Massachusetts

Lawren Harris exhibit curated by Steve Martin opens at MFA

Lawren Harris exhibit curated by Steve Martin opens at MFA

Diane Kilgore

BOSTON – Members and guests of the Museum of Fine Arts enjoyed the landscape of a picture-perfect evening as Matthew Teitelbaum, the Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA, introduced Steve Martin, Adam Gopnik and Eric Fischl to a capacity audience that included U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. The four featured speakers took center stage in the Shapiro Family Courtyard to explain a new exhibit, The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris.

With ceilings that soar 63 feet, the courtyard's modern aesthetic was an ideal venue for the lecture marking Steve Martin's guest-curatorial debut. Before the formal conversation began, a recorded piano composition by Canadian Glenn Gould, The Idea of North, (after which this exhibition is named) added melody to the majestic images projected on the expansive walls. The speakers' dialogue amplified variations of the blue and white themes considered to be quintessential expressions of Canadian identity. Collectively, they agreed that Harris's paintings of vaulting ice and snow are absent humanity, but manage to instill a powerful, plangent, emotional quiver in viewers through their intensity and intimacy.

Quabbin sacrificed country towns to supply a thirsty Boston
Massachusetts

Quabbin sacrificed country towns to supply a thirsty Boston

Beth Treffeisen

WARE – Desolate grass roads lined with trees lace the landscape around the Quabbin Reservoir, the source of most of Boston's water, the site of a ghost town and one of the longest earthen dams in the U.S.

What is now the largest inland body of water in Massachusetts, the Quabbin is also artificial, created by flooding an area that once held four small towns, Dana, Enfield, Greenwich and Prescott in the Swift River Valley. It amounted to a massive state-authorized land-taking to serve Boston's growing needs.

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