Three programs from Mountainfilm on Tour, a traveling selection of the best short films from the annual festival in Telluride, Colo., will be shown at the Southampton Arts Center tomorrow and Saturday. The festival’s stated goal is to use “the power of film, art, and ideas to inspire audiences to create a better world.”

“Life on Earth,” eight films with environmental themes, will be screened tomorrow at 7 p.m. A program of family films is in store for Saturday afternoon at 4, and “Inspiring Stories” will start at 7:30 that night. Tickets to the evening programs are $15, $5 for the family films. A party with several directors and a representative of Mountainfilm will happen on Saturday from 5:30 to 7. Party tickets, which include admission to “Inspiring Stories,” are $75, $45 for those under 35.

Networking Night

The East Hampton Arts Council and Golden Eagle’s Studio 144 have teamed up to hold a series of networking nights for artists, professionals, and other community members, the first of which will take place this evening from 6 to 8 at the barn at the Golden Eagle at 144 Main Street in East Hampton.

Five artists from different disciplines will present their work during the first hour of each program, after which a reception will allow presenters and audience members to intermingle. Tonight’s participants are Nancy Atlas, a singer and musician, John Haubrich, a visual artist, David Kozatch, a writer, Anne Raymond, a painter and printmaker, and Kara Westerman, whose fields are podcasting and oral history.

Painting, Sculpture at Ille

An exhibition of sculpture by Eva Cocco and paintings by Edwina Lucas will open at Ille Arts in Amagansett with a reception tomorrow from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. and remain on view through Oct. 3.

Born and raised in Italy, Ms. Cocco has lived on and off in Sag Harbor and works closely with the Clay Art Guild of the Hamptons in Water Mill. Her doll-like and otherworldly ceramic heads and figures reflect her interest in Wabi-sabi and its concept of “accepting beauty within imperfection.” 

A Sag Harbor native, Ms. Lucas strives in her paintings to capture the beauty of the natural world, including landscapes, animals, flowers, and water. She works from life when possible, preferring to engage her subjects directly rather than through photographs.

Five Painters at Ashawagh

The five painters in “Free Falling,” which will be on view at Ashawagh Hall in Springs from tomorrow through Sunday, with a reception set for Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m., are loosely linked by an attraction to nature, but each follows a different path.

The landscape-inspired paintings of Kirsten Benfield have recently taken a turn toward the abstract and reflect her interest in Eastern and Western calligraphy. A surfer and sailor, Christopher Butler captures the atmospheric qualities of air, space, light, and water in his paintings.

Anahi DeCanio’s abstract mixed-media works, built up with many strokes of paint and occasional collage elements, are abstract but inspired by both nature and urban settings. The paintings of Jerry Schwabe are also abstract reflections of his response to the light and color of the East End. Richard Udice’s landscapes, which focus on the unique lighting of the region, are the most realistic in the show.

A.A.E.H. Open Studio Tour

The 2017 open studio event of the Artists Alliance of East Hampton will feature the work of 20 artists from East Hampton, Sag Harbor, and Bridgehampton who will open their studios on Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Addresses, a map, and more information about each artist can be found at aaeh.org.

All About Eating

Crush Curatorial in Amagansett will open “Eat/ing Your Heart Out,” an exhibition of work by about a dozen artists who take diverse approaches to “how, why, how much, and what drives our impulse to eat,” with a reception on Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m. The show will remain on view by appointment through Oct. 2.

Among the works on view will be R. Crumb’s original drawings from the cookbook “Eat It,” made up of his wife’s recipes, sculptures by Cheryl Donegan made with her tongue, and “Recipe for Potable Water,” Allie Wist’s method for desalinating ocean water for drinking in the event of sea level rise.

Other participants are Molly Surno, who organized the exhibition, Ilana Harris-Babou, Christopher Chiappa, Christina Crawford, Suzan Pitt, Joshua Schwartz, Elaine Tin Nyo, Scott Bluedorn, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Almond Zigmund. 

Books as Objects

An exhibition featuring four artists who use books in their work is on view at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor through Oct. 14, with a reception set for Saturday afternoon from 2:30 to 4:30.

Mary Ellen Bartley’s photographs are inspired by the physical and formal properties of books. The poet Star Black creates collages using pages and imagery from books. Pages from her mother’s encyclopedia are among the found objects used by Kass McGowan in her mixed-media works. Amanda Tobier’s work includes book sculptures and altered artwork incorporating maps, dictionaries, stamps, and other ephemera.

