Raymond SaundersEducator at Heart

A man and woman looking out of a window at the city landscape
Charles “Teenie” Harris, Raymond Saunders looking toward Downtown Pittsburgh, 1955. Black-and-white Kodak safety film, 4 x 5 inches. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Heinz Family Fund. 2001.35.1264 © Carnegie Museum of Art, Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive.

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

  1. Kellie Jones, Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980 (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2011), 317. ↩︎

  2. 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. ↩︎