Tracey Rose's 62 works on paper, created during her 2000 residency at Artpace in San Antonio, are now on view at Ruby City. Produced daily in ink and graphite on Artpace stationery, these drawings resist narrative and resolution, functioning as a field of marks where meaning is continually deferred. The article traces the origins of this compulsive practice to a childhood episode where Rose was asked to draw Leonardo da Vinci's *The Last Supper* and ended up performing the image repeatedly for classmates, exhausting it through repetition until authorship dissolved.
This exhibition matters because it reframes Rose's drawings not as preparatory sketches but as a concentrated form of her broader artistic resistance. In the early 2000s, South African art was being absorbed into an international curatorial framework that demanded legible narratives of transition and reconciliation. Rose refused this position, and the Artpace drawings embody that refusal—they test rather than describe, destabilize rather than resolve. By presenting these works as a complete project, Ruby City challenges the art world's appetite for coherence and affirms Rose's uncompromising stance on the politics of visibility and performance.