
Installation view of “Irrationally Speaking: Collage & Assemblage in Contemporary Art,” Images courtesy of the Linda Pace Foundation, Ruby City, San Antonio. Photo: Jorge Villarreal
Irrationally Speaking at San Antonio’s Ruby City takes as its point of departure, a quote from Surrealist Max Ernst, who once said that “he who speaks of the collage speaks of the irrational.” Ernst famously deferred to chance and happenstance for much of his creative process. The considered, and politically charged works by artists like Hannah Höch made the point that collage, for all its chaos, is capable of eloquently speaking truth to power.
Ruby City’s founder, Linda Pace, was drawn to collage and assemblage, writing “I have always been interested in how the ordinary can become extraordinary. Removed from the familiarity and clutter of everyday life, utilitarian objects can convey an esthetic power not otherwise imagined.” An artist and art collector, Pace sought out work by artists who worked in assemblage, and Irrationally Speaking showcases the visual and conceptual breadth of assemblage and collage in works from the Linda Pace Foundation Collection, including some by Linda Pace herself.
Ruby City’s featured exhibition through August 2025, Irrationally Speaking brings together works by three dozen artists. The show allows these works to speak for themselves, dispensing any didactic wall text informing visitors what to think (though there is a very helpful and necessary exhibition booklet, which is nicely produced). Given the highly personal nature of many of these works, the show is equally satisfying and elusive.

Installation view of “Irrationally Speaking: Collage & Assemblage in Contemporary Art,” Images courtesy of the Linda Pace Foundation, Ruby City, San Antonio. Photo: Jorge Villarreal
Many of these works are autobiographical, including the assemblages by Linda Pace. In her horizontally oriented Timeline series, viewers see an eclectic smattering of detritus from her life which she arranged by color into rows, providing us with a rainbow-coded record of her daily experiences displayed like a visual diary recorded through objects (bottle caps, silverware, plastic cups, hotel room keys, etc.). Viewers get a glimpse into her workaday life through these objects; it’s a sort of visual realization of the G.K. Chesterton essay “What I Found in My Pocket.”
Artificiality, a personal, visually satisfying ensemble by Mexican artist Paula Santiago, comprises personal effects, family heirlooms, and ephemera displayed in parallel rows of double-sided picture frames which all project from the wall at an oblique angle, appearing, at first glance, like a horizontally oriented reductive minimalist sculptural work by Donald Judd. One side might show a pressed flower or a photograph of a young girl, while the reverse might be messy with tangled hair or references to blood. The work is coolly displayed in the manner of a minimalist sculpture, which undermines the chaos it references, and with which we might identify. Of her work, Santiago says, “I didn’t want to work with concepts, I wanted to work with my life.”*

Wangechi Mutu, “Living through strange times,” 2004, ink, paint, collage on mylar, 38 ¾ x 42 inches (top); 29-1/8 x 35-3/8 inches (bottom). Linda Pace Foundation Collection, Ruby City, San Antonio, Texas; Originally commissioned by Artpace San Antonio
The fastidiously rendered photocollages of Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu emphatically make the point that there is space for craftsmanship in collage. Mutu works in the figurative tradition, and in Living through Hard Times, her starting points are silhouetted painted renderings of female figures onto which she adds layers of idiosyncratic and sometimes unsettling visual textures, ranging from flowers to diseased body parts. Mutu writes, “I took these idealized stereotyped images of women … to create other images, tension-charged, potent because they were full of my own emotional upset at the original ones…I was taking apart the images of a world that refused to acknowledge me.”*

Installation view of “Irrationally Speaking: Collage & Assemblage in Contemporary Art,” Images courtesy of the Linda Pace Foundation, Ruby City, San Antonio. Photo: Jorge Villarreal
In the visual center point of Ruby City’s largest gallery space, there’s a prominently displayed, large dynamic photo-based collage by Nancy Rubins portraying a visual explosion of canoes and boats (Collage), a two-dimensional work that recalls her actual sculptural installations which often employ boats. “We all have some history with boats,” Rubins says, “whether our grandparents came over that way or whether we used them as kids.” It’s a work that rhymes with her permanent installation in Ruby City’s sculpture garden, which features over two tons of massive metallic jet parts in a swirling, cantilevered, tornado-like helix.
Admittedly, the flashiness and the chicness of Ruby City’s architecture competes with the art for the viewers’ attention, just like any postmodern exhibition space might. Conceptually and visually, the show has much to offer, but it starts to run thin at points. Many of these works speak on their own, particularly those by well-known artists, whose work already has a frame of reference; other works by lesser-known artists would benefit from some contextualization. Nevertheless, here you’ll see some internationally known, blue-chip artists on view alongside deserving local talent. Irrationally Speaking is a show that serves to democratize contemporary art, reminding us that collage is something we all may have experimented with. Collectively, the works in the show are perhaps inconsistent, ranging from messy to refined. But so is the art of collage itself.
* Ruby City: Irrationally Speaking [exhibition guide], Ruby City: San Antonio.
Irrationally Speaking will be on view at Ruby City through August 31, 2025.