SAN ANTONIO, TX.- This fall, Ruby City presents Generative Disruption: Feminist Art from the Collection, an exhibition bringing together the work of 33 artists whose practices explore the body, identity, gender, power, space, belonging, and lived experience. On view September 26, 2026, through August 29, 2027, the exhibition draws largely from the Linda Pace Foundation Collection and considers how the ideas and artistic strategies advanced by feminist artists beginning in the 1960s and 1970s continue to resonate in contemporary art today.
The exhibition opens to the public on Saturday, September 26, with a special afternoon of art and conversation. From 2–3 p.m., Ruby City Director, Elyse A. Gonzales will lead a one-hour gallery walkthrough of Generative Disruption, offering an introduction to the exhibition and be joined by several artists who will speak about their work. This gives visitors an uncommon opportunity to meet the artists themselves, hear directly about their practices and perspectives, and engage in conversation around the work on view. The walkthrough will be followed by a public opening reception.
Rather than serving as a historical survey, Generative Disruption brings together a selection of works from the 1990s to the present to trace the legacy of earlier feminist artistic practices and the ways subsequent generations of artists have expanded upon them. The exhibition reflects a foundational principle of the collection: recognizing women artists and the significance of their contributions to contemporary art.
“Feminist art fundamentally expanded what contemporary art could be,” says Elyse A. Gonzales, Director of Ruby City. “Artists challenged assumptions about whose experiences were worthy of representation, what subjects could be addressed through art, and what materials and approaches could constitute an artistic practice. Generative Disruption gives us an opportunity to recognize that history while looking closely at how those ideas continue to inform artists working today.”
At its heart, the exhibition is about artists using their own experiences and perspectives as points of departure. Feminist artists have long turned to the personal—examining bodies, domestic spaces, sexuality, identity, social expectations, and systems of power—to better understand and respond to the world around them. In doing so, they helped open the field to artistic practices that today engage questions of race, ethnicity, sexuality, social justice, bodily autonomy, and other dimensions of lived experience.
The artists featured in Generative Disruption reflect the breadth of these practices across generations, geographies, identities, and media. The exhibition brings together local, national, and international voices, including San Antonio–based artists Trish Simonite and Janet Lennie Flohr, alongside artists such as Wangechi Mutu, Sue Williams, Nicole Eisenman, Nao Bustamante, Mona Hatoum, Shahzia Sikander, Tracey Moffatt, Miwa Yanagi, Ada Ruilova, Annette Messager, Olga de Amaral, Emily Jacir, Wu Tsang, Sama Alshaibi, and Anya Gallaccio, among others. A small selection of work by male artists further demonstrates the reach of feminist thinking beyond a single gender, underscoring how artists of many perspectives have used similar materials and processes to examine gender roles, social expectations, identity, and injustice.
Among the exhibition’s inclusion of work by renowned artists is the late Laura Aguilar's Stillness series, commissioned and produced by Artpace San Antonio. In these intimate black-and-white photographs, Aguilar places her own body within the South Texas landscape, creating a relationship between figure and environment that moves beyond conventional ideals of the female body and beauty. San Antonio artist Janet Lennie Flohr is also represented with No Work Zone, a photogravure that considers time, impermanence, labor, and the tension between construction and decay.
International perspectives are equally central to the exhibition. Wangechi Mutu's Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors reimagines clinical imagery of female anatomy through surreal, hybrid forms that challenge historically sexist and racist representations of the body. Shahzia Sikander's Played Ground brings contemporary imagery into dialogue with the traditions of miniature painting, while Miwa Yanagi's My Grandmothers considers women's imagined futures through staged photographic portraits.
The exhibition also includes works on loan. Trigger Planting 3.0, by Kadambari Baxi, Maureen Connor, and Landon Newton, maps the current landscape of abortion restrictions in the United States through dried plants and herbs historically associated with contraception and abortion. The work connects contemporary questions of bodily autonomy to longer histories of knowledge, medicine, and women's agency.
The range of media is as expansive as the ideas explored. Textile, embroidery, found objects, photography, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and video demonstrate how feminist artists challenged hierarchies around both subject matter and artistic materials. Practices once dismissed as domestic, marginal, or outside the conventions of fine art became powerful vehicles for artistic expression and critical inquiry. Generative Disruption considers how thoroughly those once-disruptive approaches have become part of the vocabulary of contemporary art.
This spirit of expanding possibility is deeply connected to the vision of Ruby City's founder, artist, collector, and philanthropist Linda Pace. Pace believed that “contemporary art is essential to a dynamic society,” and built her collection around the conviction that art could create opportunities for discovery, connection, and a deeper understanding of the world. Ruby City embodies that belief by making contemporary art freely accessible to the public.
“Linda Pace believed in sharing contemporary art with others,” says Gonzales. “That generosity remains at the heart of Ruby City. This exhibition is an invitation to encounter artists whose work has helped shape the field of contemporary art today. My hope is that members of the public find themselves, their experiences represented in the artists and works on view, that they encounter different perspectives or learn something new.”
Some works in Generative Disruption include nudity and address subjects including sexuality, abortion, and violence, all of which are part of the range of contemporary lived experiences for many of these artists and women globally. Throughout the exhibition's year-long run, Ruby City will offer free public programming that extends the exhibition's themes through film, music, conversations, workshops, and more. Programs will explore feminism, identity, belonging and place, magic and ritual, objects and meaning, and the reclaiming of narratives, providing opportunities for visitors to engage with the ideas in Generative Disruption beyond the galleries.
