It is not easy to warm up a typical white box gallery space, let alone make it cozy and fuzzy, but that is what the show “Woven” has done to the Rental Gallery in East Hampton.

Tonal and colorful rugs and woven pieces lie on the floor or hang on the walls, spanning the 19th century to the present, from the beauty and function of tribal craft to the high artistic impulse of contemporary practitioners of fiber art.

Mia Romanik, an art consultant based in Los Angeles and the curator of the show, said it came to her while she was setting up a place and covering concrete floors with a lot of rugs. “Everything was beginning to look entwined, interwoven,” she said in a statement.

Despite what might first be assumed to be limited options in terms of expression, the works on view demonstrate a broad variety. The artists are not shy about mixing or transforming mediums or making something look like something else. The diversity and invention is quite exciting, and somehow soothing.

The group of Moroccan rugs on the floor are the first hint that this exhibition will be more immersive installation than the typical art exhibition. From the Beni Mguld, Beni Ouarain, and Boujad tribes, they are alternately dense and fluffy, with traditional and more unusual patterns. Covering much of the floor, they provide a busy yet satisfying contrast to their companions on the walls.

Alvaro Barrington’s yarn-sewn found postcards near the entrance set the tone for the wall pieces. Small, striking, and evocative, the familiar European vistas and interiors are transformed with stitches as the artist creates negative space or otherwise disrupts them. Coming from a family of Grenadian and Haitian migrant workers, he has used sewing as a way of channeling female ancestors who were known for their needlework. Sensitive to the role of gender in this tradition, these works appear to subvert and undermine the European male-centric cultural tradition depicted in many of the cards.

He shares the space with Sheree Hovsepian and Josep Grau-Garriga. Grau-Garriga, a Spaniard who died in 2011, developed an early fascination with the tapestries he saw in the churches of Catalonia. “Personatge” demonstrates how he took that inspiration and added a three-dimensionality that transforms the jute, wool, and synthetic fiber into a hanging sculpture. 

Ms. Hovsepian, who is from Iran and now based in New York, studied as a photographer, but wanted to have more of a hand in the process. She settled on photograms, using light-sensitve and undeveloped photo paper to create layered abstractions, such as “Text,” which includes nylon stocking material. The layers of paper and fabric in her work have “a lot of things to do with veiling, covering and uncovering what I’m making,” she told Vice last year.

Nearby is Alighiero Boetti’s 1988 embroidery “il silenzio e d’oro,” or silence is golden. It is a thought well-suited to these noisy times. Traditional needlepoint pillows have often employed sage and pithy sayings to contemplate as you recline on the couch. This is no different except the bold sans serif and blocky letters, arranged vertically as if reading a rebus, corrupt the dainty and plain-spoken style of the past.

A pairing of Zulu hair hats from South Africa and the woven glass beads of Liza Lou is particularly striking. Neither looks like it is made from the medium listed on the label. Ms. Lou’s beads are black and dull, offering only a slight shimmer that looks more like fabric. Reconciling the material qualities of the hats with their origin makes them both beautiful and jarring.

Dan Coopey takes found baskets and textiles and repairs or modifies them to his own ends. The Kuba textiles look like tapestries with his additions, notable but subtle. His baskets are more dramatic transformations, where he uses cylindrical shapes to disrupt their structure, leaving them to seem like beleaguered hosts to their growing forms.

There’s a lot here worth noting, and other standout pieces include the subtle tonal beauty of Jodie Carey’s pencil, dye, and plaster on woven canvas strips and Lucy Dodd’s “Gone Too Long,” a half chair/half beast, fashioned out of a co-opted Breuer frame embellished with thick cotton thread and blue pigment and reshaped with a branch and a stick. Antonio Pichilla’s loosely hanging cotton and polyester fibers on a wood support employ simple symbols to depict the four elements, in this case a pitcher for water, and a yellow abstraction that resembles a flame for fire.

Other artists in the show include Anne Cathrin November Hoibo, Sam Falls, Jayson Musson, Marina Pinsky, Sterling Ruby, Samantha Thomas, Ruby Sky Stiler, Kaari Upson, Hank Willis Thomas, Brian Wills, and Margo Wolowiec. It will remain on view through Jan. 31.

