Small building, big expectations
Ruby City is expected to bring major impact to San Antonio art scene
SAN ANTONIO — Ruby City, the new jewelbox of an exhibition space tucked away just south of downtown, is a relatively small building, but it’s expected to have a big impact on the city’s art scene.
The $16 million contemporary art center designed by noted architect Sir David Adjaye was built by the Linda Pace Foundation as a public showcase for the art collection of its namesake, the late philanthropist and artist Linda Pace. It opens to the public Oct. 13.
Adjaye’s creation has just 10,000 square feet of exhibition space on two stories. By comparison, the McNay Art Museum has 32,000 square feet of indoor exhibition space; the San Antonio Museum of Art has a whopping 87,351.
But the impact of Ruby City — San Antonio’s first collecting institution devoted exclusively to contemporary art — could be substantial. City leaders expect it to raise the profile of the city’s architecture and of its arts community and to bring in deeppocketed tourist fans of art and architecture who might not otherwise have come.
It’s happened in far less likely places, said sculptor Bill FitzGibbons, who was a close friend of Pace’s.
“There are people from all
over the world that go to Marfa, in the middle of nowhere, to see a bunch of (famed minimalist artist) Donald Judd’s boxes, right? And so you can imagine the people that are going to come to see Ruby City,” said FitzGibbons, who owns Dock Space, a Lone Star Art District gallery just a few blocks away.
“And if they’re going to be at Ruby City, they’re going to want to go to the McNay, they’re going to want to go to SAMA, and here for Second Saturday. That can only have a superpositive effect.”
In anticipation of such far-flung patrons, the art center’s exhibits will be up for months if not years at a time. The opening exhibit, “Waking Dream,” will be up through 2022.
The new project already has garnered big-time media attention, and it hasn’t even opened yet. Architectural Digest has written a fair amount about the museum, calling it one of the most anticipated buildings of the year. Others on that list include the Le Monde headquarters in Paris, the Statue of Liberty Museum in New York and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
Adjaye, who may be best known for his lauded design of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, spoke of the new building in religious terms during a tour he led in January.
“This is a little temple to come to and just enjoy and be inspired and be moved by what art means to a society, what it means about us human beings in the world, and what it can do for us to help us think about the future. This is a place for that,” he said.
‘Personal tribute’
Pace first started talking about creating a public space for her collection in 2004, said Kelly O’Connor, head of collections and communications for Ruby City. Pace hand-picked Adjaye for the project after installation artist Isaac Julien, a mutual friend, connected the two, and the project started taking shape shortly before her death in 2007 following a battle with breast cancer.
Adjaye, who designed Julien’s studio and has designed buildings around the globe, was a respected architect at the time, but his profile has risen since. The Ghanian-British architect was knighted in 2017, and that same year, he was named one of the 100 most influential people of the year by Time magazine. Most of his work in the United States is concentrated in New York and in Washington, D.C. Ruby City is his first building in Texas.
The look of the new building was inspired by an image that came to Pace in a dream. She often was guided by dreams, and she shared the drawing with Adjaye when they talked about what she wanted from the building. He has said he referenced it often as he worked.
The main exhibition space on the second floor is divided into three galleries, each paying homage to a different, classic artist’s space: a home studio, a garret space and a repurposed factory as studio.
“What’s so striking about the building is its faceted form ,” said Elizabeth Fazzare, assistant editor of Architectural Digest, via email. “As you walk around the structure, it shifts in feel from monumental to intimate. Inside, the same is true.”
“Light is a particularly exciting element at Ruby City,” she continued. “With embedded glass fragments, even the red concrete facade sparkles in the Texas sun. Context, rather than a particular architectural style, always drives Sir David Adjaye’s work. And Ruby City is a touching, deeply personal tribute to Linda Pace.”
Adding Adjaye’s work to the city is significant, said San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg.
“This is one of the most highly respected architects in the world, and for him to do a project here under the vision of Linda Pace is a next-level kind of achievement for San Antonio’s arts community,” he said.
It’s another advance for the city’s growing reputation for its architecture, said Fazarre.
“Home of the Alamo, San Antonio is a place with deep history, conjuring images of haciendas and mission-style buildings,” Fazzare said. “But in recent years, the city has raised its profile with the expansion of the River Walk and other developments that reveal the transformative power of public green space.”
Tourist selling point
Besides the beauty of the building and the artwork within it, Adjaye’s name alone is likely to draw travelers.
“Depending on the reputation and the stature of the architect, there are people that will travel just to see buildings by one of their favorite architects,” said W. James Burns, an Arizonabased consultant for museums and other nonprofits.
Those travelers also tend to spend a fair amount, he said.
“There’s a lot of tourism that tends to follow the arts, and the data shows that cultural tourists tend to spend more,” Burns said. “It’s not just the event that they’re attending, it’s the hotel stays, it’s the local shopping and the restaurants nearby.”
