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Boston Globe
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Raymond Saunders, painter who rejected racial pigeonholes, dies at 90
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 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. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up '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?' Advertisement Still, he was not averse to exploring questions of identity in his work. 'He wasn't throwing his fist in the air,' artist Dewey Crumpler, a friend of his in Oakland, observed. 'It was more subtle.' Mr. Saunders was known for elegant paintings that usually began with an all-black background and ended up as semiabstract compendiums of chalk-scrawled notations and paper scraps. They were often compared to the 'combine paintings' of Robert Rauschenberg, whose voluptuous accumulations of castoff objects exemplified the material plenitude of postwar America. Advertisement Yet Mr. Saunders had a restrained and almost spartan touch. When he glued a choice morsel of collage material — say, a torn-off scrap of Chinese calligraphy, or a panel from a Flash Gordon comic book — to a canvas, he left lots of empty space around it, isolating and framing his finds as if to call attention to their radiance. You could say he foregrounded the magic of art and left blackness in the background. His work was underrecognized for years, but it achieved a new visibility in 2022, when the Andrew Kreps Gallery gave him his first show in New York since 1998. At a time when the art world was determined to correct the racial slights and oversights of the past, Mr. Saunders was an obvious candidate for reappraisal. Last year, Kreps joined forces with the powerful David Zwirner Gallery to organize an expanded view of Mr. Saunders' work in New York. A well-received retrospective followed in short order at the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh, Mr. Saunders' hometown. Mr. Saunders did not attend the shows in New York or Pittsburgh, his friends said. 'His community was here, in the Bay Area,' said Julie Casemore, who represents his work at her Casemore Gallery in San Francisco. 'His home was here.' Mr. Saunders had settled in the Bay Area in 1968 and lived in the Rockridge section of Oakland, in a two-story house that also served as his studio. The interior was crammed with bric-a-brac and mounds of source material for his work, much of which he had gathered on sojourns in Europe and Asia. He did his painting in his yard, on a bright white wooden deck that was designed to receive direct sunlight for most of the day. He called it 'the arena.' A stylish dresser, he liked to exchange his paint-stained duds for the pleated garments of Japanese designer Issey Miyake when he went out at night. Advertisement Mr. Saunders lived within walking distance of the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts), where he taught painting from 1987 until his retirement in 2013. He was known to invite an entire class to accompany him on his trips to galleries and restaurants, or to stop for lunch at his house. Kevin Demery, a former student of his who now teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute, recalled an afternoon when he and his classmates were seated in Mr. Saunders' dining room sharing 'a robust charcuterie board.' Midway through lunch, the students were alarmed to realize that their professor had disappeared. 'I walked into his living room and saw through the windows that he was painting on his deck,' Demery said in an interview. 'Once we became a vibrant community, he let us thrive without him.' An elusive figure who seldom gave interviews, Mr. Saunders declined to muse on the meaning of his paintings or to disclose details about his childhood, even among friends. He was so private that his friends say they aren't sure whether he was ever married or not. Raymond Jennings Saunders was born on Oct. 28, 1934, in Homestead, Pa., a borough of Allegheny County just across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh. He and his three sisters were raised by their mother, Emma Marie (Hewitt) Saunders, who struggled to support them on her income as a maid. The family eventually moved into public housing, in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. His nephew Frank said that Mr. Saunders never learned the identity of his father. Advertisement In addition to Frank Saunders, Raymond Saunders is survived by a number of other nephews and nieces and his younger sister, Rossetta Burden. Bucky, as Raymond was nicknamed as a boy, found an early supporter in Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, a white educator who taught art at Schenley High School in Pittsburgh and who also presided over a class for gifted art students every Saturday morning at the Carnegie Institute. Fitzpatrick offered essential encouragement to budding artists, including Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and Mel Bochner. In later life, asked to name the artists who had shaped his work, Mr. Saunders instead credited his schooling. 