Postcards from Barton Springs

Ruby City, designed by architect Sir David Adjaye Obe

I like to collaborate with artists that see space and structure as integral to their work. It involves a merging of skills and aesthetics to create something that has more potential than either discipline can achieve on its own.

Architect David Adjaye

That desire must have made Linda Pace (1945-2007) an ideal client for the architect of international renown, for the passionate collector of art was an artist herself. Writing for The Guardian just prior to the October 2019 opening of the Linda Pace Foundation’s Ruby City in San Antonio, Adjaye noted that Ruby City is an:

…example of how place and history are always important. Linda… had cancer and it had just become aggressive. She knew she was starting to go down. She became fascinated with dreams and their interpretation…. Then she drew this place she called Ruby City. Her drawing looks like a shining city on a hill or a Russian Orthodox church. For her it was a vessel, a hope…. a hope that her disappearance would have an impact.

I became fascinated by it. Red had become so important to her that I wanted to use that as a start point. From discussions we had, I looked at San Antonio and the missionaries who came to the region and the structures they built, the incredible monasteries. I also looked at pre-colonization America and Mesoamerican culture and their relationship to making architecture out of mud and raising these incredible citadels all over that part of Texas and New Mexico. The commonality for me between the monasteries and citadels is that they’re both about religion but also about death and communing with the afterlife – and they’re habitation spaces. Those ideas, mixed with her idea of the form, became an idea about architecture articulating light as a revealer of different facets of her art collection….

So the Ruby City building is about Linda, Texas and the collection.

“5,000 lbs. of Sonny’s Airplane Parts,” Nancy Rubins, 1997

“Heart of Darkness,” Cornelia Parker, 2004

detail of “Dreaming Red,” collage by Linda Pace

Ruby City sculpture garden

Ruby City from sculpture garden

chairs in the sculpture garden

Ruby City viewed from Chris Park

Alejandro Diaz

Hong Kong orchid tree in Chris Park

Kim Jones

“A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love or Where You Goin’ with that Gun in Your Hand, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton Discuss the Relationships Between Expressionism and Social Reality Present in Hitler’s Paintings,” Daniel Joseph Martinez, 2007

“Accordion,” Christian Marclay, 1999

“Mirror Mirror (igloo),” Linda Pace, with (background) “Your Whole Fucking Culture Alienates Me,” Andrea Bowers, 2006

“Stones Against Diamonds,” video installation, Isaac Julien, 2015

“Colour Motoric Entrance,” Olafur Eliasson, 2004

detail of “Dreaming Red,” collage by Linda Pace

Ruby City stairway

Ruby City viewed from Camp Street

Linda Pace left behind a collection of more 900 works of art in the hands of the foundation that bears her name. The immense collection will be displayed in rotating exhibitions in the new Ruby City and her former studio and Chris Park across the street. Entrance to the campus and galleries is admission-free.

For now, Ruby City addresses the back service vehicle parking lot of an inartistic branch of the United States Post Office, but that dismal view will be dramatically changed as part of Phase Two, now in the planning stages, of the San Pedro Creek Project.