Raymond Saunders: Notes from LA

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Raymond Saunders (1934–2025) opening at the gallery’s 616 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Curated by Ebony L. Haynes, this will be Saunders’s third solo exhibition with David Zwirner and will mark the first exhibition in Los Angeles devoted to the artist’s work in over a decade. Celebrating Saunders’s time in California—the artist lived and worked in Oakland for most of his adult life—the presentation will feature a selection of paintings that embody many of the distinct material and conceptual concerns of his decades-long practice. A number of works speak to Saunders’s years in the Bay Area as a student and as an arts educator. Saunders understood teaching to be, like art making, an ongoing process of learning and saw the classroom as a vital site for exchange—of knowledge, of experiences, of ways of seeing the world. His creative and holistic approach to education was in part a response to his skepticism around traditional, didactic systems of training and came to echo the expansive nature of his assemblage-style art. As Saunders stated, “I didn’t want to make artists, I wanted to sort of contribute to well being; I wanted to contribute to freedom, and the choice of being an artist.”¹

[1] Raymond Saunders in conversation with Christopher Cook, “Nothing to Say,” Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts, January 1987.