Arne Glimcher founded Pace in Boston in 1960, aged 22, running it with his wife Milly and his mother Eva. The Chelsea flagship it opened in 2019, designed by Bonetti/Kozerski, runs eight storeys and 70,000 square feet.
Eight floors is a longer visit than a typical gallery, and roughly 10,000 square feet of the exhibition space is outdoors — easy to miss if you stop at the main interior levels.
Pace is named after Arne Glimcher’s father, whose nickname was Pacey, rather than after Glimcher himself — a small decision that sets it apart in a trade where the dealer’s surname over the door is the whole convention. He opened in Boston in 1960 and brought the gallery to Manhattan in 1963 with a partner, Fred Mueller, taking a space on East 57th Street. From 1968 the address was 32 East 57th, on a street that served as the center of the New York art trade for the rest of the century.
The move to West 25th Street in September 2019 was a change of kind as well as address. The building, by Bonetti/Kozerski, runs eight floors, which lets several unrelated exhibitions run at once: the opening week put Alexander Calder on one level, new paintings and a photography show on others, and a survey of Fred Wilson’s chandelier works upstairs. There is a research library, which opened with a site-specific installation by Yto Barrada, a sixth-floor terrace facing the Hudson, and a top floor kept clear for performances, screenings and work too large for a conventional room.
That top floor supports Pace Live, the music, dance, film and conversation program launched with the building. It is the clearest illustration of what the largest commercial galleries have become — they publish, they stage performance, they keep archives and curators, and they do it without charging at the door, because the exhibitions are ultimately in service of sales.
For a visitor the practical consequence is that this is a longer stop than the gallery next door. Take the elevator up and work down, and treat each floor as a separate show. Nobody minds if you look at one and leave.
540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 · Official site ↗
The Pace Gallery is a contemporary and modern art gallery with 9 locations worldwide. It was founded in Boston by Arne Glimcher in 1960. His son, Marc Glimcher, is now president and CEO. Pace Gallery operates in New York, London, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Geneva, Seoul, East Hampton, Tokyo, and Palm Beach.
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