Zina Saunders
Encyclopedia
Mother Jones (magazine)
Mother Jones is an American independent news organization, featuring investigative and breaking news reporting on politics, the environment, human rights, and culture. Mother Jones has been nominated for 23 National Magazine Awards and has won six times, including for General Excellence in 2001,...
, she began creating regular weekly animations (which feature Saunders doing the voices of all characters). Her book Overlooked New York (2009) is a collection of interviews, profiles and portraits of diverse New York subcultures and hobbyists.
A native New Yorker, Saunders attended High School of Music and Art and Cooper Union
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly referred to simply as Cooper Union, is a privately funded college in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States, located at Cooper Square and Astor Place...
but also learned much about painting and commercial art from her father, illustrator Norman Saunders
Norman Saunders
Norman Blaine Saunders was a prolific commercial artist who produced paintings for pulp magazines, paperbacks, men's adventure magazines, comic books and trading cards...
. She has illustrated for a variety of publishers (Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster, Inc., a division of CBS Corporation, is a publisher founded in New York City in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. It is one of the four largest English-language publishers, alongside Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins...
, Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
, Scholastic Books, Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
), while contributing to magazines, including The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, Time Out New York and Outré.
Her Overlooked New York subjects include amateur astronomers, bike messengers
Bicycle messenger
Bicycle messengers are people who work for courier companies carrying and delivering items by bicycle. Bicycle messengers are most often found in the central business districts of metropolitan areas...
, carnival costume designers, cricket players, keepers of rooftop pigeon coops
Pigeon keeping
Pigeon keeping is the art and science of breeding domestic pigeons. People have practiced pigeon keeping for about 10,000 years in almost every part of the world...
, kite flyers, scuba divers, street performers, subway musicians
Busking
Street performance or busking is the practice of performing in public places, for gratuities, which are generally in the form of money and edibles...
and urban gardeners. The project began in the fall of 2004 with her observation of colorful, decorative bicycles, as she explained:
- Ever since I was a kid I’ve seen older Puerto Rican men riding crazy, tricked-out bicycles, loaded with mirrors and flags and chrome and fuzzy dice and raccoon tails. I’ve always wanted to paint their pictures and find out why they decorate their bicycles, and how they got started, and what this bicycle display is all about. I tracked them down to where they hang out, drinking beer and showing off their bikes. I painted their pictures and asked them questions about who they are and how they got started with customizing their bicycles. These guys are members of an insular community with their own aesthetic, one that the mainstream culture knows nothing about. They are sincere and passionate and delighted with their one-man parades. Their bicycles are their personal vision of beauty and art that they are always tinkering with, perfecting and adjusting and planning and applying, and then riding down the street for everyone to see. That began my mission to discover the seemingly endless variety of enthusiasms pursued by New Yorkers, whether they were carried from immigrants' cultures from overseas or indigenous to the city landscape. These are real New Yorkers who have found fascinating ways to unleash their joy on the roofs and rivers and parks and streets of New York.
She wrote about the Puerto Rican Schwinn Club for Time Out New York (June 2005) and returned in the August 11, 2005 issue with profiles of Central Park
Central Park
Central Park is a public park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The park initially opened in 1857, on of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan...
portrait artists.
Awards
Saunders' updated design of the Pink PantherThe Pink Panther (character)
The Pink Panther is the main and title character in the opening and closing credit sequences of every film in The Pink Panther series except for A Shot in the Dark and Inspector Clouseau. His popularity spawned a series of theatrical shorts, merchandise, a comic book, and television cartoons...
character for United Artists brought her an award from Print, and her Native Americans trading card set of 106 illustrations was chosen Most Creative Trading Card Set by the trade magazine Non-Sport Update. She has contributed to numerous trading card sets, including Wacky Packages
Wacky Packages
Wacky Packages are a series of trading cards and stickers featuring parodies of North American consumer products. The cards were produced by the Topps Company beginning in 1967, usually in a sticker format. The original series sold for two years, and the concept proved popular enough that it has...
, Magic: The Gathering
Magic: The Gathering
Magic: The Gathering , also known as Magic, is the first collectible trading card game created by mathematics professor Richard Garfield and introduced in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast. Magic continues to thrive, with approximately twelve million players as of 2011...
and Goosebumps
Goosebumps
Goosebumps is a series of children's horror fiction novels written by American author R. L. Stine and first published by Scholastic Publishing. It is a collection of stories that feature semi-homogenous plot structures, with fictional children being involved in scary situations...
.
Excerpts from "Art Talks," her series of portraits and interviews with illustrators and art directors, are featured in Illo magazine. Portraits from that series are in American Illustration 26 Annual and American Illustration 27 Annual. Five of her portraits were selected for the Communication Arts Illustration Annual 2008. Four pages in Graphic: Inside the Sketchbooks of the World's Great Graphic Designers by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico (Monacelli Press, 2010) demonstrate how her sketches evolve into digital paintings.
Saunders has taught illustration at the University of the Arts
University of the Arts (Philadelphia)
The University of the Arts is one of the United States' oldest universities dedicated to the arts. Its campus makes up part of the Avenue of the Arts in Center City, Philadelphia...
in Philadelphia.