'I am from Pittsburgh,' he said, 'and they had an unusual and outstanding program for kids.' By the time he had graduated from Schenley, Mr. Saunders was decorated with awards. Moving to Philadelphia, he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on a scholarship from the National Scholastic Art Contest. In 1959, he returned to Pittsburgh and transferred his college credits to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon), where he received his bachelor's degree in fine arts the next year. After living in California for a year to earn a Master of Arts in fine arts at California State University, Hayward (now East Bay), Mr. Saunders moved to New York, the country's art capital. Most established galleries declined to exhibit work by Black artists in that era, but Mr. Saunders found an ally in Terry Dintenfass, a well-regarded gallerist on East 67th Street in Manhattan who represented Jacob Lawrence, an older and much-acclaimed painter of Black life and history. Dintenfass gave Mr. Saunders his debut show at the gallery, in 1964. Reviewing it in The New York Times, critic Brian O'Doherty described Mr. Saunders as 'essentially a conservative painter with a good eye.' Advertisement Mr. Saunders returned to California to join the faculty of Cal State in Hayward. He continued teaching, he said, less to earn a paycheck than to repay the educational advantages of his hardscrabble youth. A fervent traveler, he purchased a second home in Paris, a former fire station in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood on the Left Bank, where he hosted art classes in the summer. But his influence extended not only to his students. Among his admirers was Jean-Michel Basquiat, the precocious art star who emerged in the New York art boom of the early 1980s. Some of Basquiat's paintings, with their graffiti-style markings and floating masks inscribed against flat fields of blue, bore a curious similarity to Mr. Saunders' tastefully disjointed imagery. Basquiat made multiple attempts to contact Mr. Saunders, apparently without success, before his untimely death in 1988. 'Basquiat tried to reach Raymond Saunders when he came to San Francisco,' Ishmael Reed, with whom Mr. Saunders had sparred decades earlier, told The Amsterdam News of Harlem in 2022. Poet Bill Berkson, who taught at the now-closed San Francisco Art Institute, related that he once offered a scholarship to Basquiat but the artist demurred. 'I'll only come if you get Ray Saunders to teach there,' Berkson quoted him as saying. Mr. Saunders, with his usual aversion to discussing his work and its critical reception, had little to say about Basquiat's regard for his work. Advertisement Crumpler, his Oakland friend, once tried to draw him out on the subject. 'When I looked at Basquiat's work for the first time, I knew he was biting Ray,' Crumpler said in an interview. 'I told Ray, 'Basquiat is biting your work all day and night.' Ray just smiled.' This article originally appeared in
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Raymond Saunders, Painter Who Rejected Racial Pigeonholes, Dies at 90
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. '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.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Toni at Random by Dana A Williams review – the editorial years of a literary great
While a great deal has been written about Toni Morrison's fiction, her work as a senior editor at Random House is less well known. Dana A Williams, professor of African American Literature at Howard University, sets out to fill this gap, offering an impeccably researched account of Morrison's stint at Random House between 1971 and 1983, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights and the Black Arts movements. Reflecting ideas generated by that convergence, Morrison's novels – described by the Nobel committee, when they awarded her the prize in literature in 1993, as giving life to an essential aspect of American reality – were driven by an unwavering belief in the possibility of African American empowerment through self-regard. Williams's interest lies in showing how Morrison's editorial career was informed by the same invigoratingly insular ethos. Whether writing or editing, her work was aimed at producing 'explorations of interior Black life with minimal interest in talking to or being consumed by an imagined white reader'. Morrison saw early on how that kind of insularity could be wielded as both a weapon and a shield. Addressing the Second National Conference of Afro-American Writers at Howard in 1976, she urged the audience to recognise that 'the survival of Black publishing, which […] is a sort of way of saying the survival of Black writing, will depend on the same things that the survival of Black anything depends on, which is the energies of Black people – sheer energy, inventiveness and innovation, tenacity, the ability to hang on, and a contempt for those huge, monolithic institutions and agencies which do obstruct us'. These words could well have been repurposed as a mission statement for her editorial career, which, as Williams points out, consisted of '[making] a revolution, one book at a time'. Change was coming in America. Morrison's contribution would be to work towards change in the overwhelmingly white world of publishing: 'I thought it was important for people to be in the streets,' she said during an interview for the documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, released in 2019. 