Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden

Heinz Galleries On view through July 13, 2025

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.

Read, Watch, Listen

Black Is a Color

Essays

Raymond’s Riffs: A Raymond Saunders Playlist

Playlists

raymond saunders postcard that says from Nothing to say by Raymond Saunders in conversation with Christopher cook January 1987

Raymond Saunders: Nothing to Say

Essays

Raymond Saunders

Essays

Select Works

About the Artist

Raymond Saunders lives and works in Oakland, CA. He obtained his BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, before moving to California, where he earned his MFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Saunders joined the faculty of California State University East Bay, Hayward, in 1968, eventually becoming an arts professor at California College of the Arts in Oakland. Saunders currently holds the title of professor emeritus from Cal State East Bay in Hayward. He was awarded a Rome Prize Fellowship in 1964, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976, and is a two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Awards (1977, 1984). His work was recently included in the traveling exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, 1963–1983, organized by Tate Modern, London. He was also included in the traveling exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980, organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Saunders works are included in the permanent collections of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Howard University, Washington, DC; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland; and Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, CA; among many others.

Support

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

Generous support for Carnegie Museum of Art’s presentation is provided by The Fine Foundation. Additional support is provided by Carnegie Mellon University.

Carnegie Museum of Art’s exhibition program is supported by the Carnegie Museum of Art Exhibition Fund and The Fellows of Carnegie Museum of Art.

Carnegie Museum of Art is supported by The Heinz Endowments and Allegheny Regional Asset District. Carnegie Museum of Art receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.