Oakland Museum, California
1994
June 11–August 21, 1994
In 1994, the Oakland Museum hosted a solo exhibition of sixty drawings and paintings from 1992–1994 by Raymond Saunders, in which his “incisive sense of composition, form and texture is balanced by a keen sense of color.” Curator Philip Linhares describes how “Saunders creates profound and beautiful images with consummate skill and discipline. Spontaneity and immediacy are integral to his methods, but haste has no part in the equation. The paintings evolve over varied periods of time; some are changed, recycled, or combined with others, re-done.”
Toni Morrison writes of Saunders work of this period: “Raymond Saunders reconstructs reality for us and with us. We discover with a shock how much of the world’s beauty lies in its detritus.… From an environment of the lost, the discarded, Saunders creates another wholly inscribed world of found things in which chalk and metal and paint and wallpaper and toys and insignia combine to destabilize and soothe us—then to change us altogether like a tropical medicine belt. Glorious.”