Introducing Ruby City, San Antonio’s David Adjaye–Designed Arts Center
In 2007, just before her death, Texas-based art collector Linda Pace had a vision for a museum. It has finally come to life
Dreams played an outsize role in the life of artist, collector and philanthropist Linda Pace. A food company heiress in San Antonio, Texas, Pace began having dreams about making art in 1987, when she was in her early 40s; it was after she had decided to leave her husband of two decades, and eight years before she opened Artpace, a nonprofit artist residency program in her hometown. “Night by night, I experienced the part of me that existed independent of what was expected of me,” she wrote years later. In early 2007, after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, Pace had what she described as “an absolutely incredible dream,” in which she and a friend were walking along a “serpentine boardwalk” together. “At the end of the boardwalk was a ruby city, like the Emerald City, but it was rubies,” she recalled. She made a drawing of her red-hued vision, which she hung next to her bed.
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Pace died in July of that year, at the age of 62, but this October her dream will become a reality with the opening of the Ruby City contemporary art center in San Antonio. Inspired by Pace’s sketch, the 14,000-square-foot structure was designed by David Adjaye, the London-based architect best known for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Ruby City will showcase works from the Linda Pace Foundation’s extensive collection, which includes pieces by artists such as Teresita Fernández, Isaac Julien, Rachel Whiteread, Mona Hatoum, Glenn Ligon, Maya Lin and Christian Marclay. “Linda collected art in a very subjective way, from her gut instinct and because she had a personal connection to the artist who made it,” says Fernández, a former Artpace artist in residence. Ruby City will also house some of Pace’s own symbolism-heavy drawings and assemblages.
“The idea of wonderment, of making a building that would glisten and be a special retreat for her collection, was something that Linda spoke to me quite often about,” says Julien, the installation artist and former Artpace resident who first introduced Pace to Adjaye in 2006. The architect visited Pace in San Antonio the next year, and she showed him her drawing of Ruby City. “She had this image of this incredible shining place,” Adjaye recalls. “In my mind, it was like a church or temple for art.” He made some preliminary sketches of his design for her. “The one thing she said to me was, ‘Please, please make this building happen,’ ” Adjaye says. The Ruby City project was delayed for years, in part due to the 2008 recession, but construction finally began in 2017.
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Adjaye has translated Pace’s concept into “a very real, very weighty and yet still fantastical building,” says Kathryn Kanjo, a Linda Pace Foundation trustee and the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The two-floor museum is cantilevered at either end. The exterior is made of precast concrete; the lower 10 feet of the building’s surface has a smooth finish, while the upper portion is rough, embedded with two kinds of red glass. “We spent months testing samples out there, because to make a red building in concrete is not easy,” Adjaye says.
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The building’s rooftop features a pair of lantern-like structures with skylights that illuminate the galleries below. Once inside, visitors will follow a circular path ending up back where they started, in a lobby painted ruby red to provide continuity with the exterior. The museum will afford views of the Ruby City campus, which includes the one-acre Chris Park, built in 2005 in memory of Pace’s son, Christopher Goldsbury, who died in 1997, and Studio, the Linda Pace Foundation gallery, which opened in 2014. A new sculpture garden will feature an elliptical walkway and work by Nancy Rubins.
