Raymond Saunders is often mentioned alongside Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlstein, artist contemporaries who also began their art journeys in Pittsburgh. He was even photographed by Charles “Teenie” Harris, who, like Saunders, grew up in Hill District’s Terrace Village.

Yet Saunders’ name doesn’t surface as frequently in the art-historical canon as many of his fellow Pittsburgh-raised artists. The reasons for that omission are inseparable from the questions of race and artistic freedom that the now 90-year-old Saunders confronted throughout his career. For those familiar with his work, he is a master of visual synthesis: collage, painting, chalk marks, and found objects that reflect both interior and political worlds.

The retrospective Flowers from a Black Garden, currently on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art, is more than a long-overdue celebration of Saunders’ work; it is a homecoming. Saunders returns to his creative beginnings with a monumental, yet intimate exhibition. Spanning decades of his mixed-media practice, the show offers both contradiction and clarity.

But more importantly, it affirms that Pittsburgh raised a master.

Assistant Carnegie Museum of Art curator Alyssa Velazquez believes the show “limits curatorial framing and invites audiences into his worldview directly,” allowing Saunders to speak for himself. Pull quotes from interviews, excerpts from his 1967 manifesto Black Is a Color, and text fragments lifted directly from his works are positioned throughout the space.

First published in 1967, Black Is a Color was a counterpoint to poet Ishmael Reed’s essay “The Black Artist Calling a Spade a Spade,” a critique of Black artists not being political enough. Saunders’ essay insists that identity and political relevance can coexist with formal and conceptual freedom. Black, he argued, is simply a color, just one among many on his palette.

Velazquez points out that the show highlights Saunders as both artist and educator.

“Many of the pieces in the show include Saunders’ use of the blackboard as a painting substrate,” Velazquez says, “adding a layer of educational and ephemeral connotations to the canvas and grounding the work in a space of learning.”

His use of chalkboards as canvases speaks to the classroom not just as a site of instruction, but as a space of experimentation and vulnerability. The works are often collaged, layered, and fragmentary, but there’s clarity in the chaos, a sense that what’s been left out is as important as what remains.

The show also reflects on the museum’s history with Saunders. His initial inclusion was in Pittsburgh Collects (1993), a comprehensive and free-ranging survey of the last 50 years of European and American art. That exhibition gathered works from local private and corporate collections alongside those from the museum’s holdings.

Three years later, Richard Armstrong, then Henry J. Heinz II Director at Carnegie Museum of Art, curated a solo show of Saunders’ most recent work in the museum’s Forum Gallery. Four of the nine mixed-media works shown in that presentation are reprised here, including “Joseph Fitzpatrick Was Our Teacher” (1991), a tribute to his early mentor. Also featured is “Black is a Color” (2010–15), an intellectually rich piece that features a print of “Portrait of Madeleine,” a painting by Marie-Guillemine Benoist that has become iconic for its rare depiction of a Black woman in early European portraiture. Saunders applied the image to his canvas using blue painter’s tape, anchoring a centuries-old legacy of representation within his lifelong critique of racial essentialism in art.

This framing acknowledges that while this is a solo exhibition, it’s also a retrospective of the museum’s evolving relationship with an artist once placed on the margins. That marginalization cannot be separated from race. While Warhol became a global brand and Pearlstein a critical darling, Saunders’ equal, if not greater, complexity, remained in the shadows of wider acclaim. Flowers from a Black Garden doesn’t attempt to resolve that disparity with tokenism. Instead, it builds an honest and personal space.

“The show cannot not address race,” Velazquez notes, “because it’s in the work itself.”

For Saunders, Black is not a political assignment, it’s a formal, expressive tool.

“I’m American. I’m Black. I’m a painter,” he once said. “All these things enter into what it is that becomes what I present.”

While Saunders would go on to spend decades living and working outside the city, Pittsburgh was his artistic cradle. His early life was shaped by the city’s creative and educational infrastructure, including Saturday art classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art. He later enrolled at SoHo Elementary, Fifth Avenue High School, and Schenley High School, where he studied under famed instructor Joseph Fitzpatrick. He earned his BFA at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1960. 

“Pittsburgh was artistically instrumental in Saunders knowing he could work toward bigger and better things,” Velazquez says. “It gave him a belief in himself as a teacher, too.”

In a cultural landscape that too often erases the very people who shape it, Flowers from a Black Garden is a correction and a celebration. It gives a Black elder artist the time, space, and depth his work deserves. As institutions across the country consider how to reconcile with their histories and reshape their futures, this exhibition offers a model for honoring roots while the artists are still living.

“Being with Raymond Saunders’ family as they entered the exhibition and hearing them say, ‘We knew him as Uncle Buck,’” Velazquez recalls. “That’s a sentiment I’ll always carry with me.”

As the city continues to confront its role in systemic inequities, honoring an elder Black artist whose practice is built on nuance, intellect, and material mastery feels overdue and necessary. Saunders puts it best, once saying, “Doing art is either about doing it brilliantly and a little or doing it brilliant and doing it a lot. But if it’s brilliant it’s got to be done, so let’s get it done.”’

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Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden. Continues through July 13. Carnegie Museum of Art. 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. Included with regular admission. carnegieart.org