“The Opera House,” Susan Froemke’s 2017 documentary about the history of the Metropolitan Opera from its original home on 39th Street to its grand opening in 1966 at Lincoln Center, won the Brown Harris Stevens Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature at the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival, which was held at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor from Nov. 30 through Dec. 4.

The film, which had its world premiere in October at the New York Film Festival, covers not only the Met’s five-decade search for a new home but also the creation of Lincoln Center and its effect on neighborhood residents. The film includes interviews with Leontyne Price, who sang at the opening night in 1966, and archival footage of an interview with Robert Moses, the force behind Lincoln Center and numerous other “slum clearance” projects that displaced people from their homes and neighborhoods.

At Watermill for 2018

The Watermill Center has announced its 20 selections for 2018 artist residencies. Each artist or company will spend two to six weeks at the center utilizing its art collection, library, archives, and grounds to create “works that critically investigate, challenge, and extend the existing norms of artistic practice,” according to a release. 

Chosen by a selection committee of artists, journalists, academics, and curators, the 2018 residents are Antimetodo (Chile), Ville Andersson (Finland), Jarrod Beck (U.S.), Tania Bruguera (Cuba), Anne Carson (Canada), Jayoung Chung (South Korea), El Colegio del Cuerpo (Colombia), Lauren DiGiulio (U.S.), Saskia Friedrich (Germany), Groupe Karol Karol (France), Molly Joyce (U.S.), Masako Miki (Japan), Iva Radivojevic (Serbia), Hugh Ryan (U.S.), Bastienne Schmidt (Germany), John Stintzi (Canada), Tercer Abstracto (Chile), Bar­thélémy Toguo (Cameroon), Boris Willis (U.S.), and Joe Zorrilla (U.S.).

Inga Maren Otto Fellowships have been awarded to Ms. Miki, Ms. Bruguera, Ms. Carson, and Mr. Toguo. Each fellow receives a stipend, travel expenses, and financial support for a public exhibition of work created during the residency. Fellows’ exhibitions are organized by Noah Khoshbin and Daneyal Mahmood.

The residency program for 2018 will begin on Jan. 8 with Ms. Radivojevic, a Serbian video artist from Brooklyn, and Mr. Willis, a multimedia artist with a background in dance and theater.

Oursler Installation

“Facial Recognition,” a 2017 video installation by Tony Oursler that investigates the technology of facial recognition systems, in on view 24/7 in the window of the Rental Gallery in East Hampton through January.

A pioneering figure in new media since the 1970s, Mr. Oursler is known for liberating video art from the flat screen by incorporating video projections into three-dimensional environments. Disarming and often funny, his videos have long taken as their subject the human face, embedding the moving image and audio into unexpected contexts.

His recent interest in facial recognition technology is a natural extension of his longtime fascination with the human face and how it can be captured and exploited in a world increasingly preoccupied by security and surveillance. At the same time, according to the gallery, “the work’s color and movement evoke magic lanterns, Cubist painting, Victorian Christmas light shows, exquisite butterflies of beauty, and imagination that cannot be constrained.” The holiday window installation has been organized by Peter Fleissig, a collector and curator.

Vintage Photographs 

An exhibition of rare vintage photographs by Charles Jones (1866-1959), an English gardener whose artfully composed images of vegetables, fruits, and flowers were discovered in 1981 at a London antiques market, is on view through Dec. 31 at the Drawing Room in East Hampton.

Printed from glass plate negatives, Jones’s gold-tone gelatin silver prints reflect a modern sensibility that differed from his contemporaries’ prevailing approach to botanical subjects. While his work as the gardener at Ote Hall in Sussex was documented as early as 1905, his achievement as an early photographer went unrecognized during his lifetime.

The gallery is also showing paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by Stephen Antonakos, Antonio Asis, Vincent Longo, Alan Shields, and Jack Youngerman through Jan. 14.

