Celebrating Louise Nevelson at 125

Arne Glimcher founded Pace Gallery in Boston in 1960 in a small, street-level shop on historic Newbury Street. The first exhibition at the gallery, which Glimcher opened when he was 22 years old, included work by his professors at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. The following season, he presented exhibitions by Josef Albers, Louise Nevelson, and Claes Oldenburg. In 1963, the gallery opened in New York City on 57th Street. Today, Pace maintains seven international galleries with a presence spanning New York, Los Angeles, London, Geneva, Seoul, and Hong Kong, and it will open its first permanent space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development in 2024.

Over the decades, Glimcher has played a critical role in shaping the careers and legacies of many significant artists, including Jean Dubuffet, Robert Irwin, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Mark Rothko, and Lucas Samaras, and advancing the careers of Sam Gilliam, David Hockney, Maya Lin, and James Turrell.

He is often credited with introducing museum-quality exhibitions into gallery spaces. At Pace, his curatorial credits have included five Picasso exhibitions—including Je Suis le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso in 1986, Picasso & Jacqueline in 2014, and Picasso: 14 Sketchbooks, which was presented in 2023 to mark the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death.

Under Glimcher’s leadership, Pace has also become one of the leading producers of scholarly catalogues and art books. Pace Publishing, one of the longest standing gallery imprints, has released over 600 books in collaboration with and in support of artists. Among the many Pace Publishing titles Glimcher has contributed to are Picasso, Braque, and Early Film in Cubism (2007) and Mark Rothko: The Exhibitions at Pace (2019). He has also authored monographs on Martin, Nevelson, and Rothko, as well as the volume Modern Art and Modern Science (1983).

Today, Glimcher serves as Chairman of Pace Gallery and helms 125 Newbury, a project space he opened in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood in 2022. Named for the address of Pace’s first-ever space in Boston, 125 Newbury operates in association with Pace, presenting up to five exhibitions per year with a focus on thematic group shows and emerging artists, including artists both within and beyond Pace’s program. Glimcher also continues to organize exhibitions at the gallery’s global locations.

In addition to founding and directing Pace Gallery, Glimcher has produced and/or directed several feature films and documentaries, including Gorillas in the Mist (1988), Just Cause (1995), and The Mambo Kings (1992), for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He also directed Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies (2008), a film produced by Martin Scorsese. In 2013, Glimcher produced the documentary White Gold, which examines the ivory trade and its effects on countries in Africa and beyond.

In recognition of his commitment to the vitality of art worldwide, Glimcher was appointed Officier by the French National Order of the Legion of Honour. In 2007, he received an Honorary Doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a Distinguished Alumni Award from Boston University. In 2018, he was the recipient of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his work in conservation. Glimcher serves as the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the African Environmental Film Foundation and sits on the boards of the Mount Sinai Medical Center and the NYU-Shanghai Program on Innovation & Creativity. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Directors Guild of America, and the New York Yacht Club.

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Photo: Axel Dupeux. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

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Julia Bryan-Wilson teaches contemporary art history at Columbia University. She curated Louise Nevelson: Persistence, an official collateral event of the 2022 Venice Biennale, and she is the author of Louise Nevelson's Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face, which was published by Yale University Press in 2023.  She is also Curator-at-Large at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.

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Photo: Mel Y. Chen

Oliver Shultz is Chief Curator at Pace Gallery and Director at 125 Newbury, Pace’s project space in New York. Before joining Pace, he was previously a curator at MoMA PS1, where he was part of the curatorial team on more than twenty exhibitions between 2015 and 2019. In 2014, he served as Fisher Curatorial Fellow in Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He received his PhD in art history from Stanford University in 2018, where he was the Hume Graduate Fellow in the Arts, with a doctoral dissertation on the work of Paul Thek. He has lectured widely, including at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Courtauld Institute in London, the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, Hunter College, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Yale, among others.