Axis Gallery is proud to present THANKYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU, curated by Aida Lizalde. A group exhibition that engages the Sacramento community in a collaborative discussion about Thanksgiving, an American holiday about abundance that has a long and violent history of colonialism. This exhibition juxtaposes the ideas of lavishness and scarcity, and continues a conversation into the concepts and realities of shelter, space, and food. For the month of November Axis will be transformed into a platform for meetings, information, and activism with a collaborative installation, a movie theater, and a gathering space.

The holiday of Thanksgiving is a social method of inculcating and regenerating a national ethos of prosperity and abundance. This ethos has been recently challenged by the rise of movements that appeal to social justice and cultural equity. Artists play a significant part in culture-making through the creation of narratives and platforms that illustrate the current state of the world, and influence power dynamics in civic space and institutions alike. THANKYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU welcomes works by artists and activists Andres Alvarez, Karlos Rene Ayala, Garrett Daniells, Rob Fatal, Natani Notah, and the organizations Humanizing Deportation, and the California Allegory to have a voice in these discussions. This aggregate represents an underlying camaraderie between the communities that resist the nation’s oppression and marginalization.

About the Curator

Aida Lizalde was born in Mexico and immigrated to California in 2005 where she was an undocumented childhood arrival for almost a decade. She received her Bachelors in Arts in Studio Arts and a minor in Art History from the University of California, Davis. Her professional experience includes working at both commercial galleries, and non-profit art institutions including Axis Gallery, Alex Bult Gallery, Verge Center for the Arts, and the Manetti Shrem Museum. Her writing and curatorial experience is based on the online platform of Placeholder Magazine where she has published over a dozen artist features and interviews supporting local and regional artists in the Delta region of California. She has been a recipient of the Young Space Grant, the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, the Hopkins Endowment for Studio Art Students, the Crocker Kingsley Art Award, and the Herb Alpert Scholarship for Emerging Young Artists, among others.