Monoprints at Eagle

Monoprints by Lesley Obrock, a painter whose work is rooted in her background as a landscape designer, are on view at the Golden Eagle Art Store in East Hampton through Dec. 31, with a reception set for tomorrow from 4 to 6 p.m. Though she occasionally produces work that is representational, the East Hampton artist says she “leans more often toward the abstract.”

The Hamptons International Film Festival and Guild Hall are collaborating on a series of film screenings, beginning on Saturday nights this month.

The series, which starts by taking advantage of the number of visual arts-related films out this year, helps fill the void left by the Sag Harbor Cinema, which was destroyed by a fire last winter. Called “Now Showing” and presented at Guild Hall, it will consist of the type of art house fare that was typically seen at the theater.

The screenings will start on Saturday with “Faces Places,” a documentary by Agnes Varda. Shown at Cannes and the New York Film Festival, the film captures travel through villages in France with the filmmaker and the French artist JR.

On Dec. 23, “The Square,” Ruben Ostlund’s Cannes Palme d’Or-winning film, will take audiences through a mind-bending and sometimes harrowing morality play about the hell created by good intentions. All of its screenings at HIFF in October sold out. Elizabeth Moss and Dominic West are two of the supporting cast members in the Swedish film, which has dialogue mostly in English.

“Loving Vincent,” which has received many accolades for its inventive approach to an artist’s biography, is an animated film using 65,000 frames of oil paintings on canvas specially created by 115 artists in Vincent van Gogh’s style. Written and directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, it will be screened on Dec. 30.

“We are kicking off this series with some of the most artistic and daring films this year,” Anne Chaisson, the festival’s director, said in a release. She added that it has long been an audience request that the festival continue offering screenings after the official October event. 

“We live in a film-savvy community, but many of the best new releases never make it to our theaters,” Andrea Grover, the executive director of Guild Hall, said.

The screenings will start at 6 p.m. Tickets cost $15, or $12 for HIFF and Guild Hall members. Additional screenings will be announced in the coming weeks at hamptonsfilmfest.org. Tickets can be purchased online at guildhall.org.

St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in Bridgehampton will host three programs of dramatic readings of holiday stories offset by interludes of seasonal music tomorrow and Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday afternoon at 2. Terrance Fiore, Bonnie Grice, Devon Leaver, Timothy Lewis, Tristan Vaughn, Marshall Watson, and Charles Williams, East End actors all, will read stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Isaac Bashevis Singer, O. Henry, and other notable writers.

Holiday music will be played before the curtain and between readings. The evening will conclude with carol singing by the performers and audience and a wine and cheese reception in the Parish House. Tickets are $25, $10 for those under 21, and proceeds will support the St. Ann’s Scholarship Fund for two Bridgehampton High School graduates, the Dominican Sisters, Maureen’s Haven, and East End Hospice.

In Process @ the Watermill Center provides an opportunity for interaction between the center’s resident artists and members of the community through open rehearsals, studio visits, and artist talks. From 2 to 4 on Saturday afternoon, Dylan Neely and Alex Nathanson, and Brian O’Mahoney will be the featured artists.

The work of Mr. Neely, a composer, and Mr. Nathanson, a video artist, combines sound, video, and handmade electronic instruments into interactive multimedia performances that include noise, chamber music, experimental cinema, Saturday morning cartoons, and other elements. Mr. Mahoney uses performance, video, and humor to explore the absurdities of his personal, and our collective, anxieties.

Tours of the center’s building, grounds, library, and collection will be offered between 1 and 2. Reservations are required for Saturday’s events, and a $10 donation has been suggested for tour participants.

The Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor will present “Home for Christmas,” its annual free candlelight concert, on Saturday at 5 p.m. The program will feature the church’s holiday and bell choirs, the Fighting Chance Chorus, the East End Recorder Ensemble, and Sue Vinski, Douglas Sabo, and Dominick Abbate as soloists. Walter Klauss will conduct and lead the audience in singing carols of the season.

