One of my challenges has been how to balance my roles as the founder of ArtPace and a collector of contemporary art with my personal practice of making art. To protect my own creativity, I regularly schedule time to work in my studio, which is located in a long building behind my house in Terrell Hills. As part of the practice of discovering more about myself through art-making and the interpretation of dreams, I regularly sketch dream images. Beginning in about 1997, I noticed the persistence of the color red in my dreams and began collecting red objects that I stored in my studio. This prompted me to think about all the things that red symbolized: passion, anger, vitality, life, blood, desire, fire, wisdom, authenticity, sexuality, repressed emotion, the process of making art. Before long, my studio was filled with hundreds of red items that I had picked up in dollar stores, botanicas, and flea markets all over the world. I bought plastic saints, Teletubby dolls, Christmas ornaments, hats, necklaces, boxing gloves, underwear, plastic tumblers, candles in all sorts of shapes—including vagina candles and penis candles—and literally hundreds of red Buddhas. As I collected these mass-produced articles, I did not know what I was going to do with them, but I had some kind of artwork in the back of my mind.
My friends and family noticed my collection, and soon began making their own contributions. My goddaughter, Marcy, daughter of Margo and Bob Marbut, sent me some glittering red shoes—the kind Dorothy wore in The Wizard of Oz—that I had given her but she had outgrown. My mother gave me a small watercolor landscape of red mountains near Aspen that she had painted specifically for my project. Members of my dream group, who had also dreamed of red things, added red hair-rollers, lipstick cases, key rings, and images of the Madonna. In 1999, the group was given an assignment to make something using images from our dreams. With a glue gun and screws, I attached a variety of the red objects from my growing collection onto a two-foot-square piece of plywood. I placed the wood panel on the floor and positioned a full-size red door behind it with a giant gold key in the latch. The red door for me was a symbol of the boundaries I needed to maintain with the key, in order to preserve my authenticity. Others in the group saw the door as a threshold to unconscious desire, creativity, the shadow side. We all had our speculations on what might lie behind it.
The red panel became one of sixteen two-foot-square panels that I mounted together to create the Red Project. As I secured the items onto the panels, I realized how much of my hidden identity was expressed in the process of collecting the objects and undertaking the physical work involved in building the piece. My emotional life appeared in front of me like a photograph emerging in developer in the darkroom. When I stood back from the piece, I realized that it reflected the buried identity of women in general, not just my own. The variety of objects—keys, makeup, photos, fragments of fabric, and forbidden apples—described the intimate details of women’s lives. I continued to seek images that I knew frequent many women’s dreams, such as red boxing gloves and red dogs, indicators of female aggression and instinct. I found taboo symbols of female spirituality such as voodoo dolls and love potions. The collection also included many reminders of women’s sexual objectification: a red bra (given to me as a so-called joke at a birthday party), a red garter belt, and a pair of large red plastic breasts. I positioned these near what I think of as examples of authentic female qualities: the heart of Aphrodite, a wise red Buddha. Looking at the piece, I was also struck by how different it was from the totems I made in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were more formal and architectural. The Red Project was organic and exuberant. It revealed how much I had changed.
Linda Pace Red Project, 2001. Found objects on wood panels. 96 × 96 in. Details
When I finished the piece, in the summer of 2001, I knew I had to show it, which was a huge turning point for me. Before, I had never thought my work was good enough to display publicly. This self-judgment exposed an old wound that I was ready to heal. I realized criticism and dialogue are beneficial and welcomed them.
By this time, I had bought CAMPstreet and thought about having an opening in the new facility to show the Red Project to my friends. Then George Neubert, director of the San Antonio Museum of Art, saw the piece in my studio and immediately asked if he could show it at SAMA. He had expressed interest in purchasing a related work for his daughter earlier that year, but it had already been bought. I was flattered by this new prospect, but also knew that George’s decision would be controversial. After all, I am a supporter of SAMA. I decided not to let my fear of what others might say stop me, and I told George that I would be thrilled to show the Red Project at SAMA.
The piece was hung in the museum’s Great Hall. When I arrived for the opening, on June 21, 2001, I had the extraordinary experience of seeing my whole life represented by hundreds of old friends from childhood, family members, many of my parents’ friends, plus ArtPace artists from all over the world, fellow collectors, and curators.
That night I remembered the embryonic stages of ArtPace in 1993, before I ever set foot in the facility on North Main. What kept me going through the early years was that I had indeed been bitten by a multicolored snake, not just in my dream, but in my life. I had a hunger for contemporary art: for creating it, buying it, making it, and, most of all, sharing it with others. I couldn’t have worked on the Red Project if I had not also worked on ArtPace. They are part of the same passion. The snake twists and turns in and out of every aspect of my life.
As I made the Red Project, I wondered if I would stop dreaming in red when the piece was finished. I haven’t, but I have also started the Green Peace. For my birthday in 2002, my friends gave me green frogs, beads, dolls, shoes, and Buddhas, which now cover half of my studio. When I work on it, I find that it, too, expresses something of what I feel about the growth of ArtPace. Since founding ArtPace, I have learned to trust the creative process, my own as well as that of the artists around me. Artists are by nature people who push everyone’s boundaries. Their work can seem random or irrational, like collected fragments of dreams, but as with dreams, it almost magically comes together to suggest meaning. ArtPace is a place of retrieval; in the words of one artist, it is a “factory where dreams are made.”
If I have learned one thing, it’s that each of us has something essential we are trying to express during our lives, what the Buddhists call our “suchness.” This suchness does not end. It is a continuum, a spirit that goes on and on.
Linda Pace Red Project
