MIAMI, FLA.- Obsolete Media Miami (O.M.M.) will welcome seminal artist, filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas to the Miami Design District on Saturday, March 26 for a reception and screening of the artist’s diary film opus Walden Parts I and II.

The special evening marks the first public screening of Walden in Miami and will benefit O.M.M., an experimental art studio establishing a picture and moving image archive and resource for artists, designers, filmmakers, researchers and writers.

“There is a profound contemporary relevance and legacy in Jonas Mekas’ artistic practice and the way in which his 1960 16mm diary films anticipated our social media streams,” said Barron Sherer, Principal Obsolete Media Miami. “We are proud to partner with the Miami Design District and Ground Control to bring this celebrated archivist, filmmaker, writer and champion of underground aesthetics to Miami.”

Since the mid-1950s, the Lithuanian-born Mekas (b. 1922) has remained at the forefront of the American avantgarde and alternative cinema, working alongside friends like Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Anger, and influencing subsequent generations of filmmakers and artists.

Walden was Mekas’ first diary film, originally titled Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, 1969. Representative of Mekas’ oeuvre, the six-part Walden is an intensely personal record of daily life in New York City edited from a collection of images gathered by Mekas using a Bolex 16mm camera. Typically, in what became his signature, Mekas exposed several frames at a time to illuminate and record fleeting moments between the mid and late 1960s; ‘either you get it now, or you don’t get it at all,’ said Mekas. Walden was strung together in chronological order and presented with sounds he collected during the same period.