Image: Ruby City, San Antonio ; Estate of Joan Mitchell
Ruby City’s exhibition ‘Sensing Meaning, Abstract Painting’ will close on August 30, bringing its presentation of abstract works from the recent past back to 1945 to an end. The exhibition has been on view at Ruby City in San Antonio since September 27, 2025, and remains free and open to the public through Sunday.
The exhibition brings together artists who use abstraction to explore space, color, line and form. Among the artists represented are Joan Mitchell, Nancy Haynes, Pablo Picasso and Sarah Morris, whose works demonstrate distinct approaches to the medium: Mitchell’s gestural expressionism, Haynes’s minimalist sensibility, Picasso’s biomorphic forms and Morris’s geometric compositions.
Ruby City’s presentation is drawn from the Linda Pace Foundation Collection and includes works that examine both the possibilities and limits of painting. According to the exhibition’s description, the selection includes examples made with nontraditional materials, works that do not incorporate paint, and pieces typically considered sculpture. Together, the works approach abstraction as a way to convey feeling, evoke particular moments and places, or investigate painting’s history and fundamental structure.
The exhibition’s chronological span includes Pablo Picasso’s ‘Femme Debout,’ a 1945 watercolor and ink work on paper; Joan Mitchell’s ‘Flying Dutchman,’ an oil painting dated 1961; Nancy Haynes’s ‘Hesitant,’ an oil-on-linen work from 2008; and Sarah Morris’s ‘Gateway East (Los Angeles),’ a 2004 painting made with household gloss on canvas. The works are identified in Ruby City’s online collection database as part of ‘Sensing Meaning, Abstract Painting.’
The exhibition frames abstraction as an approach that avoids representational imagery and therefore leaves room for individual interpretation. Its presentation invites visitors to rely on visual perception and intuition while considering how artists use formal elements to create poetic or nonliteral meanings. The exhibition also includes works by artists who treat the medium’s two-dimensional conventions as something to question and experiment with.
Ruby City is located at 150 Camp Street in San Antonio and is free to visit. The gallery is open Thursday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Ruby City will close from August 31 through September 25, reopening with ‘Generative Disruption: Feminist Art from the Collection,’ scheduled for September 26, 2026, through August 29, 2027. The upcoming exhibition will bring together art made from the 1990s to the present, largely from the Linda Pace Collection, to examine the continuing influence of feminist artists of the 1960s and ’70s.
