Raymond Saunders, whose collage-based paintings and installation works grappled with racial identity and broader sociopolitical structures, died on July 19 in Oakland, California. He was 90 years old. A cult-like figure in the arts community of the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had lived and worked since the early 1960s, Saunders is best known for his assemblage-style blackboard surfaces bearing white chalk and chalk-like notations, smears of vibrant paint, and accumulated found ephemera. His mixed-media work is known to have influenced artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat and has often drawn comparisons to Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combines (1954–64)” paintings. Saunders’s death came just days after the closing of his first major museum retrospective, “Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden,” at the Carnegie Museum of Art in his hometown of Pittsburgh. The show brought him long-overdue recognition in a mainstream art world that has often overlooked or lumped together artist...