Hey El Lay:

It’s culture writer Carolina A. Miranda with another edition of Art Insider. This week, contributor Paula Mejía has a dispatch about painter Raymond Saunders and his connection to California.

Before handing the mic over, I wanted to give you a heads up that if you hit LACMA in the coming weeks (I hear something about a new building?), keep an eye peeled for the benches created by painter Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. They riff on the everyday visual culture of the city, and include wry art world gags, too. They’ll be on view through December 1st — and the best part is you can sit on them. Find the deets here.

Now onto Saunders, with detours into:

• AI propaganda
• Meret Oppenheim’s house
• Trees 🌳🌳🌳

More below…

At top is one of Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.'s painterly benches at LACMA. (Carolina A. Miranda)

BLACK IS A COLOR
by Paula Mejía

Raymond Saunders,  It Wasn't Easy Being a First Grader, 1979/84. (Estate of Raymond Saunders)

In 1994, the visual artist Raymond Saunders sat down for a rare interview with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Pittsburgh-raised painter had called the Bay Area home for nearly 30 years by that point, living close enough to Oakland’s California College of the Arts (CCA) — where he taught painting — that he could stop by his home for lunch before returning to campus. The conversation reveals that Saunders didn’t move to San Francisco to become enmeshed in the freewheeling art scene of the late 1960s; as he explained in the interview, California spoke to him for a different reason. “California felt physical to me in the way that there was land, sky, water, in a relationship and light, and it was warm,” he said. “I prefer to be in California really for just those reasons, that I like how it feels.”

The artist, who died last year at 90, was perhaps best known for creating collage-style canvases on chalkboard-black backgrounds. East Coast artists influenced his development, but it was in California where he harnessed a distinctive physicality, spaciousness, and emotiveness in his work. An exhibition at David Zwirner in East Hollywood, now in its final weeks, culls together 10 of Saunders’ abstract and assemblage-style paintings, along with ephemera he amassed, rightfully positioning him as an important California artist. What distinguishes Saunders’ paintings is that his work is not “just emotional-feeling, but really textured,” says Ebony L. Haynes, who curated the exhibition, Raymond Saunders: Notes From LA, his first solo show in the city in over a decade. “There’s a presence to the materials and the work and the composition that perhaps he was able to realize, or really feel and work through, in a place like California.”

 Raymond Saunders, We Try, 1985. (Estate of Raymond Saunders) 

Saunders was born in 1934 in Homestead, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. While taking art classes in public school, he was drawn to the sense of play inherent within artistic creation. These ways of learning inspired Saunders, who believed these methods were just as legitimate as an elite arts education, which he also pursued — attending the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon) and the California College of Arts and Crafts (which became CCA).

Haynes says that Saunders was intrigued by the idea of someone without formal training making a mark and appreciated artists like Cy Twombly, who didn’t hew to realism or formal styles. These influences converged in his own improvisational painting techniques, with Saunders relying on instinct and his own curiosities to carve out a singular lane for himself. Among these proclivities: A lifelong fascination with collecting postcards, buttons, and letters, in addition to the found objects he frequently collaged onto his paintings (some of which are displayed in the gallery, alongside his paintings). A constant of Saunders’ vocation as an educator involved opening up his studio so that students could learn from one another, himself included.

One of the largest and most striking pieces in the Zwirner show, It Wasn’t Easy Being a First Grader (1979/1984) — at top — takes the childhood art class as the subject of the painting itself: On a deeply saturated cornflower-blue canvas, there are exploratory squiggles, as well as the inclusion of whole crayons pasted onto the piece. The rigors of that era are also seen in the inclusion of familiar notebook lines, the same ones where school-aged children practice writing their name in cursive ad nauseam, with Saunders intricately spelling out “Raymond” near the top of the work. Chalky sketches of stick figures abound in another canvas, We Try (1985), situated alongside delicate drawings of vases and pomegranates, a riot of spray paint drips cutting through the chalkboard-esque backdrop.

Raymond Saunders, Untitled, 1983. (Estate of Raymond Saunders)

Identity was also a critical, albeit fraught, strain in Saunders’ work. In the late 1960s, the artist made a name for himself by resisting the art world’s insistence that he — by virtue of his artmaking and his identity as a Black man — adhere to a specific formal tradition. Later in the decade, Saunders penned a now-famous pamphlet, Black Is a Color, wherein he rejected a Black artistic canon as described by Ishmael Reed, a poet active in the Black Arts Movement. In it, Saunders asked why he, and his fellow artists who happened to be Black, should be considered outliers rather than part of the broader pantheon of artmaking. “I feel like he had a dream of really just being a true artist's artist, and he couldn't remove his identity as a Black man from that, nor did I think he wanted to,” says Haynes. “But I think his practice was in balancing those two prongs: of exploring the kind of painting and art and mark-making he was most interested in, while balancing how the world saw him and he saw himself.”

Yet Saunders rarely weighed in on the way his work was received, at least publicly. He preferred to lead a quiet life: teaching in the Bay Area, decamping to Paris for the summer, where he had a home, and rarely discussing his work, even among friends. Despite his prolific output and influence, Saunders was never a towering figure like some of his contemporaries. “His exhibition history is more expansive and consistent than so many artists I know of showing in New York in the ‘60s,” says Haynes. “He was around and present and able to sustain himself as an artist. But I feel like he's not somebody written about in a chapter of an art history book.” Zwirner’s show presents a new way into the conversation about this unique painter’s salient body of work.

AROUND THE INTERNET

It’s Carolina again! I’ll be taking it from here…

• AI-generated propaganda involving the US war with Iran has now somehow involved The Lego Movie.
• The Getty has acquired two Dutch still lifes.
• Nowness takes viewers on a tour of the Swiss home of Meret Oppenheim (she of the wondrous fur-lined teacup).
• Oppenheim once created a fur bracelet for designer Elsa Schiaparelli, the subject of this interesting story in Ursula.
• Patricia Marroquin Norby, the first curator of Native art at the Metropolitan Museum, has quietly left her position.
• An urban planning commission (stocked with Trump allies) has approved proposed plans for the White House ballroom.
• Harold Meyerson at The Prospect thinks that the most appropriate monument to Trump would be a golden calf with his head.
• Sculptor Melvin Edwards is dead at 88.
• Artist Jeff Weiss, who has made regular pilgrimages to the Sierra Nevada mountain range over time, captures the ways our forests are becoming degraded.
• California’s P-22 will be immortalized in sculpture.
• Riley MacLeod cooks the joke vegetarian dishes from Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip.
• Signing off with this story about Kris Jenner, a financial good luck charm (in China).

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