People: Steve Martin gets serious as curator of artist Lawren Harris
Comedian, actor, writer, musician, and now we can add art curator to that long list of titles placed alongside Steve Martin’s name. The man who brought bluegrass music to mainstream audiences and introduced the banjo and balloon animals to comedy routines has a new passion: He wants to imbue in U.S. audiences the same deep admiration he has for the works of Lawren Harris, arguably Canada’s most revered artist and one almost completely unknown in the U.S.
He’ll get that chance beginning Sunday when “The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris” opens at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum.
The show, which travels to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Canada’s Art Gallery of Ontario next year, will be the first and likely the last exhibition he curates, Martin said earlier this week.
The artist’s ability to strike a dichotomy between the abstract and the real was one of the things Martin said drew him to Harris’ work.
Harris, who died in 1970, turned to abstract expressionism later in life, but this exhibition focuses strictly on his Canada-defining landscapes.
Martin spent three years putting the show together.
Quaid arrested trying to re-enter U.S.
HIGHGATE, Vt. – American actor Randy Quaid was taken into custody Friday night while trying to cross into the United States from Canada, the Vermont State Police said.
The “Independence Day” actor was detained by troopers at the Highgate Springs port of entry days after Canadian officials said he would be deported. Quaid is wanted in Santa Barbara, California, to face felony vandalism charges filed in 2010 after he and his wife, Evi, were found squatting in a guesthouse of a home they previously owned.
The pair skipped several court appearances and went to Canada, where Evi Quaid was granted citizenship.
The 65-year-old actor said in interview with the Associated Press from a detention center in Laval, Quebec, on Wednesday that he would like to resolve his legal issues in California and “move on with my life.”
The birthday bunch
Actor Earle Hyman is 89. Singer Daryl Hall (Hall and Oates) is 69. Actress Joan Cusack is 53. Comedy writer and TV host Michael J. Nelson is 51. Actor Luke Perry is 49. Actress Jane Krakowski is 47. Rapper U-God (Wu-Tang Clan) is 45. Actress Emily Deschanel is 39.