With Inesa Brašiškė, I co-curated the first major show on Jonas Mekas and the New Yorj Avant-Garde at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius in 2021–22. The exhibition was based on our extensive archival research that took us four years (2016-2020). As a result of our research, the exhibition and collective monograph published by the Yale University Press examined the relationship between Mekas’s filmmaking and his intellectual, curatorial, organizational and material work involved in sustaining an independent film culture in New York.

Focusing on the first three decades after Mekas 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 his personal cinematic language ("diary films") to his 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 among modern artists of the time. Our approach placed the intimacy of the film diary alongside the collective labor of building institutions and audiences, resisting censorship, and securing a public life and artistic freedom for experimental cinema.