As Bob Schwarz said recently — and many scientific studies have confirmed — “One of the advantages of being dyslexic is the ability to visualize in space. I was very dyslexic, and when I was going to school in the 1940s and early 1950s, they thought I was just stupid. But the minute I walked into a television studio, I understood how it worked.”

And so began a 40-year career in broadcast television as a director on such productions as “The Electric Company,” “Sesame Street,” “Live From Lincoln Center,” “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “Another World,” “Search for Tomorrow,” and “As the World Turns.”

That same ability is perhaps even more vividly manifested in a second career on which he embarked more than 40 years ago as a way to relax when not directing: the creation of complex three-dimensional works of art. A broad selection of the self-taught artist’s sculpture was on view during November at the Amagansett Library.

While working at CBS, Mr. Schwarz saw the work of Naum Gabo, the Russian Constructivist, on his visits to the Museum of Modern Art. “His ability to produce three-dimensional parabolic shapes by the intersection of straight wire appealed to something in my psyche.”

Lucite and monofilament were readily available materials and remain essential to his work. He also uses aluminum, acrylic rod, metal hardware, acrylic inlays, wood, and, in some cases, LED lights. Each piece starts with a ground of contact paper affixed to three-quarter-inch plywood. He marks a dot every three-sixteenth inch and then uses a center punch to depress each dot before finishing the holes with a drill press. Each strand of monofilament passes through a hole and is stapled to the underside of the ground.

Aluminum piers or plinths are likewise drilled at regular intervals and epoxied to the ground. Each strip of monofilament emerges from the base, passes through a plinth, and returns to the base. It takes a week to string a typical work. 

“It’s like Chinese cooking,” he said. “It takes a lot of preparation, but once you get into the rhythm of it, it’s done pretty quickly.”

To describe the process with any concision inevitably involves oversimplification. For one thing, he works with a wide range of configurations; some pieces seem almost entirely constructed from monofilament, while others contain only aluminum and plate glass. Moreover, the exactitude of the measurements is crucial. He drills holes in some of the piers but sends others out to be laser cut. When they come back, he screws them to the ground and starts to string them.

While some of his constructions are made to sit on tables, the works on view at Amagansett were all wall-mounted. To move around each piece is to experience four dimensions. Viewed head-on, each is symmetrical in two dimensions. Seen sideways, the structures jut into the space of the room, often dramatically. The fourth dimension is provided by the mirrored surface that reflects the structure, sometimes making it difficult to determine the boundary between real and reflected space.

Despite their technical precision, the “Starbridges,” as Mr. Schwarz calls them, have a metaphoric dimension. “These works resemble models of titanic vessels the size of Manhattan Island that range far and wide across the vastness of the cosmos, bridging the distances between the galaxies. They move populations to settle distant planets. They transport materials, make voyages of discovery, and patrol the universe to maintain the peace.” 

“I imagine the central plinths to be hundreds of stories high, containing the command and control area, the living quarters, and the cargo. Modules radiating out contain the mechanisms that create the energy that propels the vessels at unimaginable speeds.” 

He also considers the pieces “journeys into the unconsciousness, mandalas, meditations, whatever you want to call them.” The title of the series came from a dream in which a golden arrow embedded itself into his backyard. “A man riding on that arrow said in German, ‘This is a starbridge.’ ”

Mr. Schwarz was born and raised in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard University with a degree in English literature in 1954. While there he wanted to be a writer, actor, playwright, or perhaps all three, and he wrote some of the Hasty Pudding shows. “When I got out, things didn’t turn out that way.” 

He enlisted in the Army in 1954 and was sent to Germany, where he auditioned for the American Forces Network. “I had a pretty un-Boston accent and could pronounce the names of European composers pretty well. That’s how I got to be an AFN announcer. It was ‘Good morning, American forces everywhere.’ “

He started at CBS in 1957, moving over time through the stages of production assistant, stage manager, and associate director. While serving in the latter capacity on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Tim Kiley, the show’s longtime director, went to the Smothers Brothers. “Because I was sitting in the next chair, and because I had a very good feel for camerawork, I became director.” 

