One Work: Raymond Saunders’s “Beauty in Darkness”

Raymond Saunders created the arresting mural-scale collage-painting Beauty in Darkness (1993–99) in his Oakland, California, studio during the tumultuous end of apartheid in South Africa. Its acerbic commentary on segregationist policies pertains as much to that context as to America’s past and present. Indeed, Beauty in Darkness attains a heightened sense of urgency in light of this country’s ongoing discourse on racial inequity, along with some government officials&rsquo