Alteronce Gumby

Alteronce Gumby’s “Somewhere Under the Rainbow / The Sky is Blue and What am I,” a dual-site exhibition at both Charles Moffett and False Flag, features 15 new works that straddle the color spectrum.

Each of Gumby’s Moonwalkers, lightning-bolt-shaped canvases on view at Charles Moffett, distill the essence of a color into the rough, glass-and-stone-studded surfaces of the canvases. Gemstones such as lapis, ruby, amethyst, and black tourmaline are layered onto a panel alongside painted glass before being sealed with acrylic. Love is Everywhere (2021) [pictured], for instance, is a Martian and purple-striated meditation on red.

At False Flag, the gargantuan How Long, Not Long (2021), twenty-four feet across, consists of blue panels of various shades and gradations, like snapshots of the night sky. A middle panel, the color of an inky sky at midnight, seems black, but isn’t quite. Gumby’s “black” is literally multi-faceted, consisting of a careful combination of painted glass and monochromatic gemstones in ambers and earth tones, dark blues and green. For Gumby, a Black artist, blackness is a kind of plenty—a color which contains all other colors.