Raymond Saunders: Post No Bills

Born in 1934 in Pittsburgh and now in his eighties, Saunders first studied art in the city’s public schools, participating in a program for artistically gifted students. Much of the artist’s early work from the 1960s is marked by his signature black ground, which evolved to carry sociopolitical implications when the artist published his critical essay "Black is a Color" in 1967 as a rebuttal to an article by the writer Ishmael Reed about the Black Arts Movement.

In this text, Saunders argues powerfully that Reed’s essay failed to capture the vastness of Black expression and in doing so siloed Black artists and their work as delimited by the category of race alone. He concluded with the imperative that we necessarily separate identity from artistic output, that “we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means, not the end.”