SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Ruby City is presenting the compelling work of internationally acclaimed South African artist Tracey Rose in Tracey Rose, an exhibition that opened on Saturday, June 6, 2026, and remains on view through May 9, 2027.

Featuring the visceral video performance TKO (2000) alongside a rarely seen suite of 62 drawings shown together for the first time, the exhibition offers an intimate look into Rose’s groundbreaking multidisciplinary practice. Created during her residency at Artpace, these works explore endurance, identity, creativity and transformation through physical performance, intuitive drawing and moments of humor and vulnerability.

From the raw intensity of TKO to the expressive energy of her drawings, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on the body, mark making and the emotional landscapes that shape human experience. Working in the years following apartheid in South Africa, Rose emerged as a powerful voice examining systems of race, gender, power and representation. Her work continues to resonate with contemporary audiences through its exploration of bodily autonomy, emotional endurance, surveillance, social pressure and resilience.

In TKO, Rose repeatedly strikes a heavy bag fitted with cameras, creating a layered meditation on violence, visibility, exhaustion and resistance that feels especially relevant in today’s social and political climate.

Developed after two years of boxing training in Johannesburg, TKO transforms physical impact into a form of mark making, with each strike registering traces of the body through paint, sound and motion. Across both video and drawings, Rose pushes repetition, endurance and gesture to their limits, treating the body and image alike as sites of testing, collapse and transformation.

The drawings, created during Rose’s residency at Artpace in 2000, reveal another deeply personal dimension of her practice. Produced compulsively and intuitively during a turbulent moment in her life, Rose has described the works as attempts to decode or anticipate future events.

“Those drawings were predictions,” Rose recalled. “I was trying to come up with a code that would either present what they predicted or control the outcome.”

Through dense marks, fragmented figures, symbols and repeated forms, the drawings operate less as illustrations than as fields of intuition. They hover between psychological mapping, emotional release and divination.

Presented together, the drawings and video performance reveal the breadth of Rose’s artistic language, balancing physical intensity with vulnerability and introspection. The exhibition creates space for reflection, dialogue and connection across cultures and lived experiences while illuminating Rose’s ongoing investigation into how images, gestures and the body itself can hold memory, anxiety, resistance and the unknowable possibilities of the future.

The exhibition’s opening day included a gallery walkthrough led by Ruby City Director Elyse A. Gonzales, followed by a public reception with music by Strawberry Jams, light bites by Sweet Yams and complimentary drinks. MOVE Texas was also onsite offering voter registration and civic engagement resources, inviting visitors to participate in the civic processes that shape arts and cultural spaces in their communities.

Tracey Rose remains on view at Ruby City through May 9, 2027.