youth program. There, he met one among his earliest mentors, public college arts educator Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, who helped him earn a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Wonderful 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 review on the Carnegie Institute of Expertise (now Carnegie-Mellon College), the place he obtained a Bachelor of Wonderful Arts diploma in 1960. He then moved to California and earned a Grasp of Wonderful 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 kind of have round as a result of I’m kind 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 apply was all the time evolving and he was at work on a number of items within the studio at any given time,” she stated, including that “he painted flowers daily.”
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 college 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 strong 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 stated.