'But that couldn't last. You needed a record. It would be my job to publish the voices, the books, the ideas of African Americans. And that would last.' Toni at Random traces the path that led from Morrison's Jim Crow childhood to her storied literary career, briefly documenting her early years, during which storytelling was an 'ever-present pastime', as well as her academic life (Howard, followed by graduate studies at Cornell), before moving on to chapter-by-chapter case studies of some of the publications she oversaw during her stint at Random House. At times Williams's book reads like a catalogue of those works, from The Black Book (a compendium of black life in America) to work by June Jordan, Lucille Clifton and Toni Cade Bambara, as well as autobiographies of Angela Davis, Huey Newton and Muhammad Ali, and Gayl Jones's Corregidora (which was reissued in 2019). Nevertheless, it is a fascinating catalogue, not least because it is full of thrilling behind-the-scenes insights into what it took to get them published. Morrison was keenly aware that success depended on proving that books such as these could sell; demand would have to be so high that, as Williams writes, 'even the most recalcitrant salesperson would have no choice but to fall in line'. The first job was making sure the books were excellent. Williams provides a number of examples of Morrison's exacting standards, including the fact that, while working on a collection of Huey Newton's essays, she recommended deleting the weak ones and editing the rest, 'even those that had been previously published'. But Morrison was also required to navigate 'the irony of the need to be appealing to white people while also preserving enough distance from them to maintain Black privacy', keeping one eye on the bottom line even while the other was on black consciousness. On one memorable occasion, when the poet Barbara Chase-Riboud stonewalled her about doing publicity (loftily describing it as 'tap [dancing] for prizes and coverage'), Morrison fired off a flinty letter reminding her that Random House was 'a commercial house historically unenchanted with 500 slim volumes of profound poetry that languish in stock rooms'. Morrison could be blunt when she had to be but, alongside this, Williams paints a picture of her as a fiercely protective editor, chasing blurbs and championing her projects with passion, tenacity and a moving sense of urgency, 'scared that the world would fall away before somebody put together a thing that got close to the way we really are'. In addition, Williams highlights her convivial and collaborative approach, which led to the development of close friendships with a few of her authors including, famously, Angela Davis, who lived with Morrison and her sons for a time while they worked on her autobiography. It is astonishing to consider that at the same time as doing all this Morrison was also busy raising two sons and writing her own novels, frequently leveraging her literary status in service of her editorial campaigns. Williams includes references to a 1978 interview in which Morrison hinted at how exhausting this was: 'I want to stop writing around the edges of the day … in the automobile and places like that.' Which makes it even more astonishing to consider how little has changed since she fought this fight. According to Dan Sinykin, writing in Literary Hub in October 2023: 'In 1971, when Morrison became a trade editor, about 95% of the fiction published by the big commercial houses was by white authors. By 2018, that number only dropped to 89%.' In August 2024, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris pointed out in the New York Times that following the hiring of 'a small but influential group' of black female editors in 2020, many had 'lost their jobs or quit the business entirely … [leading] some … to question publishers' commitment to racial inclusion'. In the UK the position is hardly any better. The fight is still necessary, and still exhausting. However, Williams's book is a timely reminder of the need for an inward-looking response, and of the joy to be discovered along the way. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is best when it is penetrated by Morrison's own voice, in the form of excerpts from her correspondence. Here, for example, is Toni attempting to persuade Bill Cosby (with his reputation as yet untarnished) to write an introduction for The Black Book: 'Let me just say … I want to publish books about us – black people – that will make some sense – to give joy, to pass on some grandeur to all those black children (born and unborn) who need to get to the horizon with something under their arms besides Dick and Jane and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.' At the time she wrote those lines, I was one of those black children, and I am grateful that the books she published did exactly that. The same spirit of gratitude permeates Williams's scholarly, informative and highly readable book. Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship by Dana A Williams is published by Amistad (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Toni at Random by Dana A Williams review – the editorial years of a literary great
While a great deal has been written about Toni Morrison's fiction, her work as a senior editor at Random House is less well known. Dana A Williams, professor of African American Literature at Howard University, sets out to fill this gap, offering an impeccably researched account of Morrison's stint at Random House between 1971 and 1983, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights and the Black Arts movements. Reflecting ideas generated by that convergence, Morrison's novels – described by the Nobel committee, when they awarded her the prize in literature in 1993, as giving life to an essential aspect of American reality – were driven by an unwavering belief in the possibility of African American empowerment through self-regard. Williams's interest lies in showing how Morrison's editorial career was informed by the same invigoratingly insular ethos. Whether writing or editing, her work was aimed at producing 'explorations of interior Black life with minimal interest in talking to or being consumed by an imagined white reader'. Morrison saw early on how that kind of insularity could be wielded as both a weapon and a shield. Addressing the Second National Conference of Afro-American Writers at Howard in 1976, she urged the audience to recognise that 'the survival of Black publishing, which […] is a sort of way of saying the survival of Black writing, will depend on the same things that the survival of Black anything depends on, which is the energies of Black people – sheer energy, inventiveness and innovation, tenacity, the ability to hang on, and a contempt for those huge, monolithic institutions and agencies which do obstruct us'. These words could well have been repurposed as a mission statement for her editorial career, which, as Williams points out, consisted of '[making] a revolution, one book at a time'. Change was coming in America. Morrison's contribution would be to work towards change in the overwhelmingly white world of publishing: 'I thought it was important for people to be in the streets,' she said during an interview for the documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, released in 2019. 