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Anya Tish, the celebrated and influential Houston gallerist, passed suddenly and unexpectedly in June 2024 at the age of 74, leaving behind her desire to shake up the fine arts scene with unconventional and unexpected works.

“She was essentially focusing on the value of relationships and the value of the artists in their work, and respecting that as well and truly believing in them,” says Anya Tish Gallery director Dawn Ohmer of her late mentor.

Since 1996, the space that bears her name has helped launched the careers of artists both local and international. Running until April 19, Anya’s Eye, a show curated by Ohmer, is devoted to Tish’s legacy and the creative lives she’s inspired and elevated along the way. Twenty-two artists appear in the show, which includes painting, photography, sculpture, video, mixed media, and installation pieces, representing the breadth and depth of Tish’s tastes.

“I felt like I needed to pay homage not only to her legacy and how it’s imprinted the Houston art scene, but also her memory as a person,” Ohmer says. “And so that’s where this comes from, a very personal point of view.”

A native of Kraków, Poland, Tish first made headway in the Houston gallery scene by showing emerging Eastern European talent—a demographic that, at the time, was not represented in the local arts community. She started off with prints, which Ohmer points out are much more common in Europe and therefore were not overly familiar to Texas art collectors, before expanding into displaying and selling other media. Tish would go on to represent artists such as Russian-born painter Dmitri Koustov—now a professor at Texas A&M—and Düsseldorf-based Belarusian multimedia creator Maxim Wakultschik for decades.

“[This] is something that not every gallerist can say,” Ohmer says. “Staying with a specific gallery for as long as certain artists have here is quite rare.”

In addition to expanding her roster to include more types of art, Tish also featured artists from backgrounds beyond Eastern Europe: Colombian, Chinese, Swiss, Mexican, South Korean, and English creators, among many others. The one thing they all had in common was a desire to take risks, to show works that challenged traditional gallery perspectives on what the appellation “fine art” can apply to.

This perspective carried over into her five-year mentorship of Ohmer, and forms the thematic crux of Anya’s Eye: a culmination of lessons taught, lessons learned, and legacies forged together along the way. The show is just as much a proof of Ohmer’s own curatorial skills and promising future running the Anya Tish Gallery as it is a memorial to the eponymous founder’s indelible influence.

“Anya was my rock the last two and a half years. She really took a step back and allowed me to pioneer the gallery and was insanely supportive of my decisions, truly believing in me,” Ohmer says. “And so now having to step in these—although she was very tiny—big shoes…it’s challenging. It’s scary.”

Romanian installation artist Adela Andea, who lives in The Woodlands, first piqued Tish’s interest with the light work she showed at her Lawndale Art Center solo debut. Ohmer notes that a decade ago, few museums and galleries “[were] looking at light artists and taking them seriously, but Anya did.” One of the Anya Tish Gallery’s most notable features is a friendly skylight, which Andea uses to great effect in her site-specific installation for Anya’s Eye, titled Vortex Flow.

In it, LED lights and 3D-printed plastics intertwine beginning at the ground level, eventually reaching into and around the skylight. Every element of the piece recalls something about Andea’s relationship with Tish.

“I never used that space like that before, with the window up there. I thought it just had to go from floor to ceiling, kind of like a vortex that creates…how people connect to heaven or with the spirit,” Andea says. “I know she liked the green color, so I kept that green for her up there. For me, I kept the pink.”

The work evokes all the touchpoints of a lifetime, depicting Tish’s green flowing next to and often overlapping with Andea’s pink as they reach toward a heavenly end. Andea is still represented by the Anya Tish Gallery. Throughout her time with the space, she’s held solo shows every few years as well as contributed smaller works to group shows. Tish made all that possible.

“It developed from what was experimental at Lawndale to something professional,” she says.

Koustov met Tish in 2001 after moving to the United States to pursue his arts career. His first solo show occurred at her gallery, initially located on Sunset Boulevard in Rice Village, that same year. He remains represented by the gallery more than two decades later.

“During my collaboration time with Anya and the gallery, I have had several presentations. It changes from kind of solid and dark presentations…to more light presentations, different color combinations, the design of the forms changes,” he says. “It’s a certain normal developing process for the artists.”

His oil on canvas diptych Limoncello I & II sits at the back of the exhibition and uses free-flowing colors and forms as an “expression about the world around Anya,” he says. It’s a joyful and kinetic piece that reflects the playful, anarchic spirit undergirding Anya’s Eye. That same sense of cheekiness is also witnessed across the gallery in the works of English artist William Cannings, whose steel-and-automotive-paint sculptures appear at first as lightweight inflatables. Or the bold colors and movements associated with Videosculptures, a multimedia amalgamation of looped video incorporated into sculptures by Swiss visionary Katja Loher and her coterie of collaborators.

“I think the art is what kept me wanting to pursue this legacy of hers, wanting to keep Anya Tish Gallery alive, not even changing the name over to Dawn Ohmer Gallery,” Ohmer says. “I think it’s her presence that still lingers here.”