Free and open to the public. Thursday to Sunday, 10AM—6PM.
150 Camp St, San Antonio, TX
Free and open to the public. Thursday to Sunday, 10AM—6PM.
150 Camp St, San Antonio, TX
Ruby City teamed up with National Poetry Month San Antonio, to participate in this year’s Ekphrastic Poetry Contest. Participants were asked to write a poem inspired by Wangechi Mutu’s, Living Through Strange Times, from our collection, and currently on view in Irrationally Speaking: Collage & Assemblage in Contemporary Art at Ruby City through August 31, 2025. Winning poems are shared below!
An ekphrastic poem is one based on a piece of art. These poems take an existing piece of visual art and use written words to describe and expand on the theme of that work of art. Often these poems explore hidden meanings or an underlying story.
Jim LaVilla Havelin, 2025 National Poetry Month coordinator, Eddie Vega, San Antonio Poet Laureate, and Linda Simone, poet & artist, will select up to three poems per artwork for each category.
(in no particular order)
She emerges—stitched from fragments, a body forged from ancient ghosts,
skin collaged from the echoes of history.
Her gaze is a question, unblinking, a wound that refuses to close.
She bears the weight of strange times’ breath, the liminal space between rupture and rebirth.
Metal and bone, silk and shadow, she walks on the edge of forgetting, hybrid, holy, haunted.
What does it mean to be whole? To survive the blade of becoming? She does not answer—she moves, her body, an artifact of the future.
Patricia Torres
Malambo woman,
of the slithering green river.
Barnacle body metallic, hot wheel red.
Head protrudes,
as prosperous cancer.
Lips glisten, slither,
clastic corporal sediment.
Mami Wata,
feminine seduction.
Materialism folklore.
Power,
wealth,
ruin.
Alejandra ‘Mera Mera’ Sánchez Alanís
When strangers peck at my bird-like frailty, my periwinkle-hued carbuncles scabbed then split open by their misconceptions, my beauty resides in the mystery I discover deep within myself. Like heart-murmuring epics, cells of astonishment divide, multiply, and what I call my soul –intimate dreams, unutterable passions – unveils itself unctuously. It is a lighthouse, a beacon breaching the darkness, signaling sanctuary to vessels lost in the squalls of an unnavigable sea. I know you are lost; I too am lost. And too often fear is the shadow that accompanies us – afraid of the knock at the door, the before-dawn raid. Still, we are more than the constellation of wounds that bloom upon our skin – beauty is the mystery that resides within, is the light that nullifies the pitch-black headlines of the times. Still, don’t forget the authority of our lips –luscious instruments used to whisper, to kiss, even dismiss flagpole tyranny. There’s strength in saying simple statements like this: Our beauty resides within. It cannot be taken.
Mark Heinlein
(in no particular order)
The world spins endlessly
Yet the same roots dug deep
We perpetually evolve
Yet create our own frames
We are patchworks of quirks, shades of grey
Everything all at once
We are hybrids of nature and cities
With complex and tangledmeaning
We wish for answers to come to light
Everything to fit in Black or White
We let our cultures clash,
Collide not blend with another
We are made of strange things
Yet we are all the same
Nikhita Nair
Oh, how we miss control
Living but not living
The machine takes its toll
My body crumpling and withering
As it rips apart my soul
My body feels empty
Riddled with holes
From trying to reach
Impossible goals.
We wanted to be Beautiful
To make ourselves whole
But instead we became twisted
Unable to be consoled.
Oh, how we miss control
Zachary Robinson
It hurts
The way I crack
The way I ache
The way my parts snap into place
Oh it burns
The way I burst
My colors flowing
While my free found fingers
Are filed
I’m punctured by my twisting spines
Molded by hands that aren’t mine
Merged with color of foreign piece
Now lonely frames set on a stage
Stuck on permanent display
Pearl Lyons
In addition to the selected winning poems above, the San Antonio National Poetry Month Committee identified a local poet, Cyra S. Dumitru, to write a poem in response to a work on view at Ruby City. For her poem, Dumitru selected Nancy Rubins’ Collage, 2008, which is on view as part of the exhibition, Irrationally Speaking: Collage & Assemblage in Contemporary Art, through August 31, 2025.
responding to Collage, 2008 by Nancy Rubins
Can you feel the ripples—a shape large yet fluid
tumbling through gallery air, falling so fast
that you feel splashed by watery cascade?
How does motion flow from something fixed like a huge wing
to the wall? Does your memory unfasten too, recall
cascades of canyon wrens spiraling over the Frio?
Let go of the movement, let go of fullness—focus
instead on constituent parts—not layers of feathers?—rather
boats! Canoes and rowboats, canoes and rowboats—cascade
of impression: photos—mostly black and white—glints
of color—rowboat keels like the underside of grey whales,
whales about to breach before plummeting back into ocean.
Overturned canoes sleek as agile bodies of dolphins
caught in a single leap. Layers of cascading shapes—like
collision, as when a hurricane barrels through—
wild water and wind crashing and crushing anchored
boats into deafening piles—but no, this is deliberate
assemblage . . . what pattern holds it together?
OH! . . . the same rowboat, the same canoe
repeated over and over from various points
of view: upside down, right side up, enlarged—
canoe and rowboat in dialogue, canoe and rowboat retold
over and over like a mantra until fixed meaning fades,
and all we hear is
cascade—
Cyra Sweet Dumitru