Discover Raymond Saunders’s dynamic paintings and his extraordinary legacy as an artist and thinker in his first monograph.

Saunders’s work brings together his extensive formal training with his own observations and lived experience. His assemblage-style paintings frequently begin with a monochromatic black ground elaborated with white chalk—a pointed reversal of the traditional figure-ground relationship. He subsequently adds other markings and materials, such as wallpaper, advertisements, rulers, and paintbrushes. Expressionistic swaths of paint and line drawings tangle with found objects, signs, and doors collected from his physical surroundings at home and abroad, creating unexpected visual rhymes and resonances. At once deliberately constructed and improvisatory, didactic and deeply felt, these richly built surfaces conjure a range of themes, allowing for a nuanced multiplicity of meanings.

Documenting a two-part exhibition at David Zwirner and Andrew Kreps Gallery in 2024, this publication features a conversation between curator Ebony Haynes and the Studio Museum of Harlem director Thelma Golden about Golden’s multidecade engagement with Saunders’s artwork and writing. A facsimile of Saunders’s self-published pamphlet from 1967, Black Is a Color—his vital essay on the creative expression of the artist—is reproduced alongside new commentary by the art historian Darby English. An essay by Jarrett Earnest offers an in-depth interpretation of two of Saunders’s complex chalkboard works. Also included are a previously unpublished interview from 1980 between the artist and Judith Wilson and a pivotal text from 1993 by the art historian Richard J. Powell that offers a panoramic examination of Saunders’s art from 1968 to 1993, with a special focus on his iconic painting Dr. Jesus.