Alteronce Gumby
These days, Bronx-based artist Alteronce Gumby spends most of his time in a New York City studio creating abstract, cosmic paintings. But the painter’s first fascinations with light, color and perception began in his native Harrisburg.
His current Susquehanna Art Museum exhibition, “If Herr Street Could Talk,” has returned 25 pieces of his mixed-media art just a few blocks away from the childhood stomping grounds that shaped his artistic eye.
“He was right here in our backyard,” Susquehanna Art Museum Executive Director Alice Anne Schwab said.
With this homecoming show, the Harrisburg High graduate hopes to inspire the city’s young artists.
“You can come from humble beginnings and still be a creative person,” he said. “You can be whatever you want to be.”
As a child, the now internationally celebrated, award-winning painter didn’t realize that being an artist was a career path available to him. His mother worked as a pastor and a secretary, and his father was a custodian for the state. He said there was no talk of exploring creative careers in his working-class family. He stumbled into it.
After completing a drafting and design vo-tech program in high school, he entered an architecture program at HACC and signed up to study abroad in Spain. While visiting the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, he had an artistic awakening.
“That was what really opened my eyes to fine art, painting, drawing, ceramics and sculpture,” Gumby said.
When he returned home, he remembers visiting the Susquehanna Art Museum and other contemporary art galleries in the area. Soon after, he moved to New York City, where he continued thinking about Picasso and eventually enrolled in the city’s Arts Students League to practice figure drawing.
During this time, a friend invited him to the Museum of Modern Art.
“She kind of ghosted me, and so I ended up going by myself and seeing this amazing show by abstract expressionists,” he said. “From there, I was just really in love with painting and abstraction.”
He started painting with bright colors in his room, and soon, an instructor at the Art Students League suggested that he go back to school for art.
He did just that, enrolling at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., as an art major. From there, he transferred to Hunter College and got a BFA in painting and, subsequently, an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University.
He’s since spent nine years out of the classroom, honing his unique technique.
Common materials of Gumby’s include oil and acrylic paint, gemstones, resin, shards of glass and fabric.
“And imagination,” he said.
His pieces put color theory into practice—sometimes playing with monochromatic hues, other times, high contrast opposites. The highly reflective materials that Gumby applies to the surface of his paintings alter the color of his pieces when the observer moves.
His fascination with the viewer’s shifting perception of color is rooted in his experience as a person of color, he said, and seeing how color could be used to “open up the conversation” around color and the human condition.
Rachel O’Connor, director of exhibitions at the Susquehanna Art Museum, said his art is transportive in this way.
“One of the wonderful things that his work can do, is give you this moment to intentionally observe color, to intentionally observe light,” O’Connor said. “On top of that, he welcomes the viewer to take space to think even further about what color can mean to us.”
Nostalgically, Gumby also draws inspiration from light and colors he saw growing up on Herr Street, where his maternal and paternal grandmothers lived, respectively, on the 1700- and 1500-blocks.
He can still vividly see the shadows dancing across the brick houses as he walked between his grandmothers’ houses after school—the light dancing across the leaves he’d rake or the snow he’d shovel for them, and the rainbow casting through a suncatcher hung on one of their windows.
He’s described the exhibition as both a tribute and an offering to his home city.
“To bring the experiences I have had back to Harrisburg and to share my work with the community that helped raise me — it’s pretty big,” he said.
“If Herr Street Could Talk” runs through Feb. 22 at the Susquehanna Art Museum, 1401 N. 3rd St., Harrisburg. For more information, visit www.susquehannaartmuseum.org.
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