From her high-rise office overlooking Riga’s green rooftops, Vita Liberte describes the quality she looks for in art with a single word: authenticity.
“You should never go after somebody,” she told Artsy. “You should think on your own, and only then you’re interesting.”
That principle has guided Liberte as she and her husband, Vilnis Štrams, have assembled one of the most significant collections of contemporary Baltic art. Through VV Foundation, which they co-founded with art historian Jānis Borgs almost a decade ago, they have acquired more than 500 works, largely by artists from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
The collection reflects Liberte’s belief that Baltic artists are at their most compelling when they turn inward to the region’s landscapes, memories, political histories, and unresolved experiences, rather than looking westward for direction.
“There is this tendency, a little bit also in Eastern European art, to look at what’s going on in the Western world,” she said. “But I always say we should do it differently.”
Although the collection has grown substantially, Liberte still approaches buying as a personal process. She rarely acquires a work without first understanding the person who made it. “I need to know the artist before I buy,” she said.
For Liberte, collecting is less about purchasing an object than entering a long-term relationship with an artistic practice. The artists she tracks have also changed how she sees the world. “I’ve changed as a person, also through art,” she noted.
Her personal collecting journey began without extensive knowledge of contemporary art. Liberte trained as a tax lawyer, studying international law at New York University before returning to Latvia to establish her own firm. While living in New York, she became aware of the importance of private cultural patronage in the United States.
“Here in Latvia, people look at art and think it’s the responsibility of the state,” she told Artsy. “When I came back, I said to myself: ‘Okay, if I like something, I can support it.’”
She initially supported Latvia’s film industry, the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, and Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, where she remains a board member. “I didn’t know much about contemporary art,” she admitted. “It’s a lot of learning for me as well.”
As her collection developed, so did her education. Liberte is particularly drawn to artists who engage with the Baltic region’s Soviet and post-Soviet experience, such as Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas, whose work often transforms overlooked materials, spaces, and social histories.
The 1990s remain an especially resonant period. For Baltic countries, the decade brought independence, instability, freedom, and economic hardship. Liberte believes artists are only now gaining enough distance to examine it fully.
“The ’90s were really harsh for us, for everybody,” she said. “It’s challenging for people to go back and look at it from a good perspective, because bad and good things happened.”
She sees the period as both painful and creatively fertile. Much of its material culture was lost in the desire to discard the Soviet past. “There was this thing of destroying everything,” she added.
Collecting, in this context, becomes a form of preservation. In October 2026, VV Foundation will publish its first collection book with Milan-based publisher Skira. It will bring together approximately 40 works by around 30 Baltic artists, pairing each with a writer or curator to create what Liberte calls “a dialogue between artist and author.”
The publication will include only a fraction of the collection, but it will articulate its commitment to documenting Baltic artistic practices while they are still developing.
Liberte points to a generation of artists who have already begun receiving wider recognition. They include Lina Lapelytė, co-creator of the Golden Lion–winning opera Sun & Sea; Emilija Škarnulytė, known for immersive films exploring ecology, mythology, and geopolitics; the Vilnius, Lithuania–based duo Pakui Hardware; and Latvian-born sculptor Daiga Grantiņa.
Her interest is not limited to artists who have already achieved institutional visibility. VV Foundation runs a prize for recent art-school graduates and supports exhibitions, publications, and residencies, creating an ecosystem around the collection rather than treating acquisition as its final purpose.
At PAiR, the foundation’s residency in the coastal town of Pāvilosta, Latvia, artists are given time to develop new work in relative isolation. The program is based in a renovated 1901 house near the Baltic Sea. Artists who stay there may later enter the collection or receive support for exhibitions, though the relationships are not strictly transactional.
The residency, collection, and foundation frequently overlap. The artist duo MAREUNROL’S stayed at PAiR while developing work for the Latvian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which VV Foundation has supported for four consecutive editions.
Liberte still calls the foundation a hobby. “It’s something that we just love doing because we love artists,” she said. Yet her collecting has become part of a broader effort to establish a cultural record of a region whose artists have historically been overlooked internationally.
For a lawyer accustomed to structures and regulations, she is drawn to art because it offers the opposite.“I’m also quite drawn to freedom,” she noted. “In art, you can say things, and you can experiment, and you can really break through things in your own way.”
That freedom ultimately defines her collection: not a survey of what the Baltic art world is expected to be, but a record of artists insisting on their own ways of seeing.