“When the Sullivan show went off, I freelanced for a while. Then I got involved in soap operas, which I did on and off over the years, working for Proctor and Gamble when I wasn’t freelancing. Soap opera was my bread and butter.”

He and his wife, Mimi, to whom he was married for 56 years before her death in 2014, bought their house in Springs near Green River Cemetery in 1971 and moved there full time in 1997 after he retired. They founded their Rainbow Daylily Garden there in 1989. “We grew 3,000 a year for 10 years. We were famous as daylily growers; we sold them online and won prizes for plants. Then the ground got too far away, if you know what I mean, and now I just look at them.”

Not one to take things too easily, however, in 2016 he published “How Did That Old Fart Get Into My Mirror?” A memoir about aging and his marriage, it is available on Amazon.com. Kirkus Reviews called it “a colorful, bittersweet romp through Old Fartdom.”

Mr. Schwarz now spends three or four months each year in an apartment he purchased in Zihuatanejo on the Pacific coast of Mexico after his wife’s death. “The harbor there is an old volcanic crater whose walls are broken down on the ocean side. I just look out my window from about 150 feet above the harbor. It’s very nice. This year I’ll spend a little less time there because I have to come back to work. I do things in waves, and I haven’t done anything for a long time.”

Looking around Mr. Schwarz’s living room, cluttered as it was with sculptures, some finished, some being reworked, a visitor took that statement with a grain of salt.

It takes a lot to attract the attention of a populace that is still in a food coma from Thanksgiving and exhausted from the financial consumption of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday. What is a nonprofit arts organization to do in this environment to stand out from the crowd of others clamoring on Giving Tuesday for end of the year tithes from the dazed and tapped-out masses?

Guild Hall and its director Andrea Grover attempted to solve the conundrum with its Guild Hall Live Stream-a-Thon, a 12-hour Facebook event with LTV manning the cameras and a full slate of hometown arts personalities participating, all interspersed with a dancing banana (Kristen Curcie, in costume). In addition to a chalk drawing that Kara Hoblin created and then erased to reveal a message related to Guild Hall's mission, the extravaganza  featured Wolffer wine and Montauk Brewery beer tastings.

All in all, the event attracted 15,985 views, 799 clicks, 1,300 reactions (likes, loves, ha-has), and raised $3,000. It was $2,000 short of its goal, but more than a quarter of the donations, averaging around $100, came from sources new to Guild Hall. The institution estimates that half of the donations came from young patrons.

The first week in December is when some 1,200 art galleries and thousands of collectors, curators, critics, and celebrities descend on southern Florida for Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Miami, and more than 15 satellite art fairs. Artists are thick in the mix as well, despite John Baldessari’s famous assertion that an artist going to an art fair is like a kid walking in on his parents having sex — you know it happens, but you never want to see it.

South Fork galleries making the pilgrimage this year are Mark Borghi Fine Art of Bridgehampton (Art Miami), Eric Firestone of East Hampton (Untitled, Art, Miami Beach), Todd Merrill Studio of Southampton (Design Miami), Lawrence Fine Art of East Hampton (Scope Miami), Chase Edwards Contemporary of Bridgehampton (Red Dot), and, from East Hampton, Halsey Mckay, Harper’s Books, and Rental Gallery, all participants in NADA Miami Beach.

While Rental Gallery opened in East Hampton in June, it first launched in Los Angeles in 2004 and three years later in Manhattan. Joel Mesler, the gallery’s proprietor as well as an artist, is no stranger to Miami. “The first year I did Miami was 2007, but this is the first time I’m showing my own work there. In fact, I think it’s the first time a dealer has ever shown his own artwork at NADA. In terms of expectations, hopefully I do what I’ve done for my artists in the past. It has always been quite fruitful and beneficial for me.”

