The Pace Gallery was founded by Arne Glimcher in Boston in 1960. Three years later, the gallery relocated to New York, setting up its headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. By the early 1980s, Pace was fully established as one of the city’s premier modern and contemporary art venues for painting, sculpture, video, and installation art. Over the years, Pace’s stable has grown to include major international artists and estates of the 20th and 21st centuries. The gallery has mounted nearly 700 exhibitions, including several scholarly show... Read more

The Pace Gallery was founded by Arne Glimcher in Boston in 1960. Three years later, the gallery relocated to New York, setting up its headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. By the early 1980s, Pace was fully established as one of the city’s premier modern and contemporary art venues for painting, sculpture, video, and installation art. Over the years, Pace’s stable has grown to include major international artists and estates of the 20th and 21st centuries. The gallery has mounted nearly 700 exhibitions, including several scholarly shows that have traveled to museums, and has published more than 300 exhibition catalogs.

Marc Glimcher joined the gallery as Associate Director in 1985, and he has served as President since 1993. That same year, Pace partnered with Old Master dealer Wildenstein & Co. to form PaceWildenstein, an organization with the potential to show works of art from the Renaissance to the present. In April of 2010, Pace and Wildenstein announced that they would amicably dissolve the joint venture after 17 years, and that The Pace Gallery would again operate independently, although the companies jointly stated that they would continue to pursue business opportunities together.

Today, The Pace Gallery has expanded to include three galleries in New York and, most recently, Pace Beijing, a 22,000 square foot gallery space in the heart of Beijing’s 798 Art District. The Pace umbrella also includes Pace/MacGill, specializing in photography; Pace Prints & Pace Master Prints, focusing on limited edition works on paper from the 15th to 21st centuries; and Pace Primitive, dedicated to African, Himalayan, Oceanic, and Native American tribal art. The Pace Gallery celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2010.

To coincide with this anniversary year, Pace has launched thepacegallery.com, an encyclopedic search-based site culled from the gallery’s extensive archives. The site is unlike that of any other art institution in its innovative search feature: it is built on its own search engine, so that visitors can type in a keyword and peruse a living archive of 50 years (and counting) of The Pace Gallery.

Photo credit: © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy The Pace Gallery