Raymond Saunders: Notes From LA

Why It Matters

Saunders’ blend of pedagogy, community input, and correspondence reframes contemporary art as an ongoing conversation, influencing curatorial strategies and collector interest in socially responsive practices.

Key Takeaways

• Saunders blends humor with academic critique in his LA exhibition.
• Uses numbers over letters to challenge traditional pedagogical hierarchies.
• Black backgrounds serve as immediate fill for sketching and mark‑making.
• Incorporates children’s drawings, highlighting community participation in his work.
• Postcard obsession frames the show as a visual correspondence archive.

Summary

Raymond Saunders’ solo show “Notes from LA” opens with a playful nod to a first‑grade painting, setting a tone that merges personal memory with his broader artistic practice. The exhibition draws on his long‑standing fascination with pedagogy, humor, and the visual language of correspondence.

Saunders interrogates academic hierarchies by replacing letters with sequential numbers, positioning numbers as a universal code. He often begins works on black‑painted panels, paper or canvas, allowing any subsequent sketch to appear instantly “filled in.” The black ground becomes a stage for mark‑making, from his own drawings to contributions by students, neighborhood children, and friends.

A recurring motif is the artist’s obsessive collection of postcards, stored in banker’s boxes and displayed in modest selections. These ephemera act as visual letters, linking his travels to the Los Angeles setting and reinforcing the exhibition’s title as literal “notes” from the city.

The show underscores how Saunders blurs the line between teacher and learner, inviting community participation while questioning institutional authority. For collectors and institutions, the work signals a shift toward socially engaged, process‑oriented art that values dialogue over hierarchy.

Original Description

“California felt physical to me.... I prefer to be [there] really for just those reasons, that I like how it feels.” —Raymond Saunders

Taking a closer look at Raymond Saunders: Notes from LA with curator Ebony L. Haynes. The exhibition celebrates Saunders’s time in California, where he lived and worked in Oakland for most of his adult life as an artist and a beloved arts educator. Saunders was an archivist who gathered and kept objects and mementos that would often appear throughout his work. An illustrative selection of archival materials from his Oakland studio are displayed in vitrines installed in the gallery space which further demonstrate his lifelong impulse to annotate, keep in touch, and accumulate. Plan your visit to see the show through Saturday, April 25.

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Featured works in order of appearance: Raymond Saunders, It Wasn’t Easy Being a First Grader, 1979/1984; We Try, 1985