New at Halsey McKay

Concurrent solo exhibitions of work by Henry Glavin and David Kennedy Cutler are on view at the Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton and remain openthrough March 24.

“Wooden Calendar” will consist of four paintings of vacant rural interiors. The spaces are occupied by specific objects such as snowshoes, a lamp missing its shade, and a makeshift basketball court, all of which suggest the psychology of figures who are out of frame. Mr. Glavin uses a variety of techniques to create surfaces that are as much about the act of painting as subject matter.

For his exhibition “Off Season,” Mr. Cutler will spend its 10-week run in East Hampton, exploring through his work notions of shelter, food, tools, clothing, and companionship. As in other recent solo exhibitions, his avatar, a digitally produced skin-suit that depicts the artist, will move about the winter landscape and perform a variety of tasks. Mr. Cutler will transmit his activities remotely so they are viewable live on the gallery’s website and on social media platforms.

Elizabeth Murray Doc

“Everybody Knows . . . Elizabeth Murray,” a documentary by Kristi Zea about the groundbreaking artist, who died in 2007 at the age of 66, will be shown at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill tomorrow at 6 p.m. The film will be introduced by Sophie Ellsberg, an actress and director who is Ms. Murray’s daughter.

The film explores the relationship between the artist’s family life and career through the use of vérité footage, home videos, and excerpts from her journals, read by Meryl Streep, that shed light on Ms. Murray’s internal struggles and ambition.

In Ms. Murray’s New York Times obituary, Robert Smith situated her within “a small group of painters — including Philip Guston, Frank Stella, and Brice Marden — who during the 1970s rebuilt the medium from scratch, recomplicating and expanding its parameters and proving that it was still ripe for innovation, in part because of its rich history.”

Tickets are $20, $5 for members and students.

Guild Hall’s JDT Lab will veer into seldom-charted territory with “Andrew and Andrew Make a Deal With the Devil: Southern Gothic Songs and Stories” on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. The program will feature Andrew Butler, a songwriter, and Andrew Farmer, a playwright, in a program of music and theater that reflects their Florida origins.

As alumni of Uncharted, the residency program of New York’s Ars Nova, an incubator for innovative theater work, theirs will be an eccentric, off-kilter take on the South, with collaborations including a sci-fi folk concert, a small-town, alt-country musical, and a “Floridian fable.”

The program is free, but reservations have been encouraged.

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor will present a new All Star Comedy Show tomorrow at 8 p.m. The guests will be Sam Rubinoff (Hoboken Comedy Festival, “Dog Days” web show), Greg Stone (NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” TruTV), and Mark DeMayo (Optimum’s “The Unmovers,” “Gotham Live”). Tickets are $30 in advance, $40 the day of the program.

Meanwhile, Madison Square Garden may have Billy Joel, but Bay Street has its own resident rocker, Nancy Atlas, whose Saturday night Fireside Sessions are almost as tough to score tickets for as “Hamilton.” However, seats do remain for her All Star Jam with “favorite friends,” which will happen on Friday, Jan. 26, at 8 p.m. The price is $25.

What a perfect home Robert Harms’s recent paintings have found at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, adjacent to the pocket park on Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The streetfront windows with their western exposure let in abundant natural light, underscoring the translucency of his paint application and the delicate and deliberate use of color. Seeing these paintings under these conditions, it’s hard to imagine viewing them in any environment other than one with strong natural light embellished by the gallery’s own fixtures, not unlike how they would be seen in his studio.

Although known for the past several years for the abstracted views he found around his home and studio on Little Fresh Pond in North Sea, he has been spending more time in New York City of late. The effect on his work is obvious, but has left it no less sublime. 

The source of some pieces in the show, which is titled “Some Trees,” is obvious, such as one, “Washington Square,” that evokes a kind of rainy city murkiness, the sound of taxi tires hitting wet asphalt, and the mellow pink of old brick. At lower right, is that a reference to the Washington Square Arch? It no doubt makes sense and yet the arch is low, more of a tunnel entrance than the grander reality. The work suggests something painted from memory, after his having sat for a long while on a bench contemplating the scene.

