In Raymond Saunders’s Paintings, an Education on How to Rebel by Zoë Hopkins

Saunders rebels beneath the surface of his paintings, too. Throughout his career, he has asked where a painting starts - what exactly is a blank canvas? Rather than accepting white as the neutral starting point for painting, Saunders often builds dizzying assemblages up from a base of black gesso.

While some viewers may think such gestures are political, Saunders has long pushed back against a reductive linking of an artist’s work to their racial identity. In “Black Is a Color,” a 1967 essay, he rebuffed the ambitions of the Black Arts Movement - the cultural cousin of Black nationalism - as an unacceptable restriction on artistic freedom. Suggesting that Black identity solely defined one’s work was a gross error, he wrote, and by separating the two, “we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means, not the end.”

This insistence that black is, indeed, a color reverberates from the paintings in “Post No Bills.” In them, we witness a lifelong exploration of the pleasure, variety and depth of black. At times it glistens with sleek sheen, at others it wrinkles like skin, and at still others it is matter-of-fact matte.

Click here to read Zoë Hopkins’s full text on the exhibition in The New York Times.