Alteronce Gumby’s exhibition depicts earthly elements in a new light

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques. 

Since September 2025, visitors to the Anderson Collection have been greeted by jagged turquoise, violet and sepia, interspersed with bright coral and lime-green flecks. Drawing closer, visitors see these fragments shimmer and shift, flooding the gallery with color through the entrance’s wide glass windows. The painting’s title, “Lose Your Mind and Create a New One,” is at once a premonition and an invitation, encouraging viewers to loosen the confines of their perception.

This piece can be understood as a synecdoche representing the whole ethos of artist Alteronce Gumby’s exhibit at the Anderson, on display until March 1. This exhibition is the first of Gumby’s works on display on the West Coast, featuring nine works across the Anderson’s Wisch Family Gallery.

On Sept. 30, Gumby screened his 2024 documentary, “COLOR,” at the Anderson to herald his exhibit’s opening. The documentary traces Gumby’s travels through the Holi festival in Mathura, India, the Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans, Louisiana and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, where he learned from various cultural representations and natural configurations of color. 

The centrality of color in Gumby’s work is evident across his paintings. In “The Sky is Blue and What Am I,” a jewel-toned gradient glows in iridescent violet, blue and green against the stark white wall. This gradient is created from a constellation of gemstones and painted glass. The sparse but intentional placement of protruding fragments on the canvas morphs the painting into a sky speckled with stars — a source of inspiration for Gumby, who is a member of the Planetary Society.

“I feel like I’m kind of giving you the origin story,” Gumby said in an artist’s talk with the Design District, “and really trying to present color in this cosmic perspective and how color actually transforms, or transitions, from medium to medium, from energy to energy.” 

Gumby’s exploration of color continues in “Rocks on Rainbow,” where neon hues down the visible light spectrum are dashed across the square canvas. The black tourmaline layer above the rainbow constitutes the titular rocks, conjoining the sky with the land. 

“There’s these different aspects of color, materiality, how light is being reflected and amplified and utilized within the works, that I’m really into,” Gumby said on a tour at the Anderson on Feb. 5. 

Gumby’s works are also rarely stagnant. In “Chasing Rainbows,” the jagged polygonal canvas makes the rainbow appear as if in motion. The colors, overlaid with glass, stand stark against the black gemstones and move in the light. Here, the sense of motion in Gumby’s works is attributed to his use of iridescent materials, he said. 

“If you walk from left to right for most of the paintings, you’ll actually notice that the colors shift with your perspective,” Gumby said during the Anderson tour, “so the paintings are kind of asking you to dance with them.”

Gumby’s works also demonstrate a highly intentional use of raw material and physical space. A closer look at “Kozmic Blue,” another painting, renders circles of neutral tones in a sea — or sky — of blues, greens and turquoises. These slivers can be found in the tiny crevices, forming pieces of the mosaic using sunken negative space. 

Another painting, “Make it Magic,” similarly evokes earthen elements using texture. Against the lighter pastel tones of the piece, tiny circular protrusions stud the canvas. They resemble the cross-sections of geodes, evoking Gumby’s pairing of the celestial with the earthly and grounded. 

Just as the light transforms his works, Gumby’s works also transform visitors’ understanding of other artists’ works in the Anderson. Several works in the upstairs gallery are accompanied by signs with Gumby’s own explanations of how the artists had influenced him. Artistic influences on Gumby in the Anderson include Joan Mitchell, Josef Albers, Frank Stella, Elizabeth Murray and Mark Rothko.

Rothko, whose work “Pink and White over Red” is a part of the Anderson’s second gallery, is described by Gumby on an accompanying placard as the source of his recognition that color could be “the subject, the feeling and the space all at once.”

Beyond their colors, materials and forms, Gumby’s works contain yet another subject: the viewers themselves. At the back of the Anderson first floor, a painting peers at the viewer before the viewer catches its eye. Far from the other paintings, “You Got Light In Your Eyes” beckons with a multicolored mosaic that ranges from magentas to silvers to greys. The light fixture above the painting enhances the brightness of the fragments at the top, creating a contrast and cooling the surrounding fragments.

As viewers draw close enough to the canvas, they can catch their own reflections inside the shards. True to the promise of the exhibition’s opening work, the viewer’s reflection is warped, fractured and made anew in the light. 

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