‘Formidable’ Painter Raymond Saunders Has Died Aged 90

Raymond Saunders, known for his assemblage-style works that combine painting, collage and drawing, has died aged 90. In an Instagram post announcing his passing, David Zwirner – who has co-represented the artist alongside Andrew Kreps Gallery since 2024, offered condolences to ‘his family, friends and extensive community of artists and students on whom he left an indelible mark’.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1934, Saunders was mentored by Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, a local art teacher who later taught Andy Warhol. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and earned his BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He later moved to California, where he completed his MFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts.

Saunders held his first solo exhibition at Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York in 1966. The following year, he gained widespread attention for publishing the pamphlet Black is a Color – a pointed rebuttal to an article by Ishmael Reed on Black US American art. In it, Saunders rejected the idea that ‘the Black arts’ should be seen as a separate category, writing: ‘Art projects beyond race and color; beyond America. It is universal, and Americans – Black, white or whatever – have no exclusive rights on it.’

Over the last two decades, Saunders’s work was featured in several large-scale exhibitions highlighting the contributions of Black Artists. These included ‘Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980’ (2012–13) at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; ‘Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power’ (2017) at Tate Modern, London; and ‘Paris Noir: Artistic Circulations and Anti-Colonial Resistance, 1950–2000’ (2025) at Centre Pompidou, Paris. 

In 2022, Andrew Kreps mounted Saunders’s first New York solo exhibition in over 20 years. Two years later, in February 2024, David Zwirner Gallery announced its co-representation of Saunders, having been introduced to his work by Kreps. ‘Post No Bills’ – a two-part survey curated by writer and curator Ebony L. Haynes – followed shortly thereafter, spanning four decades of Saunders’s practice. On the gallery website, Hayes described him as a ‘formidable’ painter whose ‘intentional and effective formal style… blends painting, drawing and collage.’ 

In March 2025, the Carnegie Museum of Art opened ‘Flowers from a Black Garden’, Saunders’s largest US institutional exhibition to date and his first retrospective. Writing for ARTnews, Alex Greenberger called the show ‘solid proof that Saunders deserves canonization,’ while Will Heinrich, in the New York Times, praised the artist’s use of colour, calling him ‘an unparalleled master of black.’

^{Main image: Raymond Saunders, Passages: East, West 1 (detail), 1987, acrylic, spray paint, chalk, collage and mixed media on canvas, 2.1 × 1.9 m. Courtesy: © Raymond Saunders, Andrew Kreps, and David Zwirner}