HOUSTON, TX.- Throughout much of her career, Vija Celmins has been known for her captivating paintings and drawings of starry night skies, fragile spider webs, and barren desert floors – quiet, expansive worlds meticulously executed in gradations of black and grey. As a young artist in Los Angeles during the early 1960s, however, Celmins’s work was marked by a distinctly different tone, one influenced by the violence of the era and the mass media that represented it. Realistically rendering images from newspapers, magazines, and television, Celmins filled her canvases with smoking handguns, crashing warplanes, and other images of disaster and violence. Co-organized by the Menil Collection and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-66 explores this essential yet often overlooked period of the artist’s work. While recent surveys at the Centre Pompidou and the Metropolitan M