Adding Stones to Rise May 1 – May 30

May 1 - May 30, 2026, 

Second Saturday Reception: May 9, 5-8 PM

This exhibition grows out of an ongoing curatorial inquiry into how natural systems—erosion, accumulation, and renewal—mirror personal and collective experience.

The title emerged from a focus on nature, the creative process, and collaboration with the artists—their works and words. Rivers appear as metaphors for release, endurance, and becoming. In these reflections, water is not only a physical force but an ancestral one—a site of cleansing, protection, and return. Stones, weight, and resistance are reframed here: not as obstacles, but as agents of change, capable of altering direction, causing water to rise, reshaping what follows. What weighs us down can also be what makes movement possible.

Adding Stones to Rise brings together Sacramento-based artists working across multiple media, their practices rooted in earth, migration, plants, weather, and water. Like a river—where each point is distinct yet inseparable from the whole—the works reflect ideas of connection, difference, and expansiveness, understanding identity, and particularly Blackness, as fluid, relational, and non-monolithic. Across the exhibition, processes of weathering and renewal unfold: water and erosion, release and persistence moving as parallel forces—creative and destructive, intimate and expansive—suggesting that survival is cyclical, and healing accumulative.

Adding Stones to Rise centers the work of Black women and nonbinary artists. The exhibition offers a collective meditation on movement, care, resistance, and transformation—an invitation to consider how we protect our energy, construct places of refuge, and find ways to rise through what we carry.

A catalog accompanying the exhibition will be available for purchase, extending these conversations beyond the gallery." "Adding Stones to Rise centers the work of Black women and nonbinary artists—new to the region, rooted here, or returning. Together, these artists offer a collective meditation on movement, care, resistance, and transformation. This exhibition is one moment in an ongoing story. It is not the first of its kind, and it will not be the last.

Participating Artists

Curator: Adero Willard

• • Debra Pitman

  • Laurelin Gilmore

  • Amari More

  • Victoria Kinyanjui

  • Khalia Morris

  • Tasha Green

  • Delgreta Brown

  • Alex Lowe

  • Sabrina Clark

  • Tasha Nicole

  • Bailey Anderson

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Join us at Axis Gallery, located at 625 S Street in Sacramento’s historic R Street Corridor, within the Verge Center for the Arts building. The gallery has exhibited innovative contemporary art for over 35 years and continues to serve as a vital space for artists to explore, connect, and share work outside the commercial sphere.

Gallery hours: Friday–Sunday, 12–5 PM