Group Show at White Room

“Look Deeper,” a show of photographs, paintings, and ceramic sculpture, is on view through Oct. 1 at the White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton. A reception with live music will take place on Sept. 23 from 5 to 7 p.m.

Drip painting, Lissajous curves, and painterly strokes figure in Kevin Bishop’s work. Laurie Fishman’s photographs are inspired by her encounters with naturally occurring beauty. Zoe Breen is exhibiting photographs of sunrises taken over a seven-month period. Alyssa Peek transforms her own photographs by manipulating them either in the camera or in postproduction. Adrienne Fierman has been working with clay for 25 years, focusing on the traditional hand-building methods of coiling and pinching.

Darius Yektai in Manhattan

An exhibition of recent paintings and sculpture by Darius Yektai of Sag Harbor, organized by Keyes Art, will open this evening at Mark Borghi Fine Art on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with a reception from 6 to 8. The show will run through Oct. 14.

Paint, canvas, wood, and resin intermingle in Mr. Yektai’s work, which includes images of landscapes, figures, and flowers, some relatively simple, others more complicated and abstract, all marked by a vibrant and colorful handling of paint that flattens the images while energizing the surfaces.

Art Talk at Canio’s

Marc Fasanella, a professor of art, architecture, and design, will talk about “Ralph Fasanella: Images of Optimism,” a monograph that includes 70 full-color reproductions of his father’s paintings, on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. The painter chronicled life in early to mid-20th-century New York, including the American labor movement and political and social injustices, while asserting his own hopeful vision for a prosperous working class.

When Enoc Perez last took over the walls of Harper’s Books in East Hampton, he filled the space with prints of found photographs of scantily clad women whose modesty was mostly protected by floating colorful shapes collaged on top of them.

The forms appeared to be excised straight from abstract masterpieces by artists such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and even Marcel Duchamp. It was like an early modernist peep show.

Now Mr. Perez returns with a kind of revival of the theme with completely different aims and mediums with “Nudes,” an exhibition of 15 paintings at Harper’s on view through Oct. 15. 

The women subjects have a nostalgic look with hairstyles and staged posing that seem from another era. Paired with his process, which creates paintings with the look and feel of German Expressionism’s woodcut prints, these works seem more like weathered antiques found in an excavation than contemporary paintings.

It is worth describing the technique, which involves making an image on paper, applying oil paint thickened with a gritty material on the back of that sheet and applying it to a canvas that has been prepared with painted marks or gold or silver leaf. Once the back of the paper is on the surface of the front of the canvas, he retraces the image from the front of the paper to make an image on the canvas. 

The resulting forms have blunt lines, indistinct features, and an overall crude style. There is something a bit mysterious about them, even though he renders the figures clearly enough to show their expressions, poses, and body parts. The prepared ground that becomes their flesh can almost look like newsprint, which also muddles the presentation. It is hard to fathom what one is looking at here.

Some canvases offer intensely saturated color fields that surround the figures. An acid Kelly green, electric aqua, fiery orange, and a pinkish red are some of the colors he chooses for the backgrounds. They are densely applied with his gritty impasto. Other canvases are kept very spare and dark, like a traditional woodcut.

The gallery noted that Mr. Perez has painted “iconic modernist buildings, ranging from Philip Johnson’s Lipstick Building to Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House, in which he rendered an alternate history of power and ambition in the United States and abroad.” It suggests that these female forms “serve as a kind of foil to the muscle and desire treated in his pictures of buildings.”

It raises the question as to whether these are parallel series, particularly when the organizers note that the poses seem to recall centerfolds of the 1950s and 1960s, around the same time some of the buildings he has used as subjects were erected. Although it is easy enough to find the other series on the internet, a show with the two series together would be worthwhile. Mr. Perez’s surfaces reward firsthand interaction and do not translate all that well in reproduction. They are legible, but they don’t indicate the depth of color or the topography of the surface he creates. Something is definitely lost in translation.

Many of those architecture paintings do concentrate on the tall projectiles of the International School and beyond, but there are some flat, low buildings and other rounded feminine shapes. Playing off each piece’s comparative yin and yang would create an interesting energy, somewhat disembodied, but electric nonetheless.

