Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden

Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition since 1996 and the most in-depth consideration of his practice to date.

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.

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 60 works, including important institutional loans, Layers of Being 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.

Learn more at Carnegie Museum of Art.