SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Ruby City announced the 2025 acquisitions to the Linda Pace Foundation Collection, Ruby City. The works highlight artists whose practices expand the language of contemporary art through interdisciplinary approaches, abstraction, and material innovation. Spanning video, film, painting, assemblage, and sculptural installation, this year’s acquisitions include works by Joey Fauerso, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Robert Hodge, Isaac Julien, Steve Roden, and Hills Snyder.
Reflecting upon the recent additions to the Collection, Director of Ruby City, Elyse A. Gonzales shared her thoughts. “This festive time of year invites reflection and gratitude, and I am deeply grateful to the donors who gifted works to the Collection as well as to the artists who help us see the world in new ways. This year’s roster of acquisitions includes internationally, nationally and regionally renowned artists who challenge our perceptions, literally and figuratively. All of their works speak to the Foundation’s belief in the power of artists contributing to, and creating a dynamic society. Their works explore speculative futures, question the nature of painting, space and sound and in one case even send a message of cheer to all our audiences,” Gonzales stated.
Central to this year’s acquisitions is the five-channel film All That Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025) by acclaimed British artist Isaac Julien (b. 1960, London). This video installation adds yet greater depth to the Foundation’s holdings of Julien’s work and solidifies it as the largest repository of his work outside his own archive.
Julien is known for his immersive, non-narrative film installations that examine with insightful nuance black and queer identities, diaspora, migration and the politics of representation. This film installation represents a somewhat new avenue of investigation for the artist and takes as its theme transformation or metamorphosis in relation to environmental change.
In the film, memory, history, poetry, contemporary events and imagination overlay and intersect in an act of resistance against the destruction of the planet. Through architectural and textual references to the past, present, and future, as well as present day images of recent climate disasters, Julien presents transformation as inevitable and as a force we must embrace “beyond the barriers of species, gender and time,” if humans and the planet are to survive. A ten-screen version of the work is currently on view in Mantua, Italy at Palazzo Te which commissioned Julien to produce a film installation in celebration of the institution’s 500th anniversary.
A film installation with a painted backdrop and suite of related prints by interdisciplinary artist Joey Fauerso (b. 1976, San Antonio, TX) were also acquired by the Foundation and are currently on view in her exhibition Bedroom Paintings. The exhibition, on view through May 10, 2026, features the four-channel video installation Bedroom Paintings (2024) and the suite of six archival digital prints Bedroom Paintings (every pillow and blanket) (2024). The works exemplify Fauerso’s expansive approach to painting, performance, and installation. Drawing on themes of sleep, insomnia, and collective unrest, the video has four visual themes— sleeping, thrashing, pill-taking and water-drinking, and dreaming—and features 18 friends and family members recreating night time sleeping and sleeplessness in several different bedrooms created from paintings by the artist. Each character is captured in beds covered in linens made from the artist’s own painted canvases. As bodies move, the paintings fold and crumple, producing evolving abstractions that blur the boundaries between image and form. Sound and music, composed and recorded by the artist in collaboration with her family, deepen the work’s comical and contemplative characteristics. The prints serve as a visual archive of the over 70 paintings the artist featured in the film as a rug, bed linen, or wall covering.
Additional acquisitions reflect Ruby City’s ongoing commitment to narrative-driven and work shaped by the artist’s use, and elevation of every day materials and objects. Trenton Doyle Hancock’s (b. 1974, Oklahoma City, OK) Merry 2025 (2024) is a small but resonant ink drawing that exemplifies the artist’s distinctive mythological and graphic language. Originally commissioned by Ruby City to serve as the Center’s annual holiday card image, the work was reproduced as a postcard and distributed to supporters and mailing list members, with a digital version shared via the institution’s newsletter—extending the work beyond the gallery and reflecting Ruby City’s commitment to broad public engagement and access to contemporary art.
Another Texas artist acquired whose work joined the Foundation collection is Robert Hodge (b. 1979, Houston, TX) His multidimensional, altar-like assemblage, Promise You Will Sing About Me (2019), was purchased mid year and then almost immediately featured in Irrationally Speaking: Collage & Assemblage in Contemporary Art (June 12–August 31, 2025) at Ruby City. Composed of reclaimed objects—including LP sleeves, found images, books, a model ship, and a globe—the work explores cultural memory, loss, and resilience. The repetitive “Stereo” graphic he employes here is commonly associated with sound and audio transmissions. It symbolically poses the recurring question, “Can you hear me?” a call to preserve the past to recognize and acknowledge the present, and the process necessary to build strength and resilience.
Three recent acquisitions are currently featured in Sensing Meaning: Abstract Painting, on view through August 30, 2026. The exhibition situates selected works in Ruby City’s collection within a broader history of abstraction dating from 1945 to the present. Steve Roden’s (1964–2023) tacet permutations (2012) translates avant- garde musician John Cage’s iconic silent composition 4’33” into visual terms, using line, length, and color to interpret duration and stillness. Roden was an established and well-respected painter and multidisciplinary artist with a particular focus on sound and was based in Pasadena, CA. His painting was generously gifted by the Steve and Sari Roden Family Trust in the aftermath of the artist’s death.
Hills Snyder’s (b. 1950, Lubbock, TX) sculptural wall works Back to Basics (2001), a gift of the artist, and Double Lunette (2001), a purchase, both from his Flaternité series, appear as paintings while functioning as architectural interventions. Referencing the ideals and violence of the French Revolution, the works combine primary colors, wall cutouts, and dark humor to play with abstraction’s relationship to history, space, and perception.
Together, these 2025 acquisitions reflect Ruby City’s mission to steward the Linda Pace Foundation Collection, Ruby City, while fostering meaningful dialogue between artists, audiences, and the evolving narratives of contemporary art.
