Arts

The Southampton Arts Center will kick off its summer music programs with three free outdoor concerts on Saturday and Sunday. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz for Young People on Tour program will return to the center on Saturday afternoon at 4 with a free performance on the outdoor stage by Thunderswamp, a party jazz collective whose music celebrates the culture and legacy of New Orleans. Compositions by Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Professor Longhair, and others will be on the program.

You’ve heard of the classical “three Bs” — Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Well, there are more than three notable composers whose last names begin with the second letter of the alphabet, and you can include Victoria Bond in that extended list. Ms. Bond, a well-known conductor and music commentator, is also a composer of considerable ingenuity.

In October 2005, Stephen Beachy, writing in New York magazine, asked, “Who is the real JT Leroy?” and proposed an answer. A few months later, The New York Times called the Leroy enigma “one of the most bizarre literary mysteries in recent memory” and Vanity Fair dubbed it the “literary parlor game of ‘Who Is JT Leroy?’ ”

Calling all tree lovers! Get down to the Woodbine Collection in Montauk for the opening of “The Tree Show” tomorrow with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. “Water+Color+Works,” a group show of contemporary watercolors, will be on view at the Amagansett Library from tomorrow through July 31. A reception will happen Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m.

The stars of “The Unmovers,” a popular series of Optimum TV commercials and YouTube sketches, will bring their stand-up acts to Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Monday at 8 p.m.

Jack Lenor Larsen has channeled 25 years of creative energy into the house, sculpture, gardens, and overall landscape of the LongHouse Reserve, his residence and public preserve in East Hampton.

When Lana Jokel undertakes a film project, she doesn’t so do casually. At present, she is working on a documentary on Michael Chow, best known as a restaurateur but also a serious artist who exhibited his paintings at the Warhol Museum in February and, as Ms. Jokel explained at her Bridgehampton house, a complex and multifaceted figure who has lived an extraordinary life. She has already filmed in Shanghai, Beijing, and Pittsburgh and estimates the project will take several years. “He’s now 77,” she said. “I told him I’d like to finish by the time he’s 80.”

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor will present “Stuffed,” a new comedy about food, fat, and fearlessness written by and starring Lisa Lampanelli, a two-time Grammy nominee, on Saturday evening at 8. The venue will barely have time to catch its breath before launching the three-week run of “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” its second Mainstage production of the season, on Tuesday evening.

A recital of music for flute and piano, which will include the premiere of a new composition by Daniel Koontz, will take place Sunday at 3 p.m. at Christ Episcopal Church in Sag Harbor, where Dr. Koontz is the organist.

Koichiro Kurita has a way with rocks, with trees, with ponds, indeed with nature in all its forms in straightforward photography, and, more recently, with collage. His insanely textural and captivating images are on view at Ille Arts in Amagansett with Takeshi Shikama’s photographs from his “Urban Forests” and “Garden of Memory” series.

The Southampton Arts Center, in partnership with the New York Academy of Art, will present “Water/Bodies,” an exhibition organized by Eric Fischl and David Kratz, the academy’s president, from tomorrow through July 31. A reception will be held on July 2 from 5 to 7 p.m.

The Barynya Ensemble, a New Jersey-based Russian music and dance group, will showcase folk dances from areas in and around Russia in a one-hour performance at the Southampton Cultural Center on Saturday at 6 p.m. Six dancers and three musicians will perform.

Paintings by Paul Resika will be shown at Lawrence Fine Art in East Hampton in the show “Boats and Sails.” It will open today and run through July 14. The Drawing Room in East Hampton will present concurrent solo exhibitions of work by Mel Kendrick and Thomas Nozkowski from tomorrow through July 25.

Thomas Moran, one of America’s most important landscape painters, spent most of his summers in East Hampton between 1879 and 1922, and in 1884 he built the first artist’s studio here, on Main Street across from Town Pond.

The Thunderballs, a roots reggae band featuring N.L. Dennis, a singer-songwriter who is a prominent member of the Western Jamaica music scene, will perform outdoors at the Southampton Arts Center on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

“Jazz for Jennings,” a benefit for the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center, will bring seven prominent jazz musicians to the Watermill Center on Sunday at 12:30 p.m. for brunch and a concert.

“That’s Amore!” a free concert celebrating the musical heritage of Italy and its influences on composers in North and South America, will take place Saturday evening at 7:30 at the Montauk Library.

The Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival is accepting submissions for this year’s event, which will take place at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor in December. The regular deadline for submissions is June 30; the late deadline is July 10. Submission applications and more information can be found at ht2ff.com.

Garden Dialogues, a program of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, which opens private residential gardens to the public, will feature a newly constructed Colonial Revival home and an acre of formal gardens in Southampton Village on Saturday afternoon from 1 to 3.

Art is on the menu at c/o the Maidstone inn in East Hampton Village this month. Two Swedish artists, Jacob Fellander, a photographer, and Anders Wendin a/k/a Moneybrother, a musician, will be in residence there through Monday, exploring the dynamic relationship between photography and music. The results of their work will hang on the walls and play from the speakers throughout the year.

The Choral Society of the Hamptons will perform the world premiere of “The Reluctant Moses,” an opera by Victoria Bond, on June 25 at 7 p.m. at the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor. Commissioned by the society, the work is scored for solo bass vocalist, solo string bass, chorus, and orchestra, and will share the evening’s program with Beethoven’s “Mass in C.”

While many are aware that the actor and comedian Steve Martin also has a vigorous writing career, few are aware of how many of these genres he has excelled in. There are the screenplays, which include the hit films “The Jerk” and “L.A. Story”; the novels, including the bestseller “Shopgirl”; the essays for The New Yorker, and the plays, including the popular “Picasso at the Lapin Agile.” As a writer, Mr. Martin doesn’t exactly plumb the Dostoevskian depths of the human soul: He tends toward light, breezy comedy that utilizes his broad West Coast sensibility.

Although there are some outliers, it is striking how many pieces in “TERRITORY: Abstraction on the East End Today” have such a strong linear and geometric approach. Whether by accident or design, the show makes a strong case for a local aesthetic that favors such a style of abstraction.

“You and Me the Movie,” a documentary by Taylor Montemarano, a Montauk native, and Lorenzo DeCampos, will be shown at the Surf Lodge in Montauk tomorrow at 7 p.m.

Nick Tarr saves stuff, and he always has. “I need things,” he said. “I don’t paint things.” The boxes he made for 20 years and with which he is perhaps most closely identified are jam-packed with objects and images he has accumulated. So, too, are his more recent scanographs and a series of spatially ambiguous photographs that testify to his compulsive and wide-ranging collecting.

For a few short weeks, the galleries at Guild Hall will bring East Africa to East Hampton through the local and international photography and collage work of Peter Beard.

A staged reading of Joe Pintauro’s play “Men’s Lives” will take place tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill in conjunction with its current exhibition, “Radical Seafaring.”

La Compagnia Amarilli, a vocal duet consisting of Kinga Cserjesi, soprano, and Deborah Carmichael, mezzo-soprano, will perform at St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in Bridgehampton on Saturday at 5 p.m.

Studio 11 in Red Horse Plaza in East Hampton will show “From Memory,” an exhibition of paintings by Louise Crandell. A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. and remain on view through July 10. “Natural Forces,” a solo exhibition of works on paper and canvas by Steven Kinder, will be on view at the Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill from Saturday through July 18, with a reception set for Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

The Hamptons International Film Festival will bring back its popular SummerDocs series for the eighth time this summer, beginning on July 9 with “Author: The JT Leroy Story,” which examines the unraveling of a decade-long literary hoax and the perpetrator behind it.