SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Casemore Gallery shared 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.

Since the 1960s, artist Raymond Saunders (b. 1934) developed a painting practice rooted in improvisation. Working across mediums, he combined everyday objects, found imagery, drawing, notational markings, and text in constellated compositions that blend abstraction and figuration against the complex backdrop of American history.

Saunders was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, where he participated in Carnegie Museum of Art’s still ongoing Saturday art classes for young people. His mentor, Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, the instructor of the museums’ Saturday art classes and the director of art for Pittsburgh public schools, also taught Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and Mel Bochner. He obtained a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and went on to earn a BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology (1960). He then moved to Oakland, CA, where he continues to live and work. He received an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts (1961) and later served there and at California State University East Bay as a faculty member.

In his large-scale works, Saunders routinely deployed a black ground recalling a literal blackboard and the ideas explored in his 1967 essay Black Is a Color, in which he claims an expansive role for the Black artist. “i am not here to play the gallery,” Saunders writes. “i am not responsible for anyone’s entertainment. i am responsible for being as fully myself, as man and artist, as I possibly can be, while allowing myself to hope that in the effort some light, some love, some beauty may be shed upon the world, and perhaps some inequities put right.”