I’m not here to play the galleries. I am not responsible for anyone’s entertainment. I am responsible for being as fully myself, as man and artist, as I possibly can be, while allowing myself to hope that in the effort some light, some love, some beauty may be shed upon the world, and perhaps some inequities put right.
Raymond Saunders, Black Is a Color (1967). Reprinted in Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 270.
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Raymond Saunders became interested in art in the first grade, and his talent was recognized at a young age. He regularly saw exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art and has said that his detailed memory of those early experiences informs his painting. Before earning his BFA from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1960, he received a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and also studied at the Barnes Foundation.1 The rigor of his own education instilled in Saunders a commitment to education—a responsibility to share his knowledge through teaching. In 1960 he moved to Oakland, California—where he completed an MFA in 1961 at California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts)—and in 1968 took a faculty position at California State University East Bay in Hayward, drawn by its diverse student body. For Saunders, the exchange with his students “is vital” and keeps him “staying in the process of learning.”2
Kellie Jones, Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980 (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2011), 317. ↩︎
Raymond Saunders, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art interview at Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, December 6, 1994, video, 1:38:21 hours, available as part of the California College of Arts and Crafts Archives at archive.org/details/cocac_000011. ↩︎
Raymond Saunders’ mixed-media paintings combine found objects—newspaper, handbills, plastic figurines, and signs collected on city walks—with paint and graffiti-like chalk scribbles on chalkboard. Often compared to the work of Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) for incorporating everyday objects or high and low forms of culture, Saunders’ compositions likewise evoke the neo-abstract work of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988). Scribbles and text combine harmoniously with image and abstraction in an urban-inspired arena marked by the cacophony of city life, and the abundance and struggle found within it. Not Real But Wanting To Be (1999) presents a painting within a painting. A still life of a vase holding flowers rests on an easel—an actual wooden ledge affixed to the surface of the painting—to play with notions of reality and fiction.
Raymond Saunders was interested in art as a form of free expression rather than as what he called “a political tool.”1 In the late 1960s, an era of civil rights and feminist activism in the arts that prioritized unified action over creating and sensing, Saunders’s self-published pamphlet Black Is a Color (1967) rejected the burden of politics placed on art made by African Americans. He wrote: “art projects beyond race and color; beyond america. it is universal, and americans—black, white, or whatever—have no exclusive rights on it.”2 His view was shared by some Black abstractionists and could be seen in Contemporary Black Artists in America, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1971 exhibition that sought to respond to activist demands for inclusion. As curator wrote Robert Doty wrote in the exhibition catalog, the focus was not on politics but art: “pictures and objects . . . creation . . . and human values.”3 (Fifteen of the seventy-five artists in the exhibition withdrew to protest that no Black specialists—artists or curators—were included in organizing the show.4) Saunders’s painting Marie’s Bill (1970) was reproduced in the catalog alongside Doty’s essay. It was later included along with his works Harlem (1972) and Learning to Count (1974) in the San José Museum of Art’s 1976 exhibition 20th-Century Black Artists, curated by Marie Johnson Calloway with support from the Santa Clara County Black Caucus.
Raymond Saunders, Black Is a Color (1967), reprinted in Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 270. ↩︎
Raymond Saunders, Black Is a Color (1967), reprinted in Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 271. ↩︎
Robert Doty, essay for Contemporary Black Artists in America, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1971), 7. Reprinted in Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 12. ↩︎
Roberta Smith, “Robert M. Doty, 58, a Museum Director and Curator,” The New York Times, November 26, 1992. ↩︎
“I covered it,” said Raymond Saunders of a completed work he painted over.1 It was a piece he could have sold—multiple museums had expressed interest—but the canvas was also a substrate when he needed one. And for Saunders, a completed painting is merely an artifact of the process. As such, the artist abstains from ascribing specific meaning to his completed works for fear that verbal explanation narrows a painting’s visual potency and its potential to remain alive, relevant across time and space.
Raymond Saunders, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art interview at Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, December 6, 1994, video, 1:38:21 hours, available as part of the California College of Arts and Crafts Archives at archive.org/details/cocac_000011. ↩︎
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