Vija Celmins

Vija Celmins (*1938 in Riga) emigrated to the United States with her family in the late 1940s. She studied painting and printmaking at the John Herron School of Art in Indiana and attended a summer course at Yale University in 1961 before earning a master's degree at UCLA. She has had solo exhibitions in numerous museums, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1996 she was introduced to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1997 she received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.