Steve Martin Is Coming to the MFA

Photo by Danny Clinch / Image courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In addition to his roles as an actor, a writer, and a musician, Steve Martin has recently revealed he’s also an avid modern art collector.

Beginning March 12, he’ll take on one more job—as an art curator at the Museum of Fine Arts. Martin is guest curating a Lawren Harris exhibit, which includes almost 30 modernist paintings of Canadian landscapes from the 1920s and 1930s. Organized by Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Martin’s exhibit is the first major showing of Harris’s work in the United States.

To kick off the opening, the MFA is hosting a free event with Martin in the Shapiro Family Courtyard. A conversation about Harris and modernism will be lead by Martin, artist Eric Fischl, New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik, and MFA director Matthew Teitelbaum. The discussion will highlight Harris’s legacy in relation to his iconic paintings of northern Canadian landscapes, including the Rocky Mountains and Lake Superior.

“He’s not telling the story of the landscape,” says Martin in a preview video of the exhibit. “He’s taking it to another level of the metaphysics of the landscape.”

The public event will operate on a first come, first served basis.

Free, March 12, starting at 6 p.m., Museum of Fine Arts, mfa.org/programs.

Mountains in Snow by Lawren Harris / Image courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston