‘Raymond Saunders At His Eloquent, Excoriating Best’ by Cat Kron
2026
Raymond Saunders, whose abstract collaged canvases span some six decades, was also a pre-eminent arts educator. And like the best teachers, he was an astute caller of bullshit. Saunders gained notoriety early in his career for his pamphlet Black Is a Color (1967), a rebuttal to an article by writer Ishmael Reed, published that same year, that attempted to codify the Black arts movement. Saunders scorned the essay’s proclamations of a new Black canon, even one forged as a corrective to the exclusion of Black artists from the art-historical canon writ large, perceiving it as a misguided effort that further siloed Black art and culture. The artist ended his rejoinder with a plaint: ‘Can’t we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end?’
Raymond Saunders: Notes from LA, a show of ten paintings curated by Ebony L. Haynes, accompanied by a 1987 video of the artist and ephemera from his studio, serves as a homecoming for Saunders, who taught at what is now California College of the Arts throughout his most active years as a painter. In his work, abstraction is a means of representing truths about his own – Black, but emphatically not the Black – experience. The show is premised on the majority of the works’ having been made in Saunders’s Oakland studio, but Haynes also uses its subtitle as an organizing principle, inviting viewers to read the works as one would notations in a sketchbook or lines from a postcard.
