About

Amethyst Rey Beaver is a contemporary art curator, writer, and UX designer based in Louisville, KY. She is also the Director & Co-Founder of Couchpotato, a contemporary art gallery run out of her living room. Couchpotato was born from the spirit of DIY punk house shows and a desire to break with traditional art-world rules. Each show is designed within the constraints of the space: a 150-square-foot room with windows, doors and electrical outlets, one couch that never leaves & walls with a hundred years of character. Each show requires different adjustments which include building pedestals or shelves, accommodating film and sculpture, or applying artist-made wallpaper or a mural made on site. The skills to run Couchpotato are the same ones she brings to product work: building genuine relationships rather than transactions, and treating limitations as the starting point for good design rather than an obstacle to it. From selecting the sightlines to determining the sequencing of works, an art exhibition is a unique and personal (user) experience.

Since 2022, she has been a UX Designer for Modernizing Medicine's User Experience Team, working on clinical enhancements, patient engagement tools, and long-term enterprise readiness projects. From 2016-2021, she worked as the assistant curator of 21c Museum Hotels, overseeing 20 rotating exhibitions in 9 locations across the country each year. From 2012-2016, Amethyst worked at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin on the Latin American and Modern & Contemporary curatorial teams on exhibitions, publications, and public programming. 

Amethyst has focused her efforts on fostering relationships with artists, institutions, galleries, and collectors, working to design a more equitable art world that recognizes and celebrates the contributions of artists, writers, and curators who have been systematically underrepresented in the art world. This is the same attention she brings into her design work, centering the experiences of all users and using empathy as a guiding principle.

Amethyst received her M.S. in Human Factors in Information Design at the McCallum School of Business at Bentley University in 2026. She received her M.A. in Modern & Contemporary Latin American art history from the University of Texas at Austin and her B.A. from Wellesley College. In 2010, she lived, worked, and studied in Valparaíso, Chile as a Fulbright Fellow.