Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden

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.