Raymond Saunders: On Freedom and Trust

Raymond Saunders was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1934. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Barnes Foundation, the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and the California College of the Arts (CCA). He is Professor Emeritus at Cal State East Bay in Hayward and CCA, as well as a President’s Fellow at CCA. He has exhibited in France, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Singapore, Korea, Japan, China, and the American Academy in Rome. He participated in the 1972 Whitney Biennial and has had multiple solo museum exhibitions, including at the M.H. De Young Memorial Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 2011, Saunders joined numerous notable artists in the Los Angeles Hammer Museum’s, Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1966-1980. Saunders’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, The Oakland Museum of California, The Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many other public and private collections.