Casemore Gallery is deeply saddened to share the passing of Raymond Saunders (1934–2025) at the age of 90. Saunders’s singular oeuvre was defined by assemblage-style works that brought together his extensive formal training with his own lived experiences.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1934, Raymond Saunders first studied in the city’s public school art programs under Joseph C. Fitzpatrick. The artist spent most of his career in Oakland, California, where he taught for many years and was Professor Emeritus at California College of the Arts. Saunders is jointly represented by Casemore Gallery, Andrew Kreps Gallery, and David Zwirner.
Saunders’s career was recently canonized in his largest-ever American institutional show in his hometown at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Flowers from a Black Garden, of which Will Heinrich wrote in his New York Times review, “Mere expanses of black paint, in his treatment, become imaginative universes and art-historical chalkboards, capable of summoning up and subsuming just about anything he can think of.”
Beginning in the 1960s, Saunders developed a singular practice defined by an improvisational approach. He culled eclectic ephemera, signage, detritus, and other materials from his daily life that reflected his living environment. A cult-like figure in the Bay Area art scene, his paintings and installation-based works were loaded with rich swaths of paint, interwoven with found materials, his own notational marks, and white-pencil drawings.
In his assemblage-style paintings, Saunders merged his extensive formal training with his personal observations and life experiences. Expressionistic brushstrokes, minimalist shapes, line drawings, and vivid colors intertwined with found objects, signs, and doors gathered from his urban surroundings, forming unexpected visual connections and echoes that invited careful, prolonged viewing and offered a rich, layered range of interpretations.
Born in Pittsburgh, he began his art education in the city’s public schools, participating in a program for artistically gifted students. His mentor, Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, the director of art for Pittsburgh’s public schools, also taught other notable artists, including Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and Mel Bochner. With Fitzpatrick’s guidance and encouragement, Saunders earned a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. While there, he also took courses at the Barnes Foundation through the University of Pennsylvania, before returning to Pittsburgh to complete his BFA at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1960. He later earned an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1961. In 1968, he took a teaching position at California State University, Hayward, eventually joining the faculty of his alma mater (now California College of the Arts), where he held professor emeritus status. He lived and worked in Oakland.
In 1967, Saunders achieved wide recognition when he published the pamphlet Black Is a Color as a rebuttal to an article by writer Ishmael Reed about the Black Arts Movement. In this text, Saunders argued powerfully that Reed failed to capture the vastness of Black expression and in doing so siloed Black artists and their work as delimited by the category of race alone. He concluded with the imperative that identity must be separated from artistic output, asserting that “we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means, not the end.”
Saunders’s first solo exhibitions were held at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York in 1966, 1969, 1970, and 1972. In 1971, he had his first major West Coast exhibition and museum presentation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which also traveled to Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York. He exhibited widely in the U.S. and Europe with solo shows at venues including the Providence Museum of Art, Rhode Island (1972); Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (1974, 1990); University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley (1976); Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco (1979; traveling to Baum/Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles); and Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York (1980–1999). Other notable exhibitions included the Seattle Art Museum (1981), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (1984), Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts (1987, 1989), Galerie Resche, Paris (1990, 1993), Tampa Museum of Art, Florida (1992), Oakland Museum (1994), and Phoenix Art Museum (1994). He also exhibited at international venues such as the Giorgio de Chirico Art Centre in Volos, Greece (1995), the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco (1995), and the American Embassy in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (1996). Additionally, he participated in the 1972 Whitney Biennial.
In his later years, Saunders continued to be featured in solo exhibitions around the world, as well as in significant group exhibitions. In 2011, his work was included in Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, curated by Kellie Jones at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, which traveled to MoMA PS1, New York, and the Williams College Museum of Art in Massachusetts. In 2017, he was part of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern in London, which traveled to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, the Brooklyn Museum, New York, and The Broad in Los Angeles. In 2022, his work was shown in Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In March 2025, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh presented Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden, his first solo museum exhibition since 1996, which will later travel to the Orange County Museum of Art. Saunders’s awards included a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1963), a Ford Foundation Award (1964), a Rome Prize Fellowship (1964), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1976), and two National Endowment for the Arts Awards (1977, 1984).
Saunders’s work is part of major public collections, including those of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; M.H. de Young and Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Phoenix Art Museum; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Saint Louis Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.