World-Renowned Artist Vija Celmins Selected as Hamptons International Film Festival Featured Poster Artist

The Hamptons International Film Festival has announced that world-renowned artist and longtime Sag Harbor resident Vija Celmins has been chosen as the featured poster artist for the 33rd annual festival, which will run October 3 to 13.

Continuing a 33-year tradition of showcasing artwork from local artists, this year’s poster features Celmins’ 1975 piece “Ocean.” The artwork is courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

Celmins is widely admired for her meticulous renderings of natural imagery, including ocean waves, desert floors and night skies. Her paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints capture scenes too vast or mercurial to be fixed in the mind’s eye. Her work has been exhibited at major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Centre Pompidou. She has had more than 40 solo exhibitions and retrospectives and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship and the Carnegie Prize.

Celmins is currently the subject of a comprehensive solo exhibition at Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, featuring paintings, drawings and sculptures from the 1960s to today.

‘Vija Celmins is a celebrated visual artist known for her intricate drawings of oceans, stars and desert landscapes,” said Toni Ross, an East End artist and HIFF co-founder and founding chairman of the board. “Her minimal, contemplative yet daring work mirrors the spirit of the films we champion at HIFF and reflects the natural beauty of the Hamptons. Having been inspired by Vija’s art for many, many years, I am deeply proud and grateful to her for sharing her extraordinary work with us as the 2025 HIFF poster artist.’”

Vija Celmins was born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia, and immigrated to the United States in the late 1940s. She studied at the John Herron School of Art in Indiana and Yale University, then earned a master’s degree from UCLA. After living in Los Angeles, she moved to New York in 1981, where she currently lives and works. Her first major retrospective was organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 1992. Since then, she has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kunstmuseum Basel, Centre Pompidou and Menil Collection in Houston. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996 and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997.

The Hamptons International Film Festival was founded in 1992. The nonprofit organization offers year-round screenings, an annual Screenwriters Lab, a summer documentary showcase and educational initiatives. For more information, visit hamptonsfilmfest.org.