User:LucyCOwen/Raymond Saunders

Early life and Education[edit]
Saunders was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and attended the city's public school system. It was there that he met Joseph Fitzpatrick, an art teacher who was encouraged Saunders to pursue art. Saunders received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1960. He trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on a scholarship and studied at the Barnes Foundation before going on to earn his Master of Fine Arts degree from California College of Arts and Crafts in 1961.

Exhibitions[edit]
Saunders had his debut New York solo in 1962. He had one painting, "Night Poetry", in the Third Philadelphia Arts Festival. In the late 1960s, he was represented by the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in an era when New York Galleries were almost exclusively exhibiting white men. He has exhibited internationally, spending time in Paris and exhibiting at the Latin Quarter's Galerie Resche. His international exhibits have included venues in France, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Singapore, Korea, Japan, China.

His painting of Jack Johnson (1972, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) was used as the cover of Powell's Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century.Solo Exhibitions

Notable Solo Exhibitions by date :

2022 Raymond Saunders: On Freedom and Trust, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, CA; Raymond Saunders, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY

2007 All Colors: from Oakland 2 Oakland, Joyce Gordon Gallery, Oakland, CA

2005 Paintings, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, CA

2004 Gallery Resche, Paris, France; Schneider Museum of Art, Southern Oregon University, Ashland, OR

2000 Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR

1999 Hunter College/CUNY Fine Arts Building Gallery, New York, NY Galerie Resche, Paris, France

1997 Presence and Absence, Sawhill Gallery, James Madison University, Harrisburg, VA

1996 Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Pittsburgh Center For The Arts, Pittsburgh PA; Raymond Saunders: Works of Paper, Miami University Art Museum, Oxord, OH; American Embassy, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

1995 Raymond Saunders: Black Paintings, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, CA; Raymond Saunders: New Work, Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA

1992 Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL

1990 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA

1987 University Gallery of Fine Art, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

1983 University of Texas, San Antonio, TX

1982 Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ

1981 Hunter College, Art Gallery, New York, NY

1976 University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, CA

1975 Carleton College, North Field, MN

1974 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA

1972-73 The Art Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Providence Museum of Art, Providence, RI

In addition to solo exhibitions, some of Saunders' notable group exhibitions are :

2022 Just Above Midtown, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.; Afterimages: Pop Art and Beyond from the Fisher and SFMOMA Collections, San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA.; On the Nature of Things, co-curated by Alex Gauber and Alex Fitzgerald, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY.; Drawing Connections: Raymond Saunders with Laura Vandenburg, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR (two person exhibitions).

2011 ''Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980'', Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.

2002 In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a traveling exhibition organized by The Smithsonian Institution and Verve Editions.; Houses of the Spirit: Works by African American Artists, Miami Dad Cultural Center, Miami, FL.

1986 Martin Luther King: A Documentary, Eloise Smith Gallery, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA.

1983 Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Art, Part I, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA.

1978 Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France.

1977 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

1974 Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC.; Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, Montgomery, AL.; Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomfield, IN.

1972-73 Galerie d'art, Universitie de Moncton, Moncton, Canada.; The Art Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI.

1970 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Lastly, some notable public collections include the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Dartmouth College, Fisk University, Howard University, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, University Art Museum in Berkeley, and The University of Texas' James A. Michener Collection in Austin. All of these places, and many more, have rights to house Raymond Saunders' art until further notice.

Awards[edit]
In 1964 Saunders was awarded a Rome Prize Fellowship in painting. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976 and two National Endowment for the Arts Awards the first in 1977, the second in 1984. In 1988 he was a recipient of the 9th annual Awards in the Visual Arts.

In 1976, Saunders was also awarded Guggenheim Fellowship, given to individuals in many different fields and creation under any art form. This Fellowship allowed for Saunders to create many works, possibly his works after 1976. Many of his pieces used objects that were recycled and given a new purpose within his art. Other Awards include the National Endowment for the Arts Award (1977 and 1984), as well as the Schwabcher Frey Award by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The National Endowments for the Arts Award is a very prestigious honor, as only a handful are given out per year, and it is recognized as one of the largest awards to receive as an artist in America.

Political and Social Commentary
Saunders' work overall combines expressionism and abstraction with his own personal ideas and experiences. His paintings pick up on these influences within their background, busy surfaces, and suggestion of race. Going through the Pittsburgh public school system, Saunders continues to use iconic suggestions of blackboards and chalk within his pieces. Additionally, Saunders uses his familiarity with Jazz to distort the underlaying commentary in his pieces. With intertwining details of his history as well as popular narratives, Saunders expresses imbalances and stability within the black community in an urban area.

Relating to Black art history as a whole, Saunders was one of the many black artists who worked from his personal experience. Although, he had an extreme distaste for critics who grouped black artists together as social commentators. In his article "Black is a Color", Saunders argues that grouping these artists who discuss social misconduct within the black community does more harm than good. This idea of the Model minority has been prevalent in many other art movements, as it is sometimes seen as a minority's responsibility to pronounce their experience and establish a change.