Exceptional Works: Raymond Saunders

It Wasn't Easy Being a First Grader,  1979/1984

Acrylic, spray paint, chalk, collage, and  mixed media on canvas
 77 3/8 x 74 inches
 196.5 x 188 cm

An artwork by Raymonf Saunders called It Wasn't Easy Being a First Grader, dated 1979/1984

Raymond Saunders, 1981. Portrait by Mimi Jacobs. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

“To me [making art is] like writing, it’s like poetry. When do you end the line? There’s a beginning, middle, and end, but the process is the middle, the essence of where you are.”

—Raymond Saunders

The works of celebrated American artist Raymond Saunders (1934–2025) bring together the artist’s extensive formal training with his own observations and experience. Expressionistic swaths of paint, minimalist motifs, line drawings, and passages of vibrant color tangle with found objects from his urban environment, creating unexpected visual rhymes and resonances.

Saunders taught art throughout his career. It Wasn't Easy Being a First Grader (1979/1984) speaks vividly of this important aspect of the artist’s work, and includes crayons, cursive handwriting, and numbers as emblems of early education.

M. R. Robinson, at right, presenting award to Raymond “Ray” Saunders at National High School Art Exhibition, 1953. Photo by Charles “Teenie” Harris. © Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Having earned his MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, in 1961, Saunders began teaching at California State University, Hayward, in 1968 and went on to join the faculty of his alma mater (later known as California College of the Arts), where he was given the distinction of professor emeritus. For Saunders, teaching and artmaking were equal pursuits, and each in turn informed the other, resulting in the frequently didactic, shorthand mode of expression that is a hallmark of his works.

Saunders’s creative and holistic approach to education was in part a response to his skepticism around traditional systems of training. As the artist stated, “I’ve had too much schooling to think of myself as either naive or childish.… I mean, children paint beautifully, but as long as the designation ‘children’s art’ exists, there will be an undermining of their content.”

A publication made in 2002 is the result of a semester-long project with Saunders and a first grade class at Park Day School, Oakland. The booklet features transcribed conversations between Saunders and the class, as well as students’ artwork.

This publication is the culmination of a semester-long project with Saunders and a first grade class at Park Day School, Oakland, in 2002, and intersperses transcribed conversations between Saunders and the class with students’ artwork.

This publication is the culmination of a semester-long project with Saunders and a first grade class at Park Day School, Oakland, in 2002, and intersperses transcribed conversations between Saunders and the class with students’ artwork. 

 

Saunders developed a nonhierarchical relationship to pedagogy that came to echo the expansive nature of his artmaking.

Nothing to Say, an interview between Saunders and the writer Christopher Cook, was published on the occasion of the exhibition Raymond Saunders: Paintings, Drawings, Collages at Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Massachusetts, in 1987. The interview between Saunders and Cook, then director of the Addison Gallery, inspired a collection of twenty-five postcards with excerpted quotes from their conversation which include the artist's meditations on teaching art.

A postcard from “NOTHING TO SAY”, dated 1987

A postcard from the series Nothing to Say by Raymond Saunders in conversation with the writer Christopher Cook, 1987

In It Wasn’t Easy Being a First Grader, real crayons and fragments of children’s drawings and book illustrations are among the elements affixed to the striking royal blue canvas, a rare use of colored ground for the artist. The work overtly references grade school and the growing pains of youth, with color swatches, a number table, and “Raymond” written in neat cursive at the top of the canvas.

Raymond Saunders, It Wasn't Easy Being a First Grader, 1979/1984 (detail)

“Saunders’s visual alchemy ultimately renders the picture a layered, essentially abstract, composition. His narratives wander freely. Chronological sequence is fluid, and the story being told is an impressionistic one.”

—Richard Armstrong, then-director at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 1996

Installation view, Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2025. Photo by Zachary Riggleman

Saunders’s first retrospective at Carnegie Museum of Art in 2025 reflected the artist’s early connection to the museum; growing up in Pittsburgh, Saunders participated in the museum’s Saturday art classes for young people, which continue to this day. His mentor, Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, teacher and director of art for Pittsburgh public schools, also taught Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and Mel Bochner. Saunders obtained a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and went on to earn a BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1960.

A postcard from the series Nothing to Say by Raymond Saunders in conversation with the writer Christopher Cook, 1987

Joan Miró, Blue II, 1961, reproduced as part of a selection of postcards from Saunders’s collection, gathered by the artist throughout his domestic and international travels over the years

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism, 1915–1916, reproduced as part of a selection of postcards from Saunders’s collection, gathered by the artist throughout his domestic and international travels over the years

Balthasar van der Ast, Basket of Flowers, c. 1622, reproduced as part of a selection of postcards from Saunders’s collection, gathered by the artist throughout his domestic and international travels over the years

Emil Nolde, Twilight, early twentieth century; part of a selection of postcards from Saunders’s collection, gathered by the artist throughout his domestic and international travels over the years

A consummate student as well as a dedicated teacher, Saunders collected images of other artists’ work, as discussed in an interview with Judith Wilson in 1980:

“I need what they do.... It makes me who I am.... It’s like a piece of music, and someone says, ‘How does it make you feel?’ You cannot ever say how it makes you feel, but you will continue to listen. And in that same sense, I can’t tell you what it does, but I’d hate to be without it.... But because it’s someone else’s [art], I can leave it alone. I can be happy with it ... because it’s theirs.... But I’m not happy because, thank you, but I want to do something else.” 

A spread from Here for the Children, a fundraising booklet published to benefit the Children’s Hospital Medical Center of Northern California in the mid-1980s

It Wasn't Easy Being a First Grader is illustrated in Here for the Children, a fundraising booklet published to benefit the Children’s Hospital Medical Center of Northern California in the mid-1980s. This image shows the painting in its earlier iteration—Saunders first executed it in 1979 and reworked it in 1984, in keeping with the loose, ever-evolving, and improvisatory nature of his painting style. Saunders understood making art, like teaching, to be an ongoing process, and the artist would frequently return to his compositions. The present version of the painting shows the addition of spray-painted markings and supplementary collage elements.

Raymond Saunders discussing his work and process in an interview, 1994

“Raymond Saunders reconstitutes reality for us and with us.... We look at his pictures and (suddenly or slowly) begin to imagine our own humanity—a kind of trembling tenderness touched with menace, exhilaration, relief, and the outrageous bounty at our disposal. From an environment of the lost, the discarded, Saunders creates another wholly inscribed world of found things in which chalk and metal and paint and wallpaper and toys and insignia combine to destabilize and soothe us—then to change us altogether like a tropical medicine belt. Glorious.”

—The author Toni Morrison in her 1993 introduction to a solo exhibition of Saunders’s work

Raymond Saunders:  Notes from LA