New York–based art collector Amitha Raman was, by her own account, a wild child growing up in Kansas City. “As much as I could be,” she smiled in her apartment overlooking Madison Square Park, surrounded by a monumental Rashid Johnson painting, a Nari Ward work, and a classic Maia Ruth Lee canvas.
“My mom and dad are immigrants from India and Korea,” Raman said. “They didn’t actually know that I smoked weed until I launched my business.” In 2020, after a decade in marketing strategy and corporate innovation, she debuted an eponymous line of artist-inspired smoking accessories. Raman recalled her mom’s reaction: “When she saw how beautiful they were, how well-made they were, she’s like, ‘I accept this.’” As a collector, Raman gravitates towards artists who use beauty to give rebellion a good name, too.
Since 2018, she’s acquired dozens of paintings, photographs, and materially adventurous artworks. She’s also joined MoMA’s Black Arts Council, its Photography Acquisition Committee, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Council, which supports the Maine residency’s artists.
Raman didn’t arrive at art all at once. She’d taken only one art history course in college—Italian Renaissance and Baroque art. “I thought it was gonna be such an easy class,” she said. Instead, it required learning histories and symbols she hadn’t encountered growing up.
In 2010, Raman started taking evening classes at MoMA with art historian Agnes Berecz. “Do what you’re passionate about,” the fledgling aficionado had figured, “and you’ll meet like-minded people.” Imagine Raman’s surprise, then, to find herself surrounded by senior citizens—including Alice, a stylish lady with “beautiful bleach-blonde hair” and “red fingernails dripping in Chanel and diamonds.”
“I don’t think she was coming to learn anything,” Raman said. “I think she just wanted to share her amazing stories,” which featured Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Raman’s favorite artist, Felix Gonzalez-Torres. “Alice seemed like such an aspirational figure,” Raman remembered. Alice was more than a collector. She was a part of art history.
Raman waited eight years to buy her first work: Hounds of Hell (1973) by Mary Beth Edelson. “This is not the most obvious or conventional choice,” she said. Although Edelson was a pioneering feminist photographer, she’s less famous than other legends in Raman’s collection—like Tracy Emin, whose neon sculpture Keep Me Safe (2006) casts a glow over Hounds of Hell and another one of Edelson’s works in Raman’s powder room.
“The foundation of learning about art through a more curatorial lens by taking classes at MoMA is really what informed this choice,” Raman noted. “It’s still a throughline in the collection.” Before committing, she dives deep into research, bingeing on artist interviews and archival materials. “I try to rely on the primary sources,” she said.
Since 2020, Raman and collector Will Palley—her co-chair on MoMA’s Young Patrons Council—have created primary sources of their own, interviewing artists like Camilo Godoy and Ming Smith on their podcast. Conversations have led Raman to acquire works by Marilyn Minter and Jeffrey Gibson. The latter is the pride of her collection.
Larry Bell’s colorful glass sculptures flashed against the snow blanketing Madison Square Park outside Raman’s windows on the afternoon she toured me through her home. She’d recently hosted a reception to celebrate Bell’s installation, and two newly arrived works on paper—tokens of his appreciation—waited to be hung in the master bedroom, near an orange abstraction by Young-il Ahn and a silk painting by Kyungah Ham.
Raman initially encountered Ham’s work at Frieze London with the late arts administrator Boon Jui Tan. He explained that Ham’s materials are smuggled to and from North Korea, where artisans help produce her pieces. Raman’s example, What you see is the unseen / Chandeliers for Five Cities SSK 06-02 (2018), literally lists “middle man,” “bribe,” and “anxiety” among its materials, alongside silk threads and a wooden frame.
“This is such a great example of what really moves me,” Raman said. Aesthetics draw her in, but context keeps her there. She credits Berecz with shaping that instinct. In Raman’s view, art should “say something or stand for something or have some kind of political message.”
She’s skeptical of the ubiquitous advice to buy what you love. For Raman, love works best with boundaries. To that end, she focuses mostly on abstraction and minimalism. “I would get tired of looking at representational work,” she said.
This discipline has paid off. Raman has never sold a work, and only Mika Rottenberg’s Ponytail (Black) (2016) lives in storage. When Raman admires artists outside her collecting lane, she supports them in other ways—donating work to museums, hosting dinners, or organizing benefit shows like the one she’s planning with the Asian art–focused collective Here and There at the Gotham dispensary in Chelsea during Frieze New York.
She began supporting emerging artists after meeting figures like Chase Hall, Tomashi Jackson, and Jeffrey Meris at Skowhegan in 2019. More recently, she’s turning more toward formerly overlooked figures like Howardena Pindell and Ed Clark. Raman remembers seeing Clark’s work at Hauser & Wirth’s Hamptons gallery in 2020 and hesitating.
“Seeing what the prices are six years later, I’m like, ‘Damn, that was a missed opportunity.’”
“I want to have those important works to anchor the collection,” Raman said, “then mix in some of the emerging artists that I feel are in conversation.”
As a cannabis entrepreneur, she’s learned firsthand how conservative the art world can be. Her collection offers a constant reminder that there are still troublemakers to befriend.
