With Inesa Brašiškė, I co-curated this exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius in 2021–22. The exhibition was based on our extensive archival research that took four years (2016-2020). We examined the relationship between Mekas’s filmmaking and the intellectual, organizational, and material work involved in sustaining an independent film culture.

Focusing on the first three decades after his arrival in New York in 1949, the exhibition brought his films together with critical writings, photographs, magazines, and institutional records. His involvement in Film Culture, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, and Anthology Film Archives connected the development of a personal cinematic language to the creation of structures for distribution, exhibition, and preservation.

Films by Maya Deren, Marie Menken, Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, and Andy Warhol situated Mekas’s work within a history of artistic exchange. Our approach placed the intimacy of the film diary alongside the collective labor of building audiences, resisting censorship, and securing a public life for experimental cinema.