“It’ll be exciting to see if anybody likes it. The funniest thing is that sort of cringe-worthy question you always get on the last day of a fair, when people ask if you’re the artist. I’ll actually be able to say yes this year.” The Rental booth will also be showing ceramics by Sarah Aibel, Mr. Mesler’s wife.

Aside from the lack of more recent stories and cases, Liz Garbus’s “Shouting Fire: Stories From the Edge of Free Speech,” released in 2009, feels like it could have been made last year. The film documents cases that arose in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, during a time when President George W. Bush’s press secretary instructed people to watch what they say. 

In the mid 2000s, Ms. Garbus began examining how Iraq War protests were being handled. Her impetus was a conversation with Sheila Nevins, the long-time head of documentaries at HBO. The original story she pursued, about students staging a play and being shut down by their school, hit an impediment. “I started to think about different ways to tell the story and look at it,” she said on Saturday in a talk following a screening of the film at the Hamptons Take 2 Film Festival in Sag Harbor. 

She began thinking about how a film could examine issues of free speech in terms of her father, Martin Garbus, and his distinguished decades-long career as a staunch defender of that right. The film became “more of an essay film, not what I set out to make, but a personal story in some sense.”

The film meanders between stories of those who suffered for speaking freely during that time and the life and the law career of Mr. Garbus, whose clients have included Lenny Bruce, Peter Matthiessen, Robert Maplethorpe, Spike Lee, Robert Redford, Samuel Beckett, and many more. He has represented Nazis who wanted to march in Skokie, Ill., as well as Chinese dissidents and Sikh nationalists. He was an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg for releasing the Pentagon Papers, and hid a copy of them in his upstate New York house at the time they were being disseminated to media outlets.

Decisions on his cases in areas such as obscenity and libel became established law, effectively eliminating the prosecution of both in this country. He also served as chairman of the Committee to Abolish the Death Penalty. In short, he made for a fascinating and insightful focus of the film.

Ms. Garbus examined cases that included Ward Churchill’s dismissal from the University of Colorado for academic misconduct, following delayed public outrage at an article he wrote immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. Debbie Almontaser attracted controversy as a New York City school principal and Yemeni immigrant tapped to head the city’s first Arabic language school, which opponents cast as a madrassa. An interview in the New York Post that she said had twisted her comments was her undoing. Chase Harper put masking tape on his T-shirt with a biblical message condemning homosexuality and wore it to a California school. He was told to take the shirt off or to leave. In a more generalized sense, the film also examined how protesters were dealt with during the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Ms. Garbus, a documentary filmmaker who produces films with Rory Kennedy, has directed more than 20 films, many with awards and distinctions. “Lizzie’s subjects go across the whole area of what’s wrong with society, what can’t be fixed and what can,” said Mr. Garbus about his daughter’s films. He said that all of them exude the sense that they were completed yesterday.

“These battles [over free speech] have been going on for some time,” Ms. Garbus said after the screening. “In the film we showed that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had a debate about it.”

Those in the audience wanted to know how the Trump administration’s policies had affected these issues. Fake news and social media were brought up as concerns. But Mr. Garbus seemed most concerned about court appointments. Not just the Supreme Court, but the federal circuit courts, and the state courts. He mentioned the case of the baker who refused to make a cake for a gay couple, claiming it violated his freedom of expression of religion. The case is to be argued at the Supreme Court this week. “If everyone adopted that position, it would be the end of the anti-discrimination laws,” Mr. Garbus said. “A hotel owner could say I have a right to say I’m not in favor of integration, so I have a right to keep certain people out of my hotel.”

With more potential Supreme Court nominees like the recent appointee Neil Gorsuch, who, like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, has advocated faithful adherence to the framers’ original intent, Mr. Garbus said, “More and more the questions will go back to what did the Constitution say as it was written, even though it was impossible to see or imagine the decisions of 1789 and 1811 being the standard for how people are treated today.”