In his landmark 1967 essay, “Black Is a Color,” Raymond Saunders took aim at the pressure placed on Black artists to make work “about” their identity. “I am responsible for being as fully myself, as man and artist, as I possibly can be,” he wrote, “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.” Born in 1934 in Pittsburgh, at a time when the art world had little space for Black voices, Saunders forged his own visual language. Frequently using a black background that brings to mind classroom blackboards, he layers fragments of texts and found objects into raw, improvisational paintings that hum with a political charge. Now, at 91, Saunders is receiving his first museum retrospective, the most in-depth survey of his practice to date. —Elena Clavarino