In 1982 Phillip Brookman curated a mid-career survey of Raymond Saunders paintings at The Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery. The Sesnon Art Gallery is honored to be working with Saunders again and exhibiting over twenty of the painter’s most dynamic and challenging works to date.
Having exhibited nationally and internationally since 1952, Saunders, working in a range of media from drawing to assemblage, interrogates the false premise that artists who happen to be black produce something that can be uniquely identified as “black art.” Rather, Saunders dares his audiences to accept the fact that black really is just a color—one among many on the palette of any artist who seeks to emancipate himself and his practice from the binds of identity-driven art.
The paintings on view incorporate traditional and nontraditional materials such as found objects, doilies, ephemera from his personal archives, and chalk. He often works and reworks paintings, sometimes subtracting, and other times adding elements that may feel familiar, recalling the work of such contemporaries as Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Yet, his combination of materials and the recurrence of certain motifs—flowers, urns, spirals—are unmistakably Saunders’s own unique visual language, to which there is neither a key nor a legend.
Like the artist himself, Saunders’s paintings are masterfully improvisational, defiant, and unexpected. This exhibition, named after his notable 1967 pamphlet “Black Is a Color,” showcases the profound ways Saunders (an artist who happens to be black) troubles and refuses any easy associations of racial blackness with his deployment of the color black in his paintings as well as any past thematic readings of his body of work.
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Opening reception: September 30, 5-7pm with artist walkthrough at 6pm
Workshops with Raymond Saunders: October TBA
Closing reception: Friday, November 20 (4:30 pm)
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, noon to 5 p.m.
Open LATE: Wednesday 12:00-8:00 p.m.
Free to the public
For more information contact the Sesnon Gallery:
sesnon@ucsc.edu