Frozen Film Frames: Portraits of Filmmakers by Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas is considered by many to be the “godfather of American avant-garde film.” He is revered for his experimental diary films, his founding of the New York film institutions Filmmakers Cooperative and Anthology Film Archives, and his passionate promotion of avant-garde cinema when he was a film critic for The Village Voice. At 92 years old, he has, in recent years, started a new career as a gallery artist, exhibiting photographic blowups of adjoining frames from his 16mm film diaries. His “frozen film frames” have been exhibited and acclaimed at the Venice Biennale, MOMA/PS1, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, among other venues.

The exhibition, which features twenty-two photographic portraits, is co-curated by Richard Herskowitz, director of the Cinema Pacific film festival, and Deborah Colton, owner and director of the Deborah Colton Gallery in Houston. The Deborah Colton Gallery has shown Mekas’s work since 2005 and was founded as an innovative showcase for ongoing presentation and promotion of strong historical and visionary contemporary artists worldwide. Frozen Film Frames features, among others, images of Robert Frank, Elia Kazan, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andy Warhol, Wim Wenders, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono, observed filming their experimental film Bottoms.

Also showing in the gallery is Mekas’s 1997 feature film Birth of a Nation, which consists of 170 portraits, sketches, and glimpses of independent film makers and activists shot between 1955 and 1996.

This project is made possible by a JSMA Academic Support Grant.