'But that couldn't last. You needed a record. It would be my job to publish the voices, the books, the ideas of African Americans. And that would last.' Toni at Random traces the path that led from Morrison's Jim Crow childhood to her storied literary career, briefly documenting her early years, during which storytelling was an 'ever-present pastime', as well as her academic life (Howard, followed by graduate studies at Cornell), before moving on to chapter-by-chapter case studies of some of the publications she oversaw during her stint at Random House. At times Williams's book reads like a catalogue of those works, from The Black Book (a compendium of black life in America) to work by June Jordan, Lucille Clifton and Toni Cade Bambara, as well as autobiographies of Angela Davis, Huey Newton and Muhammad Ali, and Gayl Jones's Corregidora (which was reissued in 2019). Nevertheless, it is a fascinating catalogue, not least because it is full of thrilling behind-the-scenes insights into what it took to get them published. Morrison was keenly aware that success depended on proving that books such as these could sell; demand would have to be so high that, as Williams writes, 'even the most recalcitrant salesperson would have no choice but to fall in line'. The first job was making sure the books were excellent. Williams provides a number of examples of Morrison's exacting standards, including the fact that, while working on a collection of Huey Newton's essays, she recommended deleting the weak ones and editing the rest, 'even those that had been previously published'. But Morrison was also required to navigate 'the irony of the need to be appealing to white people while also preserving enough distance from them to maintain Black privacy', keeping one eye on the bottom line even while the other was on black consciousness. On one memorable occasion, when the poet Barbara Chase-Riboud stonewalled her about doing publicity (loftily describing it as 'tap [dancing] for prizes and coverage'), Morrison fired off a flinty letter reminding her that Random House was 'a commercial house historically unenchanted with 500 slim volumes of profound poetry that languish in stock rooms'. Morrison could be blunt when she had to be but, alongside this, Williams paints a picture of her as a fiercely protective editor, chasing blurbs and championing her projects with passion, tenacity and a moving sense of urgency, 'scared that the world would fall away before somebody put together a thing that got close to the way we really are'. In addition, Williams highlights her convivial and collaborative approach, which led to the development of close friendships with a few of her authors including, famously, Angela Davis, who lived with Morrison and her sons for a time while they worked on her autobiography. It is astonishing to consider that at the same time as doing all this Morrison was also busy raising two sons and writing her own novels, frequently leveraging her literary status in service of her editorial campaigns. Williams includes references to a 1978 interview in which Morrison hinted at how exhausting this was: 'I want to stop writing around the edges of the day … in the automobile and places like that.' Which makes it even more astonishing to consider how little has changed since she fought this fight. According to Dan Sinykin, writing in Literary Hub in October 2023: 'In 1971, when Morrison became a trade editor, about 95% of the fiction published by the big commercial houses was by white authors. By 2018, that number only dropped to 89%.' In August 2024, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris pointed out in the New York Times that following the hiring of 'a small but influential group' of black female editors in 2020, many had 'lost their jobs or quit the business entirely … [leading] some … to question publishers' commitment to racial inclusion'. In the UK the position is hardly any better. The fight is still necessary, and still exhausting. However, Williams's book is a timely reminder of the need for an inward-looking response, and of the joy to be discovered along the way. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is best when it is penetrated by Morrison's own voice, in the form of excerpts from her correspondence. Here, for example, is Toni attempting to persuade Bill Cosby (with his reputation as yet untarnished) to write an introduction for The Black Book: 'Let me just say … I want to publish books about us – black people – that will make some sense – to give joy, to pass on some grandeur to all those black children (born and unborn) who need to get to the horizon with something under their arms besides Dick and Jane and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.' At the time she wrote those lines, I was one of those black children, and I am grateful that the books she published did exactly that. The same spirit of gratitude permeates Williams's scholarly, informative and highly readable book. Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship by Dana A Williams is published by Amistad (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Chicago Tribune
