Raymond Saunders: Notes from LA

Celebrating Saunders’s time in California—the artist lived and worked in Oakland for most of his adult life—this exhibition features a selection of paintings and works on paper that embody many of the distinct material and conceptual concerns of the artist’s decades-long practice.

Saunders had close ties to the West Coast, where most of his studio years were spent, and he became well-known as an arts educator there. 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 understood teaching to be, like making art, an ongoing process of learning, and embraced the classroom as a vital site for exchange—of knowledge, of experiences, of ways of seeing the world. He embodied a creative and holistic approach to education that was in part a response to his skepticism around traditional, didactic systems of training. Beginning with his early art training in Pittsburgh’s public schools, Saunders developed a nonhierarchical relationship to pedagogy that came to echo the expansive nature of his artmaking.

Saunders’s assemblage-style paintings frequently begin with a monochromatic black ground elaborated with white chalk—both a pointed reversal of the traditional figure-ground relationship and a nod to his decades spent as a teacher—to which he would subsequently add a range of other markings, materials, and talismans.

Expressionistic swaths of paint, minimalist motifs, line drawings, and passages of vibrant color tangle with found objects, signs, and doors collected from his urban environment, creating unexpected visual rhymes and resonances that reward careful and sustained looking.

Untitled (1996) is exemplary of Saunders’s late style, which is loosely characterized by the artist’s embrace of a more limited palette and the occasional employment of a white ground instead of his signature black. It Wasn't Easy Being a First Grader (1979/1984) incorporates motifs that speak to Saunders’s lifelong role as an educator.

As seen here, he often included children’s drawings and children’s book illustrations as part of the collaged elements in his compositions. The title of the present work overtly references grade school and the growing pains of youth, with the inclusion of crayons, cursive handwriting, and number tables appearing as emblems of early education.

As well as an artist and a teacher, Saunders was a committed correspondent. Along with his large-scale, assemblage-style paintings, Saunders also made works on paper and intimate collages whose mixed materials point to the artist’s practices of note-taking—an extension of his mark-making that encompassed scribbling notes to himself, giving notes to his students, receiving notes from colleagues and friends—and the related routine of collecting.

His collages—which, along with graphite and watercolor drawings, were the subject of his first major museum presentation in a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1971—are intimately scaled, elegant, and restrained compositions defined by the fine and occasionally whimsical quality of Saunders’s line. The artist employs lyrical contours and cryptic gestural marks to depict abstracted figures, text-like inscriptions, and organic objects such as plants, flowers, or vegetables.

Saunders’s tall, towering paintings inhabit a physicality that suggests both presence and displacement—embodying an artist who worked across mediums, formats, and cities to produce an inimitable and ever-evolving oeuvre. At once deliberately constructed and improvisatory, didactic and deeply felt, Saunders’s richly built surfaces conjure the fullness of life and its complications, allowing for a vast and nuanced multiplicity of meanings.