[12] A prominent figure among women artists at Yirrkala, Gulumbu was one of the leaders who shifted their focus away from painting sacred clan designs in their work.

[14] It was not until she began painting in the early 2000s and won the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2004 that her artistic endeavors garnered attention.

[17] In 2012, a painting on wood titled Garrurru (Sail), weighing a tonne and measuring seven by three metres, was installed at the Australian National University,[18] at the Hedley Bull Centre for World Politics.

She was one of eight Aboriginal artists whose art was incorporated into the design of the museum itself, creating a ceiling of stars composed of thousands of dots on the second floor of the building.

[23] The curatorial team visited Gulumbu for the commission to hear her clan’s customary stories and gained approval to adapt her work into a design one hundred times larger than the original, embedded into the building fabric in Paris.

Her work has also been featured in the Basic Needs Pavilion at the Hannover World Expo in 2000, the Melbourne Art Fair and the Kerry Stokes Larrikitj Collection.

[25][1] In 2018 Yunupingu's work was included in the exhibition Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia at The Phillips Collection.

[26] Gulumbu's work is featured in Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala, an exhibition that opened at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth in September 2022 and continues to tour the United States.

In 2004 she won the 'Big Telstra' prize at the 21st National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award for a piece entitled Garak, The Universe, which consists of three memorial poles, decorated in her own style, which combines traditional Yolngu designs with her own modern interpretation.

[18][2][27] Yunupingu suffered from terminal cancer, but she continued journeying to various artistic events, such as the MCA building in Sydney, where her works were displayed.