SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Ruby City announced that Robert Hodge’s Promise You Will Sing About Me, 2019, a recent acquisition to the Linda Pace Foundation Collection, will be joining Irrationally Speaking: Collage & Assemblage in Contemporary Art beginning June 12, 2025. To make space for this exciting addition, selections from the Timeline series, 2004-5 by Linda Pace, will be deinstalled on June 9, 2025. Ruby City has been pleased to have shared Pace’s work with the public and look forward to welcoming visitors to experience this new addition.

Promise You Will Sing About Me is a multidimensional, altar-like structure that weaves together everyday materials and reclaimed objects to explore themes of cultural memory, loss, and resilience. Featuring fabric, LP sleeves, found images of the Black Panther Party, acrylic flowers, a model ship, and a small globe, the work evokes complex social and political histories. The globe, inspired by Hodge’s childhood mishearing of a lyric in a popular song by A Tribe Called Quest “Award Tour” as “A World Tour,” becomes a metaphor for the transatlantic slave trade and the forced migration of African peoples.

At once personal and communal, the work serves as a tribute to lost friends, family, and ancestral legacy. Carefully chosen books—including Black Saga: The African Experience, a Fred Wilson exhibition catalog, Black Roots: The Beginners Guide to Tracing the African American Family Tree, and The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X—further ground the work in a critical historical context. Hodge’s signature STEREO motif appears layered throughout the piece, asking the enduring question: “Can you hear me?”

This powerful work will join Irrationally Speaking, an exhibition that explores the creative and conceptual possibilities of collage and assemblage in contemporary art. Through layered materials, disparate objects, and unexpected juxtapositions, the featured artists—including Leonardo Drew, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Wangechi Mutu, and Deborah Roberts, among others—challenge the boundaries of visual language to reflect on history, identity, and culture.

Hodge’s work will be on view as part of Irrationally Speaking: Collage & Assemblage in Contemporary Art beginning June 12, 2025, and through the duration of the exhibition which closes on August 31, 2025.