Upcoming Lectures & Talks
7 upcoming lectures and talks from Museum of Fine Arts, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All lectures in Greater Boston →
Sun Oct 25 · 2:00pm
Hoshino Satoru, the Japanese ceramic artist, traces how a 1986 landslide caused by torrential rain changed his view of clay from a material for presenting his ideals to one with a vitality of its own, and how his early work, carefully controlled and smoke-black, grew into large-scale installations. He speaks in Japanese with English interpretation, in the Rad Smith Program in Japanese Art.
Thu Oct 29 · 7:00pm
Uzo Aduba, who won two Emmys as Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren in Orange Is the New Black and a third playing Shirley Chisholm in FX's Mrs. America, talks about identity, belonging, resilience and courage, drawing on her career and her 2024 memoir The Road Is Good. She most recently starred in Netflix's The Residence. Part of the Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Celebrity Lectures, also livestreamed.
Thu Nov 12 · 7:00pm
Suzanne Jackson talks with Imani Perry about her six-decade career, from ethereal early canvases to recent abstractions that suspend paint in midair, and the experiences and places that shaped it; the evening accompanies the MFA exhibition Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love. Perry, a Harvard professor of African and African American Studies and of women, gender and sexuality, writes on the history of Black thought, art and imagination.
Thu Dec 3 · 7:00pm
Mo Rocca liked the variety pack of cereals as a child, shredded wheat excepted, and has run his life on the same principle. He makes the case for a wide range of interests over a strict plan — from afternoons with the 1974 World Book Encyclopedia to road trips in his twenties to presidential homes and gravesites. At the MFA.
Sat Dec 5 · 2:00pm
Hourig Sourouzian, director of the Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project, gives the Barbara W. Herman Memorial Lecture on royal portraiture made under the pharaoh Amenhotep III, focusing on statuary her project has recovered from his “Temple of Millions of Years” on the Theban west bank, beside the Colossi of Memnon. Her team has excavated the site, Kom el-Hettan, since the late 1990s.
Thu Feb 25 · 7:00pm
Rachel Dratch, the actor and comedian who spent seven years on Saturday Night Live and created Debbie Downer there, talks with Irene Bremis, a comedian and her co-host on Woo Woo with Rachel Dratch. Dratch grew up in Lexington, started at Second City in Chicago, wrote the memoir Girl Walks Into A Bar and is a two-time Tony nominee, for The Rocky Horror Show and POTUS. Also livestreamed.
Thu May 13 · 7:00pm
Ocean Vuong, the poet and novelist, talks about the craft and purpose of writing and his movement between poetry and fiction. His books include the novels On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) and The Emperor of Gladness (2025), the collection Time Is a Mother (2022) and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which won the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize. A Shapiro Celebrity Lecture, also livestreamed.
