As we continue to celebrate Linda Pace’s birthday, we’re highlighting yet more gifts of her work to the Linda Pace Foundation Collection at Ruby City!

Pace was not only a committed philanthropist, collector and friend to artists, but she was also an accomplished artist herself. Influenced by psychiatrist Carl Jung’s work on dreams and the unconscious, Pace practiced interpreting her dreams and their underlying ideas and emotions. Pace summed it up in Dreaming Red: Creating ArtPace, stating: “My dreams became my nightly compass, my way of listening to my inner authority rather than allowing external events to shape my life.” This emphasis on dreams and the unconscious in turn drove and inspired her artistic practice. Beyond making drawings based on her dreams, explored in the previous newsletter, Pace sometimes realized those drawings as sculptures. This is evidenced in the J. Travis Capps Jr. and Lee Anthony gift, STAY (2006).

STAY, currently on view at Ruby City, is composed of faux flowers adhered to wooden letters that spell out a simple, grief-stricken plea to “stay.” The cool color palette of blue and purple communicates a sense of loss. And, the use of carnations, among other flowers, reminds the viewer of standing floral arrangements placed on gravesides of the recently deceased. Deeply evocative of loss and longing, this work came out of a dream about moving Pace experienced shortly after her mother’s passing. Kelly O’Connor, Head of Collections and Communications and Pace’s former studio assistant, comments that “there were only a few drawings that Linda wanted to realize as sculptures, STAY was one of them.