Artpace at 30: How Linda Pace's 'Laboratory of Dreams' Produced 4 Turner Prize Winners and Changed How Texas Makes Art

Linda Pace was an artist, a collector, a businesswoman, and the heir to Pace Foods — the salsa company her family built in San Antonio. She was also someone who believed that Texas could sustain a world-class artist residency if the model was right. In 1993, she conceived Artpace. In 1995, she opened it. She called it a "laboratory of dreams."

The building is a 1920s Hudson auto dealership at 445 N Main Avenue — 18,000 square feet of industrial architecture converted into five exhibition spaces, furnished apartments, and studios with 24-hour access. The bones of the building matter. High ceilings, big windows, concrete floors. It feels like a place where things get made, not merely displayed.

## The Model

The International Artist-in-Residence program runs three cycles per year. Each cycle, a guest curator selects three artists: one from Texas, one from elsewhere in the United States, one international. Each artist receives a furnished apartment, round-the-clock studio access, a materials budget, a living stipend, and travel expenses. The on-site facilities include wood, metal, and computer workshops with dedicated technical support staff. The residency lasts two months, culminating in an exhibition that opens to the public. Every exhibition is free.

The model is deceptively simple, but the mathematics are what set Artpace apart. Nine artists per year, every year, for three decades. That's over 250 artists, selected by more than 80 guest curators — curators who are themselves drawn from the upper ranks of the international art world. The curatorial rotation means no single aesthetic dominates. A cycle might pair a Houston painter with a Johannesburg video artist and a Brooklyn sculptor. The friction is intentional. Pace understood that the best work happens when artists are removed from their routines and placed in proximity to people who think differently.

## The Numbers

The alumni outcomes tell the story more clearly than any mission statement could. Four Turner Prize winners came through Artpace. Nine MacArthur Fellows. Fifteen Guggenheim Fellows. More than 84 artists who have gone on to exhibit at the Venice Biennale or the Whitney Biennial. Tracey Rose, whose recent exhibition at Ruby City drew national attention, was an Artpace resident in 2000. The list includes artists who were unknown when they arrived in San Antonio and became major figures within a decade — not because Artpace made them famous, but because the residency gave them space, resources, and time at a critical moment in their careers.

No other residency program in the American South can match those numbers. Few in the country can.

## Spring 2026

The current cycle, curated by Dr. Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, features Violette Bule (Houston), Mel Chin (North Carolina), and Việt Lê (Vietnam). The exhibitions opened March 19 and run through July 12. Bule's installation occupies the ground-floor gallery with large-scale textile works that map immigration patterns across the Gulf Coast. Chin, a MacArthur Fellow whose career spans four decades of socially engaged art, has built an environment that merges ecological data with sculptural form. Lê's multi-channel video installation draws on the Vietnamese diaspora experience, layering archival footage with contemporary interviews.

All three shows are free.

## Linda Pace

Pace died in 2007, at 62. That same year, she had a dream about a building — a crimson structure that seemed to glow from within. She described it to the architect David Adjaye, who designed Ruby City from her sketches. The building opened in 2019, twelve years after her death, and now houses the Linda Pace Foundation's collection of over 1,400 works.

Her two institutions anchor San Antonio's art identity. Artpace serves the living — the artists who are still making work, still taking risks, still needing the space and the money and the time to figure out what comes next. Ruby City serves the collection — the record of what Pace saw and believed in, preserved in a building that is itself a work of art. No other city in Texas has a single patron whose vision shaped this much of the cultural landscape. Houston has the de Menils, but that was two people and a dynasty. San Antonio had Linda Pace, one woman with a salsa fortune and an unshakable conviction that art should be free, that artists should be supported, and that Texas could hold its own against New York if the infrastructure existed.

She built the infrastructure. The artists did the rest.

Artpace San Antonio is located at 445 N Main Ave, San Antonio, TX 78205. Free and open to the public. For the full picture of San Antonio's art scene — Ruby City, SAMA, the McNay, Blue Star, and the Briscoe — our complete guide maps it all.