Arts

   There are some unique and thought-provoking offerings this winter at the Amagansett and John Jermain Libraries and we have a native son to thank for it. Christian Scheider has just made the dead of winter here a bit more interesting.

   Robert Richenburg’s paintings and works on paper from the 1950s and 1960s, during the height of Abstract Expressionism, are the subject of a new show on view in New York at the David Findlay Jr. Gallery on Fifth Avenue. The exhibition includes work that is gestural and full of color and linear movement.

   “The Scottish Play” is the title many people substitute for “Macbeth” when inside the theater, not because they are interested in geography, but because, according to an ancient theatrical superstition, speaking the title aloud in a theater will bring calamity upon the speaker and the theater itself.

    But only good luck was in the air at the Friday night debut of William Shakespeare’s bloody masterpiece, produced by the Round Table Theatre Company and Academy at LTV Studios in Wainscott.

Art in the Sky

    Tomorrow, the Parrish Art Museum will offer a guided telescope viewing and slide lecture on extraterrestrial life. The telescope viewing begins at 4 p.m. and continues through 8, weather permitting, and is offered through the Montauk Observatory, Suffolk Community College, and the Dark Sky Society.

Neoteric Symposium

    From 7 to 11 p.m. tomorrow, Neoteric Fine Art in Amagansett will present two events. First up is the “Neoteric Symposium,” a show-and-tell of multiple presentations by local people on a variety of topics. Based on the popular PechaKucha format (lately at the Parrish Art Museum), the symposium aims to provide a forum for ideas and introduce the people behind them. A listing of presenters is available on the gallery’s Web site.

    Now that the holiday season has left us, those on the South Fork looking for other reasons to get out of the house can take advantage of the return of several winter film and theater programs beginning this week, such as the Bay Street Theatre’s Picture Show.

Eric Meola, whose most famous image is the photograph of Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons on the "Born to Run" album cover, has had a full and varied career. He is now traveling the globe and capturing the "last great places" with his camera.

Saunders’s “Long Now”

    “Christopher Saunders: The Long Now” will open at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in East Hampton on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. “The Long Now” refers to a term used by Brian Eno: “The precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes.” In the painting “The Long Now,” from 2011, three horizontal planes, implying different states of place or time, are merged.

    The Scottish play known to nonsuperstitious Shakespeareans as “Macbeth” will be performed beginning tomorrow at LTV Studios by the Round Table Theatre Company.

    This will be the first full production of the new theater ensemble, which had its inaugural event in October with a reading of “Double Falsehood,” a play with portions attributed to Shakespeare.

   “Non-matriculated” is the operative mouthful of a word as relates to a trio of graduate-level workshops in writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton this spring. Some quick details: The courses run weekly from Jan. 28 to May 22 and cost about $1,800. The deadline to apply is Saturday.

   The courses: Ursula Hegi is offering Contemporary Literature by Immigrant Writers. Ms. Hegi, the author of 12 books, is now editing an anthology of just this type of fiction, “Second Voices.”

‘Les Troyens’

    Guild Hall will screen the Met: Live in HD’s presentation of “Les Troyens,” an opera by Berlioz based on Virgil’s “Aeneid,” on Saturday at noon. Fabio Luisi will conduct. The production stars Marcello Giordani as Aeneas, Deborah Voigt as Cassandra, and Susan Graham as Dido.

    The five-act epic has a running time of 300 minutes, with two intermissions. It is based on Francesca Zambello’s 2003 production, receiving its first Met revival this season. Joyce DiDonato will host the transmission and conduct backstage interviews with the stars.

Chrysalis Gallery Opening

    Chrysalis Gallery in Southampton Village will present “Color Fields,” featuring the work of Joe Bucci, this weekend. On Saturday and Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. the exhibit will be complemented by poetry readings and refreshments. Guests have been encouraged to wear their favorite color and join in the poetry readings related to color.

Syd Solomon at Spanierman

Festival Passes

    The Hamptons International Film Festival is offering its founders passes at reduced rates through the end of the year. The passes, which provide priority access to screenings, conversations, and other festival events are now $1,250, a 25 percent discount off this year’s rates.

East End Women Artists

In New Book

    “Danger! Women Artists at Work,” a new book by Debra N. Mancoff and published by Merrill, features Lee Krasner, Judy Chicago, Cindy Sherman, and Elizabeth Peyton, who have all lived and worked at one time on the East End, or still do.

   The first thing you notice is the hair. Grace Coddington’s signature vermilion mane is full and fluffy, somewhat triangular, parted in the middle, and held back on one side by a comb.

Pollock-Krasner House

Receives Grant

    The Helen and Claus Hoie Charitable Foundation of East Hampton has given the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center a $14,700 grant, which the center will use for educational purposes.

