American artist Raymond Saunders, who created abstract multimedia paintings focused on sociopolitical issues, has died at 90. His death was confirmed by a joint statement on Instagram posted by his two representing galleries, Andrew Kreps Gallery and David Zwirner.
Saunders’s body of work is characterized by his use of collage, through which he incorporated found text into large-scale gestural and calligraphic abstractions, often set against a black ground reminiscent of a blackboard. His work often grappled with social issues, particularly the experiences of Black men in the United States. “Saunders’s singular oeuvre was defined by assemblage-style works that brought together his extensive formal training with his own lived experiences,” the two galleries wrote in their joint statement.
“When I first encountered Raymond Saunders’s oeuvre, which spans more than seventy years, I was struck by its depth, complexity, and innovation, and by his intellectual contributions to critical discourse through his essay ‘Black Is a Color,’” David Zwirner said in a statement sent to Artsy.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1934, Saunders attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology between 1950 and 1953. He went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia after receiving a scholarship, and later returned to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he completed his BFA in 1960. He subsequently earned his MFA from California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland, where he’d later teach.
“Raymond will be dearly missed by his family, friends, and the Bay Area community, where he had lived since the early 1960s,” Zwirner continued. “His work, however, will continue to be seen and discovered by new audiences for many decades to come as he takes his rightful place in art history.”
In his hometown, the Carnegie Museum of Art recently mounted the artist’s first major museum retrospective, “Flowers from a Black Garden.” The show, which closed on July 13th, featured 35 works spanning the artist’s entire career.
Saunders earned many accolades over the years, including a Rome Prize Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Award in 1964, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976, and National Endowment for the Arts awards in both 1977 and 1984. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at major galleries for decades, including “Post No Bills,” a two-part presentation mounted by David Zwirner and Andrew Kreps in New York in 2024. His work is featured in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among many others.
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