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Arts|Raymond Saunders, Painter Who Rejected Racial Pigeonholes, Dies at 90
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/arts/raymond-saunders-dead.html
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Widely admired if long underrecognized for his collage-based art, he died only days after the closing of his first retrospective at a major museum, in his native Pittsburgh.
July 27, 2025Updated 12:11 p.m. ET
Raymond Saunders, a belatedly recognized Bay Area artist who decried the art world’s tendency to pigeonhole Black artists by race even as he produced paintings that actively explored racial subjects, died on July 19 in Oakland, Calif., just a few days after his first retrospective at a major museum, in his native Pittsburgh, closed. He was 90.
His nephew Frank Saunders said he died in a hospital after he had aspirated a piece of food and contracted pneumonia.
Mr. Saunders prided himself on his independence from movements. In 1967, he published a now-famous polemical pamphlet, “Black Is a Color,” which rebutted an article by the poet Ishmael Reed, a leader of the Black Arts Movement. Breaking with the collective spirit of the ’60s, Mr. Saunders argued that Black artists should not feel obligated to share social goals, or to use their work to lobby for political change. He wanted to be seen as an American artist rather than be ghettoized as a Black one.
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“Can’t we get clear of these degrading limitations,” he wrote, “and recognize the wider reality of art where color is the means and not the end?”
Still, he was not averse to exploring questions of identity in his work. “He wasn’t throwing his fist in the air,” the artist Dewey Crumpler, a friend of his in Oakland, observed. “It was more subtle.”
