Pace Gallery Is Launching PaceX, an Ambitious New Initiative to Promote Projects That Unite Art and Technology

Though the opening of Pace Gallery’s new $100
million, eight-story New York headquarters is still weeks away, the
gallery is already dominating headlines. Today, the mega-gallery
announced the launch PaceX, a new initiative to support projects at
the intersection of art and technology.

The gallery has hired an all-star team to lead the
venture. Christy MacLear, who led an advisory service for
artists’ estates and foundations at Sotheby’s Art Agency, Partners
until her somewhat abrupt
departure last year, has been tapped as CEO of the program.
(Prior to Sotheby’s, she served for six years at the Robert
Rauschenberg Foundation, where she was the organization’s first
CEO.)

Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, a director at the gallery, has been
promoted to chief creative officer of the initiative, while
Kathleen Forde will join as PaceX’s inaugural curator of
experiential art. Forde, a well-regarded curator in the sector,
previously served as artistic director at large for the media arts
space Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul.

In an interview with ARTnews, which
first reported the story, Pace’s president and CEO Marc Glimcher
noted there is currently a lack of infrastructure at the gallery
level for tech-minded artists. “In what way is the gallery
model equipped to support these artists in the way it supports
painters and sculptors?” Glimcher asked.

Pace has been moving into the tech sector more aggressively than
any other mega-gallery. It opened a permanent gallery space in Palo
Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, in 2016, after operating a
pop-up space in Menlo Park out of a former Tesla showroom for two
years. The new PaceX program appears to be an outgrowth of Pace Art
+ Technology, a program launched in 2016 to support collaboration
with interdisciplinary art groups, collectives, and studios who
work with tech.

Pace currently represents the collectives teamLab and Random
International, both of which use tech to create crowd-friendly
spectacles that have the potential to make as much, if not more,
money from ticket sales as from traditional art sales. In an
interview with artnet News earlier this year, Glimcher said he was
“pondering” how Pace might incorporate ticketed exhibitions into
the current gallery model.

Asked what kind of projects PaceX will take
on, MacLear told ARTnews: “Bold ones. Projects which
match the issues like climate change or social justice that drive
artists to new tools and canvases, such as cities or immersive
spaces.”

The post Pace Gallery Is Launching PaceX, an Ambitious New
Initiative to Promote Projects That Unite Art and Technology
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