Robert Kushner, born in 1949 in Pasadena, California, grew up in an artistic household profoundly shaped by his mother, Dorothy Browdy Kushner, a California Modernist painter whose studio filled with abstractions, printmaking, taxidermy, and succulents sparked his early creativity. He studied at the University of California, San Diego, where his senior exhibition in 1971 featured the performance *Costumes for Moving Bodies*. Kushner soon pioneered edible clothing in works like *Costumes Constructed and Eaten* (1972) at Jack Glenn Gallery and *Robert Kushner and Friends Eat Their Clothes* in New York, blending fabric, food, and nudity to challenge artistic boundaries.

Transitioning to painting, Kushner co-founded the Pattern and Decoration movement in the 1970s New York scene, championing ornament as a bold riposte to Minimalism's austerity. His style fuses lush floral motifs with swirling geometric patterns, rendered in vibrant oils, acrylics, gold leaf, and glitter—opulent yet modernist. Drawing from Islamic and European textiles alongside masters like Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Pierre Bonnard, and East Asian artists such as Tawaraya Sotatsu and Ito Jakuchu, Kushner's canvases celebrate pleasure and solace through fractured patterns and exotic palettes.

Key works span decades: the 1980 screenprints *Bear Claws & Bamboo* and *Pomegranates & Lilies* from *The Joy of Ornament*; monumental mosaics like *4 Seasons Seasoned* (2004) at New York's 77th Street-Lexington Avenue subway station and *Welcome* (2010) at Raleigh-Durham Airport; the immersive installation *Scriptorium: Devout Exercises of the Heart* (2010), comprising over a thousand floral drawings on antique book pages; and recent floral explosions such as *Iceland Poppies* (2024) and *Dahlia Garden Twilight* (2024).

Kushner's legacy endures through solo shows at the Whitney Museum and Brooklyn Museum (1984), a mid-career retrospective at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art (1987), three Whitney Biennials, two Venice Biennales, and recent Pattern and Decoration surveys like *With Pleasure* (MOCA, 2019-2020). His paintings grace collections at MoMA, the Met, Whitney, Tate, and the National Gallery, affirming decoration's vital role in contemporary art.