The famous avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas spoke of the visual arts centre being created on an international scale like this: "Let me dream a little about what should be in this centre, apart from keeping and showing the works of George Maciunas and Jonas Mekas. It should not be just a museum – a place for collections already gathered, that is, for what was created by Maciunas, the FLUXUS artists and myself. It should be a place for artists living now, working in film, video, computer art and mixed genres. And at the same time it must be a centre offering an overview of the work of artists in these genres – from the beginning to the present. The centre should be the standard-bearer of the avant-garde in all the arts." The centre has set itself the goal of popularising classic, intellectual, documentary and national cinema and video art, and of collecting, preserving and continually exhibiting the work of the famous 20th-century Lithuanian émigré artists Jonas Mekas and George Maciunas (Jurgis Mačiūnas), along with all kinds of objects connected with their lives and work: sketches, posters, photographs, working tools, equipment and household items. The Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center also constantly seeks out, discovers and shows the world the work of young Lithuanian visual artists. The public institution "Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center" was founded to popularise classic, intellectual, documentary and national cinema and video art. The centre plans to set up a film archive that would collect and preserve all data on avant-garde cinema. One of the centre's main missions is to bring the creative legacy of the world-famous New York artists George Maciunas and Jonas Mekas to Vilnius. In 2007 the centre signed an agreement with the world-famous filmmaker Jonas Mekas to acquire the FLUXUS collection. The FLUXUS collection consists of about 2,600 items and is the third-largest FLUXUS collection in the world, after those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. The collection includes works by Maciunas made for the magazines "Film-Makers' Cinematheque" and "Film Culture" and for Mekas's projects, exceptional works and documents connected with the founding of the SoHo district, and works and texts from Maciunas's private life. The collection also holds works by such famous avant-garde artists as Robert Morris, Nam June Paik, Jonas Mekas, Yoko Ono, On Kawara, Donald Judd, Yvonne Rainer, Alison Knowles, Michael Heizer, Joan Jonas, Claes Oldenburg and many others.