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Biblioracle: Dana A. Williams tells the tale of the indomitable Toni Morrison in ‘Toni at Random'
I'm well acquainted with the fact that Toni Morrison is the greatest American writer of my lifetime. I know this because I've read her books, but I could also point to a little something called the Nobel Prize in literature, which she was awarded in 1993. I also know that for a number of years in the early 1970s, just as she was publishing her first novels, Morrison worked as an editor at Random House, shepherding books by luminaries like Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali (among many others) to publication. Previously, this fact was a curio, a trivia question of the 'Did you know?' variety, but thanks to a new book from Dana A. Williams, 'Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship,' I have a new appreciation not just for Toni Morrison the writer and editor, but for the work of writing and editing in general. Williams, a professor of African American literature and graduate school dean at Howard University, has crafted a book that manages to satisfy as narrative, literary analysis and cultural criticism, offering multiple points of entry for different readers in search of different things. The acknowledgements reveal that the book is 20 years or more in the making and it shows in a book written with great knowledge, deep feeling and a sense of purpose. In this way, Williams mimics the work of her subject. At its heart, 'Toni at Random' feels like the tale of the 'indomitable Ms. Morrison,' as Williams draws on correspondence and interviews with Morrison to unfurl the tale of a Black woman trying to make space for Black writers in an overwhelmingly white industry. Random House is portrayed as open, even eager to publish Black writers in the immediate wake of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of the Black Arts Movement of poets like Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni. But Morrison is also swimming against the realities of business and culture, where sales and profit are paramount, and many believe there isn't a sufficient audience for books by Black authors that don't have obvious appeal to white readers. Carefully, tactically, inexorably, Morrison seeks to challenge this notion while championing writers she sees as unimpeachable in terms of originality and artistry. This included writers like Toni Cade Bambara (who became Morrison's lifelong friend), Gayl Jones (of whose talent Morrison was envious) and Leon Forrest (legendary Chicago writer and longtime professor at Northwestern). Williams shows how savvy and even calculating Morrison was as she positioned these books for the best chance of success in the marketplace, pursuing blurbs from luminaries like James Baldwin, and horse-trading for pre-publication publicity and review attention. Her attention to detail extended even to a book's interior design. We learn how Morrison would alternately massage the egos of authors or challenge them to step up the diligence and quality of their work. When she felt her acuity as an editor was being questioned, she would respond with sly barbs asserting her authority. Williams ingeniously structures the book around different threads of Morrison's editorial work, non-fiction, fiction, a whole chapter on Ali, another on Davis, and others. The chronology weaves back and forth, but we're never lost. Periodically, we're reminded that while all this is happening, Morrison is also writing and publishing 'The Bluest Eye,' 'Sula,' and 'Song of Solomon,' establishing herself as a major literary figure in her own right. As Williams reveals the inside story of the publishing of some of these books, I kept underlining titles, thinking my next step is to find copies so I can read them and see what Morrison saw. John Warner is the author of books including 'More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.' You can find him at Book recommendations from the Biblioracle John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you've read. 1. 'Spooky Great Lakes' retold by S.E. Schlosser 2. 'Howard's End' by E.M. Forster 3. 'Disappearing Earth' by Julia Phillips 4. 'Bastard Out of Carolina' by Dorothy Allison 5. 'Forward Progress: Confessions from a Rookie College Football Official' by Todd SkaggsFor Tom, I'm going to recommend a highly entertaining tale of adventure and revenge by a writer like no other, 'True Grit' by Charles Portis. 1. 'The Tsar of Love and Techno' by Anthony Marra 2. 'Cosmicomics' by Italo Calvino 3. 'In the Distance' by Hernán Díaz 4. 'The Sympathizer' by Viet Thanh Nguyen 5. 'The Orphan Master's Son' by Adam JohnsonLyle doesn't seem to mind a book with some quirks. 'May We Be Forgiven' by A.M. Homes is near the top of my list of books where you're never on totally solid ground. A wonderful sensation if you're in the right headspace for it. 1. 'I Heard Her Call My Name' by Lucy Sante 2. 'A Field Guide for Getting Lost' by Rebecca Solnit 3. 'Ongoingness: The End of a Diary' by Sarah Manguso 4. 'Miracles' by C.S. Lewis 5. 'Bluets' by Maggie NelsonSome searching writing about life and identity in this list. This brings to mind a favorite of mine, even though the beliefs and life of this author are entirely different from my own: 'The Seven Storey Mountain' by Thomas Merton. Get a reading from the Biblioracle Send a list of the last five books you've read and your hometown to biblioracle@
