Exhibition Talk: Arne Glimcher and Lawrence Weschler

Arne Glimcher is the founder of Pace Gallery, which he opened in Boston in 1960 in a small, street-level shop on historic Newbury Street. In 1963, the gallery opened its first space in New York City on 57th Street. 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. 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 also often credited with introducing museum-quality exhibitions into galleries and establishing Pace as one of the leading producers of scholarly catalogues and art books.

Lawrence Weschler graduated from Cowell College of University of California, Santa Cruz in 1974 and met Robert Irwin a few years later while working in the University of California, Los Angeles Oral History Program. Their conversations presently yielded the manuscript that would become Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, which was bought by the New Yorker in 1981 and published by the University of California Press in 1982, with an expanded second edition published in 2006. Weschler was a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1981 to 2001, and then director (now emeritus) of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University through 2014. He is the author of over twenty books, including True to Life (1982, 2006), a contrapuntal collection of conversations with David Hockney; Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995) on Los Angeles’ Museum of Jurassic Technology; Vermeer in Bosnia (2004); Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (2006), and And How are You, Doctor Sacks (2019) a biographical memoir of his 35-year friendship with the late neurologist Oliver Sacks.  A third edition of Seeing is Forgetting is forthcoming. Meanwhile, most of his efforts these days are devoted to Wondercabinet, his Substack fortnightly on the Miscellaneous Diverse.

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.