To make sure that word about Ruby City reaches those potential tourists, Visit San Antonio plans a big social media push pegged to the opening. It also is helping to coordinate plans by national and international media outlets to cover it, said Richard Oliver, director of partner and community relations.
“Ruby City is a big, red shiny piece that we can let people know about,” said Oliver. “It’s going to be one of those things that lifts us another notch into that spotlight.”
Pace legacy
Ruby City is just one part of Pace’s legacy in San Antonio. Pace — whose family founded Pace Foods, which gave the world Pace Picante Sauce — also created Artpace, the nonprofit arts residency program that is celebrating its 25th anniversary. It is separate from Ruby City and is based in the same spot Pace selected — a former Hudson auto showroom. Its mission remains the same as it always has been: to support regional, national and international artists in the creation of new work.
Some of the artists in
“Waking Dream,” the debut exhibition at Ruby City, are alumni of Artpace, including Julien, who was one of the speakers at Pace’s memorial service. He noted that she could have created Artpace anywhere in the country, but it was important to her that it be here.
“She wanted it to be seen as a destination for contemporary art — and she succeeded,” Julien said, according to an ExpressNews story about the service.
Ruby City is part of a small arts campus that started taking shape in 2001, when Pace bought the Tobin Building on Camp Street. She developed the building, which had been erected in 1926 as a candy factory, as a residential property, and lived on the top two floors.
The first public element of the campus was Chris Park, a lush, art-laced green space constructed in 2005 as a memorial to Pace’s son Chris Goldsbury, who died in 1997 at the age of 24. One of the walkways through the park leads to Studio, a small, sleek gallery that opened in 2014. It, too, exhibits pieces from Pace’s collection.
The entire campus was dubbed Ruby City last year.
In her lifetime, Pace accumulated an art collection of around 600 works. Some of it was displayed in her home — “be amazing,” the 1999 neon piece by Sylvie Fleury visible through the front window of Ruby City, hung near Pace’s front door as a source of encouragement, O’Connor said.
Some was stored. Ruby City stands on the site of a former icehouse that was converted into a storage space for some of the collection, O’Connor said.
The collection now is maintained by the foundation, which Pace tasked with creating a space to share it with the public. The foundation has added to the collection since Pace’s death, bringing the total number of works to around 900.
All of that gave Kathryn Kanjo, a foundation trustee who worked closely with Pace, plenty to draw from for Ruby City’s first exhibition.
She chose 50 pieces for “Waking Dream,” including some of Pace’s own work.
“This is a small slice,” said Kanjo, director and CEO of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and a former director of Artpace. “I hope it’s a reflection of the larger whole.”
“Waking Dream” will be on display through 2022. The exhibitions will run long term, giving visitors both local and from out of town plenty of opportunities to see the work. Shorter-term exhibits — also drawn from the collection — will be shown in Studio. “Jewels in the Concrete,” which also opens Oct. 13, will be on display through April.
“Waking Dream” includes Teresita Fernández’s 2005 piece “Burnout,” an array of tiny glass cubes suggestive of a beehive or the sun; Cornelia Parker’s eerie 2004 installation “Heart of Darkness,” constructed of shards of wood burned in a Florida wildfire; and Christian Marclay’s 1999 piece “Accordion,” an oversize rendering of the instrument created during his Artpace residency.
Many of the pieces have a dreamlike feel, a reflection of the importance of dreams in Pace’s life.
“That quality is in a lot of the works,” said Kanjo. “They feel a little bit dreamy, a little bit unreal. They’re familiar, but they’re not.”
How it fits in
Ruby City will be the city’s first exhibition space devoted exclusively to collecting and exhibiting contemporary art. Its mission complements a few other institutions, including Blue Star Contemporary and the McNay, as well as a slew of galleries.
Art community leaders see the addition of Ruby City and the attention that comes with it as a rising tide lifts all boats situation.
“We showcase a lot of the same type of work, and I think that’s what we’re most excited about, having another powerhouse in the Southtown community, which is the destination for contemporary art in the downtown area,” said Mary Heathcott, executive director of Blue Star Contemporary. “I’m excited about how that will amplify and increase once they’re open.”
The two organizations already are collaborating on programming. They presented the first joint offering in their Contemporary Film Series in May, when “Moonlight” was screened in Chris Park. The next presentation will be “The Matrix,” slated to screen outdoors in the sculpture garden on Nov. 9.
Katie Luber, the outgoing director of the San Antonio Museum of Art, sees Ruby City as another important step forward in the continuing growth and expansion of the city’s art scene.
“I think the impact of events like this on cities can’t be underestimated,” said Luber, who remembers visiting San Antonio as a child at a time where there wasn’t much to do here. “Especially since this is all done with private money, it shows the commitment of the community to the arts, and I hope that it makes everybody here sit up and pay attention and listen. This is something really amazing, and something that is a harbinger of the future of our sophistication, our intelligence, and our importance as a global art center.”