Starting in the 1960s, Raymond Saunders (b. 1934, Homestead, Pennsylvania: d. 2025, Oakland) developed a painting practice rooted in improvisation. He combined everyday objects, found imagery, drawing, notational markings, and text in constellated compositions blending abstraction and figuration against the complex backdrop of US history.

Flowers from a Black Garden 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 more than thirty works, it investigates his multifaceted and nonlinear process of picture making, which carried forward, in reference and reverence, myriad histories and languages of art. From Dada, expressionism, and assemblage to Fluxus, Pop, and Postmodernism, Saunders charted an unexpected path as well as a romance with painting’s poetic modes of communicating layers of consciousness.

In his large-scale works, Saunders routinely deployed a black ground, recalling both 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 wrote. “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.”

Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden is co-organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art and UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art.

Major support for Raymond Saunders: Flowers for a Black Garden is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.