Vija Celmins is the most internationally renowned and highest-valued American artist of Latvian origin. Vija Celmins was born in 1938 in Riga. In 1944, she fled with her family, immigrated to the United States in 1948, and settled in Indianapolis in 1949. In 1962, the artist began her studies at the University of California and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1965. She then moved to Los Angeles, where she lived and worked until 1981, when she relocated to New York.

The exhibition held in Riga in 2014 featured Celmins’s paintings, sculptures, objects, graphite and charcoal drawings, as well as prints created in mezzotint, aquatint, drypoint, etching, and woodcut techniques. In total, the exhibition showcased nearly fifty works by the artist, brought from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt am Main, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, Tate in London, and the Scottish National Gallery, as well as from the collection of the U.S. Embassy in Latvia, the Mūkusala Art Salon collection, the collection of the Latvian National Museum of Art, the McKee Gallery in New York, and the artist’s own collection.