Moments from Pace Gallery

Arne Glimcher opened the first Pace gallery in Boston in 1960 while he was still in his twenties, and over more than six decades built it into one of a handful of galleries operating at genuinely global, museum-adjacent scale, representing the Rothko and Nevelson estates alongside major living artists including Yayoi Kusama, James Turrell, and Robert Rauschenberg's estate. Its flagship, an eight-story building in Chelsea completed in 2019, was designed specifically to handle the scale and technical demands of contemporary installation art, with dedicated freight elevators and column-free floors built for work that a conventional gallery space simply couldn't accommodate.

Pace now operates spaces across New York, London, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Geneva, a footprint that mirrors how thoroughly the contemporary art market has globalized since Glimcher's Boston beginnings. Exhibitions here are free and open to the public with no obligation to buy, and given the gallery's scale, shows are often produced with a level of installation ambition closer to a museum retrospective than a typical commercial gallery exhibition, worth treating as a genuine alternative to paid museum admission rather than a lesser stop on an art itinerary.