04/30/2026
Axis Gallery is proud to announce: Adding Stones to Rise, a curated exhibition of Sacramento artists
May 1st - May 29th
Reception: May 9, 5-8pm
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.