It would be easy to say the more somber paintings were all inspired by city vistas, but it seems more complicated than that. Surely “Starfish,” with its saturated blues, aquas, and magentas infused with yellow, came from a Caribbean vacation. A couple of pieces appear to have been influenced by the South Fork as well. But all of these canvases seem grayer, browner, less imbued with light. Even his watercolors in the back room, which are often ebullient, are subdued.

Mr. Harvey noted a hint of Chinese landscape paintings in some of them — beech trees, for instance — and once noted it is impossible not to see.

A few of the paintings have “Plane Tree” or “London Plane Tree” in the title. Catching a glimpse of plane trees in situ in city streets or parks or in viewing reproductions of them, it is much easier to point to them as the subjects and see the paintings not so much as an emotional response, but in some ways a direct representation. The branches and trunks provide the linear elements, the leaves appearing as swaths of green or brown, depending on the season.

The gallery points out that these paintings resemble watercolors, with the oil paint so thinned it looks like a scrim. They also fill most of the canvas, which has been true for much of Mr. Harms’s work over the past couple of years. At one time, his work was dense and intensely marked. Then, he pulled back, a lot, and gave very little to the canvas, leaving the outer limits devoid of anything. This is a potent middle ground, not a compromise but a synthesis. The white space is not gone, it has just been incorporated, even accented with the washes of color.

While the Drawing Room Gallery’s shows of his art here have always been expertly installed, it is instructive to see it in the midst of an urban art enclave. It reminds us that Mr. Harms’s work is not our treasure alone, but something that holds up well across the broader art scene. 

The show will be on view through Jan. 29.

The Hampton Theatre Company, coming off one of its greatest successes with this fall’s production of “Clever Little Lies,” now takes on edgier and more challenging material with “Venus in Fur,” which opened last Thursday in Quogue. At first glance, this David Ives play seems to be a sadomasochistic sex comedy, but it is actually a work of feminism in disguise. 

The setting of this two-character drama is an industrial rehearsal space where a playwright turned first-time director has been auditioning actresses for his new work, “Venus in Fur” (yes, this is another “play within a play”). The director/writer, Thomas, as acted by Tristan Vaughan, is pedantic and condescending, coming off like a callow, if slightly kinky, graduate student. As the play opens he is onstage alone complaining to his fiancée how the women he has been auditioning are all shallow and superficial (though the same could be said for Thomas, despite his literary pretensions). He is about to pack it in for the day, when there is a knock at the door. 

Enter Vanda, a struggling actress spewing vulgarities and dressed like a prostitute in leather boots and black nylons. Thomas judges her immediately as wrong for the part — just another in a line of floozy actresses. Vanda, however, though repeatedly denied by Thomas, is determined to audition. This sets off a monologue of self-laceration that proves significant later in the play: “I’m too young, I’m too old. I’m too big, I’m too small. My résumé’s not long enough.” 

She then unfurls a copy of the script, based on a 19th-century novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch — from which the word masochism is derived. Where did she get this copy of the script, asks Thomas? Skirting a reply, Vanda suddenly leaps into character (also named Vanda, not so coincidentally) and nails it in an instant. She is so convincing, in fact, that Thomas decides to let her rehearse the entire play with him, which turns out to be a kind of pretentious soft-core variation of the works of the Marquis de Sade. Still, it is twisty and kinky enough to allow Vanda and Thomas to play out their game of dominance and submission to its conclusion. 

Much of the humor comes from watching Vanda, superlatively played by Tina Jones, flit from vulgar-New-York-actress-Vanda into vampy-Austro-Hungarian-Empire-Vanda. Ms. Jones accomplishes this seamlessly, changing character sometimes within the same line of dialogue and keeping the audience completely off balance. As directed by Diana Marbury (herself excellent in “Clever Little Lies”), Ms. Jones gives a dynamic performance, which by the play’s conclusion has her convincingly inhabiting four or five different characters. 

Sean Marbury’s set is also notable. Initially, the loft-like rehearsal space looks innocent enough, with its cushy divan and inviting coffee station. But as the lighting changes and the drama begins to darken, the space begins to look more and more like a sadomasochistic dungeon, helping to bring to life the interplay of dominance and submission. 

