Raymond Saunders, known for his mixed-media assemblage paintings that layer fragments of printed matters with expressionistic brush marks, has died aged 90.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1934, Saunders participated as a teenager in the Saturday art programme run by Carnegie Museum of Art. There he studied under Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, who also taught Andy Warhol and Mel Bochner. Saunders went on to earn his BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, where he had taught since 1968, before being recognised as professor emeritus.
Saunders is known for authoring ‘Black is a Color’ in 1967, a response and rebuttal to black writer and poet Ishmael Reed’s article on the Black Arts Movement, published the same year. In his essay, Saunders criticises attempts to ‘set the black arts outside the current of art as a whole’ and warned of strangling art with politics. ‘Pessimism is fatal to artistic development. Perpetual anger deprives movement,’ he writes.
The artist’s first institutional retrospective in the US, Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden at the Carnegie Museum of Art, closed on 13 July.
