The Paintings of Alma Gunter

About the Artist

Alma Pennell Gunter (1909–1983) African American folk artist and nurse, was born in Palestine, Texas, on June 11, 1909. Gunter’s work focuses on happy scenes from her childhood in Palestine: her grandmother tells ghost stories to her and her three brothers in Ghost Teller, and children lie on their backs watching clouds in Cloud Watchers. She used brilliant colors such as red, turquoise, blue, green, orange, and yellow in the foreground and background of a painting, a practice that tended to flatten the picture plane. Because of her lack of formal art education, she was usually called a “naive painter,” but she was nevertheless very skilled in conveying the vitality of people and scenes. She supplied written comments on each of her paintings. In addition to painting her childhood memories, Gunter also painted more ambitious “statement pieces,” usually accompanied by pointed commentary. In 1980 her work was exhibited at the Lufkin Historical and Creative Arts Center (now the Museum of East Texas), and in 1982 she had a solo exhibition at the George Washington Carver Museum in Austin that was Co-sponsored with Black Arts Alliance Project. The inclusion of her painting Dinner on the Ground in the two-year touring exhibition Texas Women-A Celebration of History brought her statewide recognition.