American artist Raymond Saunders is known for his wall-bound assemblages that reflect on the sociopolitical landscape, education, and the changing city.
Read MoreRaymond Saunders was born in 1934 in Pittsburgh, United States. Initiated to art through the public school system, he enrolled in a programme for artistically gifted students. His mentor, Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, also taught artists such as Andy Warhol and Mel Bochner.
Saunders later received a scholarship to attend Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He returned to Pittsburgh and received his BFA at Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1960. The following year, he finished his MFA at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where he is currently a professor emeritus.
In 1967, Saunders published a pamphlet entitled Black Is a Color in response to writer Ishmael Reed's analysis of the state of Black American art. Saunders writes about Reed's failure to understand the breadth and depth of Black experience and artistic potential, thereby limiting an analysis of Black art as reflexive and evocative of racial politics.
Saunders's assemblage-style paintings are rich with material and visual information through which the artist explores the fluidity and non-linearity of identity and process.
A recurring motif in Saunders's work is the use of blackboard and chalk. 'I paint to try to access [who I am]', Saunders told SFMOMA in 2022. He connects his layered compositions to his multifaceted identity as an American, a Black person, a painter, and a teacher.
In Celeste Age 5 Invited Me To Tea (1986), a black ground is littered with childlike scribbles: hopscotch, watermelon, and improvised gestures. Other blackboard works show more realistic renderings of people, while others have maths problems scrawled across the surface.
Beauty in Darkness (1993–1999) speaks to the segregationist policies of apartheid South Africa with posters, illustrations, and signages stuck to a near-five-metre-wide board as a reflection on contemporary inequality and suppression.
Aside from the formal qualities of the blackboard, Saunders's paintings also incorporate found objects and advertising images. Through the latter, Saunders explores the evolving fabric of society and the city, referencing urban signifiers such as graffiti, police sirens, and billboards.
The Gift of Presence (1993–1994) is a four-metre-wide black billboard that includes signage from Coca-Cola and Pepsi amid myriad imagery—a scribbled American flag, a no-smoking symbol, and a Basquiat crown, among others. The sculpture reflects on consumerism and its intertwined relationship with American culture and the arts.
Saunders combines and reconfigures discarded material to create new meanings in his work. Through these combinations, he evokes a sense of disquiet irony when thinking about urban neighbourhoods, reflecting on the reality of human detritus with childlike innocence.
Raymond Saunders is the recipient of the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1963), the Ford Foundation Award (1964), the Guggenheim Fellowship (1976), and the National Endowment for the Arts Award (1977, 1984).
His works were included in travelling survey exhibitions such as Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, first shown at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011), and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, first shown at Tate Modern, London (2017).
Raymond Saunders's work has been widely exhibited in the United States, Europe, and Asia.
Select solo exhibitions include David Zwirner, New York (2024); Casemore Gallery, San Francisco (2023); Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York (2022); Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco (2010); Stir Gallery, Shanghai (2009); Carnegie Museum of Art (1996); and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1971).
Selected group exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022); Tate Modern, London (2017), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011); Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. (2002), Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge (2000); Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona (1997); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1977).
The artist lives and works in Oakland, California.
Saunders's works have been collected by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Raymond Saunders is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and David Zwirner.
The artist's website is here.
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2024
