For Pacific co-founders Elizabeth Karp-Evans and Adam Turnbull, what started as a labor of love—crafting quality art books for friends like Toyin Ojih Odutola, Servane Mary, and Marina Adams—has morphed into one of New York’s buzziest cultural nerve centers.
On a blustery spring day in March, Turnbull recounts their brisk rise. “We started the independent imprint in 2016,” he tells me, “but things got crazy in early 2020. We were inundated with requests from clients and friends in the art world about how to deal with the closing of brick-and-mortar galleries.”
Picking up the thread, Karp-Evans muses, “We realized the full scope of what Pacific could be—a purpose-driven, community-oriented dialogue with our partners and their audiences. We’re a creative agency, but we think of ourselves as cultural storytellers.”
The project that cemented Pacific’s place in New York’s creative ecosystem was the development of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s new visual identity, ahead of the opening of its new building on 125th Street later this year. “We rebranded the whole institution,” Turnbull recalls of the 2023 project, “which allowed us to explore all the elements we’re interested in—not only branding and messaging, but also membership, campaigns, language, tone of voice, and typeface.”
“The Studio Museum is singular,” notes Karp-Evans. “It’s a champion and safekeeper of Black American contemporary art. Our work was about creating a visual toolkit that people would immediately understand—that this is the place where Black art lives. That was our tagline.”
More recently, the duo were tasked with designing and art-directing the catalog for the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, inaugurated each May with the now-legendary Met Gala. “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” charts Black dandyism from the 18th century all the way to modern-day wayfinders like Pharrell Williams, Virgil Abloh, and Grace Wales Bonner. “We took inspiration from tailoring, of course, and older volumes that predate machine-binding techniques,” says Karp-Evans. “We wanted the book to feel like it has existed for a long time.”
The past 12 months have been particularly nonstop for Pacific. The team recently completed a rebrand of the avant-garde New York institution the Kitchen, poring over 50 years of archival material; embarked on a similar project for the Drawing Center; finished a collaboration with Matthew Barney on the artist’s Secondary publication and video installation at the Fondation Cartier in Paris; and worked on an initiative with Julie Mehretu to build a collective of filmmakers on the African continent and produce an anthology film to premiere at Cape Town’s Zeitz MOCAA in 2026.
Perhaps the most unexpected hat tip came in 2022, when the MoMA Library requested to acquire Pacific’s complete collection of titles. “We set out to make books for artists who we really believe in, without the expectation of acknowledgment from an institution like MoMA,” reasons Karp-Evans. “[A large] percent of the artists in MoMA’s collection are men and many are white. They become history. Our catalog represents quite a different demographic. We’re really proud to have collaborated with these artists, and to have others recognize how much their stories matter.”
