Jgm Not For Web|01 Ff Ag Their Eyes Were Watching God 1 Credit False Flag|Justingmoore Photo 300 Credit Dario Calmese

Justin Garrett Moore on the Work of Artist Alteronce Gumby

The executive director of the New York City Public Design Commission reflects on how a painting forms a personal backdrop to the pandemic and this year’s protests for racial justice.

01 Ff Ag Their Eyes Were Watching God 1 Credit False Flag
Courtesy FalseFlag

When I turned 40, I acquired a painting by South Bronx, New York–based artist Alteronce Gumby titled Their Eyes Were Watching God. It references the novel of the same name by Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston, which captures African-American life in segregated 1920s America and culminates in a social, environmental, and public health disaster.

Now, as I work from home, society faces a pandemic, protests, and poverty. On the wall of my Harlem apartment, Gumby’s painting has become a literal and figurative backdrop to my work on social and environmental equity. In Zoom meetings, people remark on its iridescence and curious patterns. Its shattered glass, grout, acrylic, and wood are materials latent with the subjectivity of broken-windows policing, embodied labor, energy, and carbon, and the effort it takes to make whole and beautiful something that is smashed, imperfect, and real. Online, people can’t see the painting’s blues lose color from certain perspectives—like a morpho butterfly—or that, as I work late into the night, it almost appears black, like me.

Justingmoore Photo 300 Credit Dario Calmese
Justin Garrett Moore is an urban designer and the executive director of the New York City Public Design Commission. Courtesy Dario Calmese

You may also enjoy “Noteworthy: Artist Shinique Smith on Skins

Would you like to comment on this article? Send your thoughts to: [email protected]


Register here for Metropolis’s Think Tank Thursdays and hear what leading firms across North America are thinking and working on today.

Recent Profiles