Amy Eva Raehse, Partner and Executive Director at Goya Contemporary Gallery
Could you tell me a little bit about your outfit?
The outfit is all garments I’ve actually owned for quite some time. The shoes are leather boots clad in metal and then the jacket is Armani and the dress underneath—which is a parachute dress, which is technically for going to the pool—is actually from Anthropologie. I don’t believe in prioritizing or having a hierarchy within my closet. So celebrated designers are often paired with what would be pretty basic staples for clothing.
I can tell that you really curate the way you dress. How do you approach that kind of curation with your own belongings versus art?
I work with a lot of female practitioners, and many of the female practitioners that I work with are in their 60s, 70s and 80s. In particular, this artist here, Joyce J. Scott, focuses on really important narratives—conversations that people have a difficult time addressing like rape misogyny, racism, or hierarchies. So my clothing doesn’t prioritize a celebrated designer over a less celebrated designer. Scott also doesn’t prioritize the hierarchy of materials, so she will work with what’s called low-brow beads, plastic pony beads, in the same way that she works with really high brow, expensive Japanese glass beads. It’s kind of similar to what the artists in our gallery are doing within their work. I do that in my clothes as well.
How do you feel about the New York art scene, and what do you think it needs more or less of?
I don’t think of the New York art scene by itself. The art scene has gone global for quite a number of years now, and so I see New York as part of the larger context of a global vernacular. We’ve done this fair for many years and we work with museums all over, and there is much more of a cross-pollination between different cities and countries and not a siloing of New York as just a singular hub anymore.
I’m from New York originally, but I’ve lived in Baltimore for many, many years now. I like to say that Baltimore is a mini New York from the 1970s. And if you were in New York in the 1970s, you would know what that means.
What brought you into art?
It’s really hard for anybody to pin down why they took certain paths in their life. However, visual practice is very much a form of language and storytelling, and visual practitioners tend to—when they’re good and when they’re viable and when they’re potent within their practice—be truth tellers. I think that people can digest visual practice easier and remember visual things easier than they sometimes do with language or words. It’s really a universal language that transcends place and sometimes transcends time as well. We need many ways to communicate with one another and art is a potent way to do that.
Looking around your space and from the way you dress, I can see a lot of texture and form. How do you feel about texture and form?
I’m a texture person because I’m also more of an analog person. Things that are made of the hand, things that one needs to see in person because it’s hard to understand them on a flat screen—those are things I really gravitate towards, partially because I find them to be very human. We are the objects that tend to have that accumulation of texture. They are really humanizing. They remind us that we live in space. We don’t live on screens.
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