Mr. Vaughan, too, in his portrayal of Thomas, is asked to inhabit a number of characters and sexual posturings. Mostly he succeeds, though without the dynamic breadth of Ms. Jones. This may be by design, as the play is all about the championing of Vanda and, finally (without giving too much away), the power of women. 

By drama’s end, it’s not clear if the playwright is in complete thematic control of his material, as the play becomes a hall of mirrors where all human interaction is boiled down to sadomasochistic impulses. It shoots off so many ideas at once you don’t have time to notice which ones land and which don’t. One thing for sure, however, is that Mr. Ives’s work is partly a criticism of the theater world and its power dynamics, where struggling actresses (and, presumably, actors) supplicate at the feet of pompous directors who hold all the cards. 

This gives this new production of “Venus in Fur” a distinct timeliness. With our culture and politics awash in sexual scandal, it’s hard to think of a more current subject matter. First staged in 2010, “Venus in Fur” was prescient in its diagnosis of a corrosive theater culture. With its many electrifying moments, this Hampton Theatre Company revival brings back the hurt at just the right moment.

The Drawing Room Gallery in East Hampton has a wonderfully colorful group show of some of its regular gallery artists on view in its front galleries, but a tiny show of small photographs from the turn of the 20th century by Charles Jones emits its own magnetic pull toward the small back gallery.

Jones, who lived from 1866 to 1959, was an avid English gardener who admired his produce so much he made it the subject of a series of glass negative photographs. Keeping the backgrounds stark and tidy, the beets, onions, potatoes, cucumbers, squash, radishes, and other earthy delights are clearly the stars of the images. 

Although the images’ stark modern look would be adopted by photographers who came after him, Jones apparently was not trying to make art. Rather, he seemed to approach the objects from his garden the way botanical painters portrayed their bounty, as a record. 

His titles are notations on the backs of the prints: “Potato Red Round,” “Ridge Cucumber,” “Bean (Dwarf) Sutton’s Masterpiece,” to name a few. That these prints were found in a trunk in London without their negatives and discovered at an antiques market in 1981 demonstrates how little value the photographs had accumulated since their making. 

Yet these are compositions made with passion. The descriptive titles hint at colors we will never see, but the tonality brought out by the vintage gold-tone gelatin silver prints of “Radish Long Red” and “Mangold Yellow Globe” (which one assumes are golden beets) more than make up for it. Placed on a plain white ground in a tight bunch and captured from above, the radishes (at far right) look ravishing. In contrast, the beets, shown stemless, are stacked in a pyramid of three with a wall supporting them from behind. The dwarf beans lie flat but appear to dangle from their leafy stems like flowing locks from a crown. Jones’s “Onion Brown Globe” appears to be cast from bronze.

With little data and the only mention of the artist from his work as a horticulturalist in a professional publication dating from 1905, his innate preternatural talent feels mysterious and uncanny. It could easily be presumed that he was some gentleman hobbyist, but he spent his life, in the employ of a number of estates and then lived in Lincolnshire. He led a private life out of touch with the modern world and its conveniences, such as electricity and plumbing, according to a brief biography by Robert Flynn Johnson that accompanied a 1998 monograph of Jones’s photos. In the same account, there is a family recollection of how he used the glass negatives he created as cloches to protect young plants in the spring in his later years.

There are three floral studies in the group of nine photographs, and all have the same arresting minimal approach. Still, Jones’s vegetable still lifes have a gravitas and presence that are all made more impressive by their humble quotidian appearance.

The works by Stephen Antonakos, Antonio Asis, Vincent Longo, Alan Shields, and Jack Youngerman in the front gallery share a similar luminosity with the photographs. Emily Goldstein, an owner and curator of the gallery, said the works were chosen because they used color to evoke light, a welcoming thought in a time of increased darkness. Mr. Antonakos, Mr. Asis, and Mr. Longo form the core, with works from the 1950s by Mr. Youngerman and an early example of Mr. Shields’s sculpture using paper pulp over wire rounding out some of the visual themes.

The exhibitions are on view through Jan. 28.

