Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden

Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden is the artist’s first retrospective exhibition at a major American museum and the most comprehensive consideration of his practice to date.

Since the 1960s, artist Raymond Saunders (b. 1934) has developed a painting practice rooted in improvisation. Working across mediums, he combines everyday objects, found imagery, drawing, notational markings, and text in constellated compositions that blend abstraction and figuration against the complex backdrop of American history.

Saunders was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, where he participated in Carnegie Museum of Art’s still ongoing Saturday art classes for young people. His mentor, Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, the instructor of the museums’ Saturday art classes and the director of art for Pittsburgh public schools, also taught Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and Mel Bochner. He obtained a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and went on to earn a BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology (1960). He then moved to Oakland, CA, where he continues to live and work. He received an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts (1961) and later served there and at California State University East Bay as a faculty member.

In his large-scale works, Saunders routinely deploys a black ground recalling a literal blackboard and the ideas explored in his 1967 essay Black Is a Color, in which he claims an expansive role for the Black artist. “i am not here to play the gallery,” Saunders writes. “i am not responsible for anyone’s entertainment. i am responsible for being as fully myself, as man and artist, as I possibly can be, while allowing myself to hope that in the effort some light, some love, some beauty may be shed upon the world, and perhaps some inequities put right.”

This exhibition moves freely across the artist’s career, taking as its point of departure Saunders’s position as a consummate student and passionate teacher of painting. Through some 35 works, including important institutional loans, it will investigate his multifaceted and nonlinear process of picture-making, which carries forward, in reference and reverence, myriad histories and languages of art. From Dada, expressionism, and assemblage to Fluxus, Pop, and postmodernism, Saunders’s charts an unexpected path through the medium of painting, as well as a romance with its poetic modes of communicating layers of consciousness.

Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden is co-organized by Carnegie Museum of Art and Orange County Museum of Art. Carnegie Museum of Art’s presentation is curated by Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II Director, Carnegie Museum of Art, and Vice President, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, with Alyssa Velazquez, assistant curator.