    The grant will allow the center to purchase 20 mini digital audio units to offer tours in several languages to visitors to the house and site. The same system is used in museums and historic sites all over the globe.

   Can theater survive in a world of tweeting and Facebook, iPads and PlayStations, and films in 3D that cost more to make than some nations’ gross domestic product? If it is as simple, good, and devastatingly truthful as “What Rhymes with America,” the brilliant new play at Manhattan's Atlantic Theater Company by Melissa James Gibson, theater will not only survive, it will thrive.

Paris in Song

    “Dreams of Paris,” a concert of works for clarinet and piano by French composers, will be given on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Montauk Library. The composers include Debussy, Saint-Saens, Ravel, Widor, and Poulenc. The works will be performed by Maksim Shtrykov on clarinet and Alina Kiryayeva on piano.

Art Basel week in Miami, which ended on Sunday, brought the usual international crowds and galleries, satellite fairs, and installations everywhere. In addition to the galleries that did show, a number of East End dealers and artists participated even if they weren’t showing.

    John Messinger, an East Hampton artist who teaches photography at the Ross School, is now in residence at the Watermill Center and will show his work there on Saturday from 3 to 6 p.m.

    The work will be on view in the studios and is from the series “#nofilter,” which examines the “evolving nature of photography amidst the ubiquity and proliferation of the digital image.” The show will include the artist’s large-scale, site-specific photographic tapestries that he began last year. The pieces consist of hundreds of smaller instant photographs taken using a Polaroid camera.

   Created in a burger joint on the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike in the spring of 2009, the Jazz Jam Session will celebrate its accomplishments and internationally renowned musical guests at its first CD release party at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor next Thursday. A success by all accounts, Claes Brondal and his core Thursday Night Live Band brought not only business to a roadhouse-style restaurant, but an experience that led to more live music throughout Sag Harbor.

Here I sit beside you

As we watch each other age

You in your comfy chair,

I in mine,

Shifting the pillows behind me —

They never will feel right again.

Each of us secretly hoping

The other will stoop

And fetch the paper

Dropped to the floor.

Mornings now, we measure

Tablets and capsules

To prevent or to encourage:

Stool softeners in glossy orange tubes,

Baby aspirin to help the heart.

I order shoes online in 4s and 5s

And send them all back,

“A Change in the Wind”

    Sara Nightingale will present “Kia Pedersen: A Change in the Wind” beginning Saturday with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Ms. Pedersen employs her training as a printmaker, sculptor, painter, and architect in subverting traditional methods of printmaking, leaving out or changing the usual steps involved.

   “Westerly,” a collection of poems by Will Schutt of Wainscott, is the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for 2012. Since 1919 the prize has been awarded to “the most promising new American poets.” Past winners include John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich. The award means that Yale University Press will publish Mr. Schutt’s collection in April. And new this year, the winner receives a writing fellowship at the James Merrill House in Stonginton, Conn.

   Anne Chaisson, a longtime adviser to the Hamptons International Film Festival, will take over as its executive director, the festival has announced.

    She will replace Karen Arikian, the director for the past five years, who is leaving to pursue new opportunities, according to a press release. Ms. Arikian will continue as a United States/East Coast delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival and a U.S. consultant for European film promotion.

   Igor Lovchinsky will play at the Southampton Cultural Center on Saturday as part of the Rising Stars Piano series at 8 p.m.

    Mr. Lovchinsky was born in Russia and now lives in the United States. He last played with the series three years ago, and also at Pianofest and the Rogers Memorial Library. He will perform works by Chopin, Prokofiev, and Liszt-Horowitz.

    Tickets are $15 and free for students under age 21. They can be purchased at scc-arts.org or at the door 40 minutes prior to the performance.

   While every presentation of East End Stories on Film at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill offers compelling reasons to see it, last Thursday’s version was particularly rewarding, coming primarily from Genie Henderson and the LTV archive, which dates back to the station’s beginnings in 1984.

   The five-year old Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Festival has fully come into its own. Each year, the festival has grown in size and prestige, and its main event at Bay Street Theatre Saturday night brought some of the most respected names in documentary filmmaking to Sag Harbor.

    Jacqui  Lofaro, the founder and director of the festival and a Bridgehampton resident, said Saturday that the films that began the day before had been well received and attended, particularly films about Shelter Island and the North Fork, which brought in residents from all over the East End.

Weber’s People Paintings

    “Eighteen Years of Painting People,” a retrospective exhibition of work by Nick Weber, is on view at QF Gallery in East Hampton through Dec. 30.

Cather’s Life and Loves

    “Call Me William: The Lives and Loves of Willa Cather” will be presented at the Montauk Library on Sunday at 3:30 p.m.

    Prudence Wright Holmes is both writer and performer of this one-woman play about Cather, who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Her books include “My Antonia” and “Death Comes for the Archbishop.”