“ColorPop” Pops Up

Folioeast will open “ColorPop,” an exhibition of work by Peter Dayton, Janet Jennings, and William Pagano, at Malia Mills on Main Street in East Hampton with a reception Saturday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Organized by Coco Myers and Kay Gibson, the show will continue through Feb. 4.

Mr. Dayton will present works from his “Rockets” series, brightly colored hard-edged forms that appear poised to take flight. Ms. Jennings’s recent oils and watercolors in “ColorPop” feature geometric blocks and bands of color. Color and geometry also figure prominently in Mr. Pagano’s works, which are executed in oil and in dye sublimation on aluminum.

Drawing Botanicals

The Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons will hold a workshop devoted to drawing botanicals on Saturday from 10 a.m. to noon at the John LoGerfo library at the Bridgehampton Community House. 

Led by Andrea Cote, a multidisciplinary artist and art educator, the class will focus on the basic skills and techniques for drawing from life and will encourage personal expression. No prior art experience is necessary, and participants have been encouraged to make use of a favorite plant, flower, or clipping. 

The cost is $25, $20 for members, and $15 for premium members.

A production of “Crimes of the Heart” — the winner of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize — will be presented at the Southampton Cultural Center from Friday through Jan. 28. The dark comedy, written by Beth Henley, focuses on a trio of young sisters in Hazlehurst, Miss., who are struggling with a variety of existential woes ranging from relationship troubles to professional failures. 

First staged at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, “Crimes of the Heart” moved to Off Broadway, then Broadway, and was eventually made into a feature film in 1986 starring Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek. Directed by Joan M. Lyons, the S.C.C. production stars Bonnie Grice, Tina Realmuto, Mark Strecker, Deyo Trowbridge, Josephine Wallace, and Kristin Whiting. Performances are Thursdays and Fridays at 7 p.m., Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. General admission tickets are $25, and student and group rates are available.

An Oscar-winning epic, a teenage odyssey, and a series of power struggles will play out on screen during this year’s East Hampton Library Winter Film Festival, which presents free showings of six foreign films starting on Sunday at 2 p.m. with the Colombian feature “Bad Lucky Goat.” Curated by the head of adult reference, Steven Spataro, the festival will continue on Sunday afternoons through the end of February. All films will be presented with English subtitles.

Released in 2017, “Bad Lucky Goat” is set on an island in the Colombian Caribbean, where two teenage siblings inadvertently kill a goat while driving their father’s truck. The accident sends the duo on a comedic quest to get the truck repaired in time to pick up tourists arriving for a stay at their family’s hotel.

“Afterimage,” the last work from the late Polish director Andrzej Wajda, is a 2017 biopic that focuses on the life of the Russian-born, avant-garde painter Wladyslaw Strzeminski, who lost both an arm and a leg fighting in the tsar’s army during World War I, but would later battle the rise of Stalinism in Poland. It will be shown on Jan. 21.    

Set in 1983, “The Teacher,” screened on Jan. 28, is a 2016 Czech satire about a middle school teacher who uses her power over her pupils’ grades to extract favors from their parents. Because the teacher is a ranking member of the Communist Party, the parents must make a choice: accept the injustice in order to appease the powers that be, or take a stand and risk reprisal.  

The 2016 Bulgarian film “Glory” is next up on Feb. 11. It tells the story of a railroad worker who finds a pile of cash on the tracks and alerts the police rather than pocketing it. The hero’s good deed gets him entangled with the corrupt Ministry of Transportation, which sets off a series of mishaps including the loss of his prized possession — a Russian watch (the brand name Slava translates to “glory”) given to him by his father. 

The 1966 Mexican film “Time to Die” — whose screenplay was written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez — is a classic tale of revenge. After serving a sentence for killing a man in a duel, Juan Sayago heads back to his hometown, hoping to live a quiet life. The sons of the man he killed, however, have been awaiting retribution. A “High Noon”-style showdown ensues. This one will be shown on Feb. 18.

The festival concludes on Feb. 25 with “Pelle the Conqueror,” a sweeping turn-of-the-20th-century drama starring Max von Sydow as a farmhand (and recent widower) who brings his son, Pelle, from Sweden to Denmark in search of a better life only to find a new world of hardships to overcome. The Danish-Swedish co-production was the winner of the 1989 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.­