Before Delgreta Brown called herself a painter, she was a teenager making $50 a gig as a youth artist for the Sacramento Children and Families Commission.
“It was the coolest thing,” she says. “I told my brother, if we sign up for two of these town halls, that’s a hundred dollars each, for doing art.”
Now, nearly two decades later, Brown stands at a different threshold. Her solo exhibition at Axis Gallery, “Gardens of Huemanity,” showcases both her artistic growth and spiritual development.
“Gardens of Huemanity” is on view for free at Axis Gallery through Sunday, March 1. A public reception is scheduled for 5-8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 14, during which visitors can meet Brown and experience work by other exhibiting artists in the space.
Brown says the spelling “Huemanity” is intentional and represents identity.
“I paint from a Black lens,” Brown says. “I’m African American. My work comes from that cultural perspective.”
The title also carries a more personal element: a tribute to her mother, who died in 2018.
An English teacher who worked with underserved and at-risk youth, her mother often invited Brown into her classroom as a guest poet. She tended to her students, Brown says, the way a gardener tends soil.
“She was a gardener of humanity,” Brown explains. “She tended to the future.”
That memory is at the heart of the exhibition. Brown’s paintings move through aquatic, terrestrial, and celestial environments. In them you see deep waters, open roads, intergalactic expanses. Black figures appear in places often denied to them historically: in space, in myth, in imagined futures.
“For me, Afrofuturism is spiritual and cultural aesthetics,” Brown says. “It’s history, and then letting your imagination take over.”
Water recurs in her work and she explains that it has a powerful meaning.
“The deeper the ocean goes, the deeper self-analysis goes,” she says. “The monsters get bigger. The secrets get darker.”
Everything in her work has a purpose.
In one recently completed painting, a lone figure walks down a road emerging from clouds, dropping jewels behind him. The piece is titled “Dropping Jewels,” slang for sharing knowledge.
She began the painting years ago but felt compelled to finish it recently as debates around education and truth intensified.
“Knowledge is under attack,” she says. “So the jewels became important.”
In another piece still in progress, a half-visible octopus stretches across a circular canvas. Some viewers might question the departure from human form, but Brown sees symbolism.
“Octopuses are highly intelligent. They feel their world,” she explains. “Even animals have something to teach us.”
Tentacles become neural networks. Deep-sea creatures become metaphors for subconscious exploration. Everything holds meaning.
Brown describes her creative process as immersive and intuitive. She works on multiple canvases at once, rotating between them as energy shifts. Music plays constantly, often ’70s and ’80s soul, rich with live instruments and layered textures.
“Everything is frequency,” she says. “If I’m trying to paint love and beauty, I can’t be listening to something low-vibrational.”
The Axis Gallery exhibition marks a significant moment for Brown as an artist. After years of youth mentorship, coordinating poetry competitions, participating in public art initiatives, and serving on arts committees, she is consciously redirecting her energy toward her studio practice.
“I’ve given a lot,” she says. “Now I want to give my art the focus it deserves.”
The gallery, a 35-year-old membership-run space, is free to the public, which Brown values deeply.
“This space belongs to the community,” Axis President Roma Devanbu says. “Supporting art is choosing vitality, not just survival.”
For Brown, such an approach matches her goals.
“We’re all sharing this turf,” she says. “No one owns anything. So why are we fighting about belonging?”
Her answer is not an argument; it is imagery. Black bodies in space. Roads through clouds. Jewels of knowledge. Tentacled wisdom rising from the deep.
She sees society at a crossroads, torn between division and unity. She believes everyone has something to offer and that each person can use their own skills to help heal.
“We can be our own version of the Avengers,” she says. “But you have to want to assemble.”
In the meantime, she paints. She plants color like seeds. And she tends, carefully, to her garden.Artists interested in joining the Axis Gallery can contact Devanbu at romadevanbu@gmail.com or Fiona K. Lau at Fionakylau@hotmail.com.