Raymond Saunders

Who is Raymond Saunders?

Raymond Saunders is an American artist born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1934. He lives and works in Oakland, California. Saunders was a former professor of Painting at California College of the Arts, Oakland, California. He is a visual artist, with a place in American art history. He also donates his time to help spread the Visual process of art to many communities throughout the world.

Saunders works in a large variety of media, but is mainly known for work that encompasses painting and transversal media juxtaposition, sometimes bordering on the sculptural but always retaining the relation to the flat wall key to modernism in painting. Saunders' painting is expressive, and often incorporates collage, chalked words, and other elements that add references and texture without breaking the strong abstract compositional structure. This lends a sense of social narrative to even his abstract work which sets it apart from artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, or Cy Twombly, with which it has obvious affinities. Besides his painting, Saunders in known for his late 1960s pamphlet Black is a Color arguing against metaphoric uses of the concept 'black' in both the mainstream abstract and conceptual art world and Black Nationalist cultural writing of the time.