At 19, Alteronce Gumby left Harrisburg without knowing who Picasso was. He returns to his hometown this week a world traveler with an international reputation as an abstract painter and budding filmmaker.
“I’m really excited to come back home and share the work I’ve been up to with the community that helped raise me,” Gumby, now 40, told PennLive during a recent phone interview.
Gumby, whose many family ties to Harrisburg continue to lure him from his Bronx, N.Y., home, is being celebrated with an exhibit at the Susquehanna Art Museum. The show, featuring his colorful, cosmos-inspired, glass-and-gem-bedecked paintings, is entitled, “If Herr Street Could Talk.”
Yes, it’s that Herr Street, which courses through the Allison Hill neighborhood near where Gumby grew up on the 1800 block of Market Street. Both of his grandmothers, along with a great grandmother, lived nearby on Herr.
Their homes were hubs for Gumby’s extended family, always brimming with food and bustling with activity. Those few blocks around 18th Street became Gumby’s whole world, the axis of his childhood.
The artist as a young man: Alteronce Gumby growing up in Harrisburg. Today, at age 40, he’s a celebrated artist. (Provided photo)Provided photo
“I remember just constantly visiting,” recalled the 2004 Harrisburg High grad. “I would go from one house to the next, just walking up and down Herr Street, because those were the meeting hubs of family. I’d walk in that house, and it would just be full of aunts and uncles, cousins, distant relatives, friends of the family. That’s the place that kind of made me who I am, those very formative years.”
Gumby poured all that personal history into the painting named after Herr Street.
“That painting is paying a homage to a neighborhood, a community, a street that really helped make me who I am,” he said.
The process of creating it was just as personal.
Gumby dispensed with a brush, painting with his hands and fingers. All the colored glass that highlights the cosmic, up-sloping path from his childhood was set by hand. He likened his intimate process to a master gardener sinking his hands into soil. He hopes viewers of the work can feel the love, too.
“There’s a very human process for making that painting that I hope someone can pick up on,” he said. “There’s a visceral connection when I paint with my hands. If anything, I just hope people could just feel the love or the affection — the touch — particularly within that painting.”
Image of Harrisburg-born artist Alteronce Gumby’s painting is courtesy of parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles. © Alteronce Gumby.
Photo credit: Ed Mumford
PennLive
Gumby also credits his racially diverse hometown with igniting his artistic interest in color. He spoke of boyhood friends from Puerto Rico, Africa, Vietnam and fondly recalled feasting on both the food and culture at Passage to India, the Shipoke restaurant that closed in 2022.
“There’s something about that micro-diversity in Harrisburg — the textures of culture, tastes of culture and a sense of community — that shaped me,” he said.
As both an artist and a Black man, color – and all the moral and societal stigmas that come with it – became Gumby’s obsession.
“If society says I am a Black man, I want to be my own shade of Black, my own hue of Black, my own uniqueness of whatever Black is,” he declared.
His explorations of color have led him to work with raw pigments, gemstones and glass, connecting his art to geology, physics and nature.
For Gumby, color is “one of nature’s love languages.” He seeks to reflect “its universal and spiritual dimensions” in his work.
But the spirituality radiating from his cosmos-inspired paintings comes from his mother, a Pentecostal minister. What Gumby witnessed from a Harrisburg church pew has stayed with him throughout his life.
Alteronce Gumby with his family in the familiar surroundings of church — a constant in his Harrisburg childhood and a continuing inspiration for his art. (Provided photo)Provided photo
“Watching my mother catch the Holy Ghost, speaking in tongues—those aspects of life made me think deeper about otherworldliness. I’m searching for that in my work,” he said.
No wonder many of his paintings reach into swirling, colorful galaxies in search of universal truths.
Image of Harrisburg-born artist Alteronce Gumby’s painting is courtesy of BODE Gallery and Alteronce Gumby Studio.
Photo credit: Katharina Balgavy
PennLive
These are all the hometown influences and experiences that formed the artist and shaped his work. But it took leaving Harrisburg at 19 to awaken Gumby to the possibilities of the artist’s life.
Enrolled at Harrisburg Area Community College with designs on becoming an architect, Gumby was in Barcelona, Spain, on a study abroad excursion. The city’s flamboyant buildings, birthed from the mind of architect Antoni Gaudí, showed Gumby the possibilities of design.
But it was a detour into the Pablo Picasso Museum that opened his eyes to a pursuit he’d never considered. At the time, he didn’t know who Picasso was. But the art – the colors, the cubes, the freedom – didn’t just speak. It shouted.
“Going from gallery to gallery, seeing how he evolved as an artist and as a human being really just spoke to me. I wanted that for my life,” Gumby said.
The voice Gumby heard that day beckoned him to New York City. He didn’t plunge right into painting, however. Music was his first muse.
After spending five years performing in a nightclub, he took up the brush and enrolled in art school. He earned degrees from Hunter College and Yale, becoming the first college graduate in his immediate family.
Soon, he was visiting Renaissance cities in various artist-in-residency programs. He became drawn to abstraction after studying works by Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning.
Since then, Gumby’s art has been exhibited at “renowned galleries such as Nicola Vassell Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, and Gagosian,” his website says. His work is held in the collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem; Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; Allentown Art Museum; and Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee.
Or, as Susquehanna Art Museum Executive Director Alice Anne Schwab put it: “He’s the real deal. An extraordinary human being and a great talent. A 2004 Harrisburg High graduate who has made it big in the art world.”
The textured, abstract work of Harrisburg-born artist Alteronce Gumby. (Provided Photo used with permission)PennLive
Most recently, Gumby, in collaboration with writer and director John Campbell, completed his first award-winning documentary film. Entitled, ‘COLOR,’ It explores “the rich and diverse facets of color as experienced around the world,” his bio says.
But the roots of Gumby’s artistic inspirations remain in Harrisburg. Even his penchant for adding glass, gems and resins to his paintings came from his hometown visits to one of his grandmothers. She was always working a puzzle, Gumby recalled. Each time he visited, Gumby wouldn’t leave before adding a few pieces to the developing mosaic.
Looking back, Gumby said there’s a direct line from working his grandma’s puzzles to his current glass-setting technique.
Indeed, all of Gumby’s artistic quests for meaning in the infinite colors of the cosmos began when Herr Street was his whole world.
If You Go:
Alteronce Gumby’s ‘If Herr Street Could Talk’ at the Susquehanna Art Museum
Members’ preview: Thursday, November 20
Third in the Burg with the artist: Friday, November 21
Private fundraising event: Saturday, November 22.
Public exhibition during the museum’s regular hours: November 22, 2025 through February 22, 2026.
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