Boston, 1960, and New York, 1963.

Pace Gallery began in Boston in 1960. Wikipedia says Arne Glimcher founded it there and ran it with his wife, Milly, and his mother, Eva. The name did not come from a partner or a place. Wikipedia, citing a 2011 profile in The Wall Street Journal, says the gallery was named after the nickname of Glimcher’s father, “Pacey”. A short, familiar word became the name the gallery would carry from one city to the next.

The gallery soon moved its centre of gravity to New York. Wikipedia says that in 1963 Glimcher partnered with Fred Mueller to bring the gallery to the city, where it opened on East 57th Street, and that he closed the Boston gallery and moved his family to New York in 1965. Three years later, Wikipedia says, the gallery settled at 32 East 57th Street, which became its long-time address. The same encyclopedia records a branch in Columbus, Ohio, run by Eva Glimcher on Broad Street from 1965 to 1982.

The name also spread to related businesses. Wikipedia says Pace Prints was founded in 1968 on East 57th Street, and that Pace/MacGill, a photography gallery run by Peter MacGill, kept a separate space at 32 East 57th Street from 1983 until it joined Pace’s Chelsea headquarters in 2019. Each of these used the word Pace as a prefix, joined to a second word that described the specialism.

For nearly two decades the gallery traded under a longer, joined name. Wikipedia, citing The New York Times of 1 April 2010, says Pace operated jointly with Wildenstein & Co., a gallery specialising in old master paintings, as PaceWildenstein from 1993 to 2010, after which the two became separate galleries again and the single word Pace returned to the front of the business. The founder’s son, Marc Glimcher, later became the gallery’s president and chief executive; ARTnews reported on 5 December 2022 that he described a handover from his father that had started about ten years earlier.

Rooms in many cities.

Pace’s identity is also told through its buildings. Wikipedia says the gallery ran a short-lived outpost on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles in the 1960s with Irving Blum, and that from 1995 to 1999 PaceWildenstein had a gallery in Beverly Hills designed by the architect Charles Gwathmey. From 2008 until 2019 it kept a space in the 798 art district of Beijing.

London came next. The Guardian reported on 2 July 2012 that Pace would occupy the west wing of the Royal Academy’s building at 6 Burlington Gardens, a high Victorian building designed by James Pennethorne in the 1860s, beginning with an exhibition that set late paintings by Mark Rothko beside photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto. The newspaper quoted Marc Glimcher, then the gallery’s president, and said the London operation would be led by Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst. Pace later moved within Mayfair: ARTnews reported on 19 November 2020 that it was taking over the former Blain Southern gallery and had hired Jamie Fobert Architects to renovate the main-floor galleries and create a basement venue for experimental programmes. Wikipedia gives the address as 4 Hanover Square and the move as 2021.

On the West Coast, ARTnews reported on 19 July 2022 that Pace had run a pop-up in a former Tesla showroom in Menlo Park in 2014, opened a space in Palo Alto in 2016, and would close Palo Alto in September 2022 after gaining a Los Angeles gallery through its merger with Kayne Griffin, which opened that April. Wikipedia adds a gallery in Geneva from 2018, a Seoul space in Hannam-dong designed by Minsuk Cho, and a gallery in Azabudai Hills, Tokyo, in 2024.

The centre of the network is in Chelsea. artnet News reported on 7 June 2019 that Pace would open its new flagship on West 25th Street on 14 September 2019, with exhibitions of Alexander Calder, David Hockney, Fred Wilson and Loie Hollowell. The building was developed by Weinberg Properties and designed by Bonetti/Kozerski in close collaboration with Marc Glimcher, with a flexible seventh-floor space intended largely for performances. Glimcher called it the gallery’s global headquarters, and its address, 540 West 25th Street, now appears across Pace’s printed and online material.

Surnames, catalogues and white walls.

Art-market names often begin as people. A gallery or saleroom may carry a founder’s surname, a pair of joined surnames or a family name, and that name then has to work at very different sizes: on a street-level sign, on the spine of a catalogue, on a press release and on a small icon in a browser tab. Many houses set the name in a restrained typeface and leave plenty of space around it, so the word sits quietly beside the artworks rather than competing with them.

The printed catalogue is one of the main brand surfaces. Cover layouts, the grid of lot or plate pages, captions and the paper itself can all signal a house style from one season to the next. At a sale, a numbered bidding paddle is a small, repeated object that carries the name into photographs of the room.

Buildings matter too. Facades, entrance lettering, white walls, grey floors and even light can become part of how a gallery is recognised. Many galleries and auction houses also publish magazines, journals, podcasts and websites, where typography, photography and colour carry the identity between exhibitions.

A round table, a platform and a programme.

Recent years have added new layers to the Pace name. The Art Newspaper reported on 18 November 2021 that the gallery would launch Pace Verso, a custom-built platform for digital artworks, on 22 November 2021, beginning with works from Lucas Samaras’s XYZ series. The newspaper quoted Marc Glimcher, then president and chief executive, as saying the gallery’s philosophy was to build the tools its artists needed. It also noted that an earlier initiative, PaceX, had been spun off into a separate company, Superblue, which runs ticketed experiential installations.

The leadership structure changed in 2022. ARTnews reported on 5 December 2022 that Samanthe Rubell, who had started at the gallery’s front desk in 2008, had been named president, while Marc Glimcher remained chief executive. Glimcher formed a group of senior directors that he called the Round Table, meeting monthly to build consensus on how the gallery should develop. Wikipedia says the Chelsea building also hosts Pace Live, a programme of music, dance, film and conversation.

For designers, Pace is a case study in how a very short name can hold together a growing and changing organisation. The single word has been used on its own, joined to a partner’s name as PaceWildenstein, and attached to specialist ventures such as Pace Prints, Pace/MacGill and Pace Verso. Each extension keeps the founding word at the front, so the family nickname stays the anchor while the second word explains what the business does. The buildings support the same idea: an architect-designed space in each city, whether a Royal Academy wing in London or a purpose-built tower in Chelsea, presents the art inside a calm, neutral frame.

For a design guide, Pace Gallery shows how a short, personal name can carry a gallery across cities and decades. Compare it with Gagosian, another dealer named after its founder, and David Zwirner, which also uses a founder’s full name. For this guide we use gallery white, concrete grey and basalt with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pace Gallery’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.