In this room, alone, the women look a bit like they are in suspended animation. The artist presents them in his own kind of amber, a harkening back to bygone days, but his aim remains mysterious.

The LongHouse Reserve will hold its annual Landscape Awards Lecture and Luncheon on Saturday, starting at 10 a.m. at Hoie Hall at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton with lectures by Deborah Nevins and Kris Jarantoski. 

Ms. Nevins will receive the Landscape Award for her garden designs in the United States and abroad. Mr. Jarantoski will take home the Garden Direction Award for his work as the director of the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Following the lectures, the event will move to the LongHouse Reserve for the awards ceremony and lunch. Other honorees are Sunbrella, known for its outdoor fabrics, which will receive the venue’s first Design Award from Caroline Baumann, the director of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and Garden Design magazine, which was given the Award for Publication, to be presented by Eric Groft of Oehme van Sweden.

Lunch and a tour of the LongHouse gardens with Alex Feleppa, the horticulturalist there, will follow the awards presentation. Tickets to the lectures only are $50, $35 for members. Tickets for the entire event start at $300, $250 for members.

Two free a cappella performances will take place this weekend at the Montauk Library. Tomorrow evening at 7:30, the Chickpeas, a quintet consisting of Liz Sarfati, Marcia Previti, Lisa Shaw, Deb Coen, and Jane Hastay, will perform a program of traditional and popular songs by composers ranging from Harold Arlen to Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne to Bob Dylan. 

The next night, the Bulgarian Voices Trio will offer a program of folk songs, sung in Bulgarian with a discussion in English, also at 7:30. The trio — Vlada Tomova, Valentina Kvasova, and Shelley Thomas — combines traditional Bulgarian village styles with a cappella arrangements that reveal “the disarming power and intimacy of the unaccompanied voice,” according to a release. The group has performed at Lincoln Center and Joe’s Pub in Manhattan and at festivals here and abroad.

The ninth annual Save the Waves film festival, an evening of surf, adventure, and documentary films, will take place tonight at Atlantic Terrace in Montauk. Doors will open at 7, and a program of short films will run from 7:30 to 9.

After an hourlong intermission featuring a band and a raffle, Taylor Steele’s new feature film, “Proximity,” a visceral portrait of modern surfing, will be shown. A cash bar, absent single-use plastic cups, will be open. Guests can provide their own reusable cups or buy a Klean Kanteen pint cup for $10, one drink included.

General admission is $21.99. A V.I.P. reception with filmmakers, for which tickets are $63.99, will take place at 6 p.m. The evening will benefit the coastal conservation programs of the Save the Waves Coalition and World Surfing Reserves.

After graduating from high school, Queen Esther Marrow moved from Virginia to New York City, where she lived with an aunt and worked in the garment district. Three years later, at 22, she found herself in Duke Ellington’s living room, auditioning for him. 

Recalling that day in her blog, Ms. Marrow said, “I was a bag of nerves from the time I started to the time I closed my mouth with the last word.” Though he maintained a poker face while she sang, it wasn’t long before the Duke asked her to perform “Come Sunday” and “The 23rd Psalm” during his 1965 Sacred Concert at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. 

A singular career followed. Ms. Marrow has performed for Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton; Pope John Paul II, and in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s World Crusade, a series of civil rights rallies that also included Jesse Jackson, Sidney Poirier, and Dr. Ralph Abernathy. Her next stop is the Southampton Cultural Center, where she will launch her “Here’s to Life” tour tomorrow evening at 7.

Ms. Marrow has spent much of the last 25 years performing with the Harlem Gospel Singers, a group she formed in 1992 in concert with BB Productions, a German concert producer. The group performed primarily in Europe and recently concluded its farewell tour. Of one of its final shows, in Luxembourg at the Grand Theatre, the reviewer Erik Abbott wrote, “And my-oh-my, did the stately hall swing and rock.”

“Going forward I will be doing solo performances,” she said during a recent telephone conversation. “Southampton is the first stop on the tour, and I’m also in the studio recording, so I’ve got a lot of things I’m doing and want to do. Don’t get me wrong. I love working in Europe, and I love the people there, they are really so warm and kind. But I haven’t been working and singing to the people here in the United States. It is my home, so I want to do that.”

The show will reflect the entire range of her music, with gospel, blues, soul, and jazz, including “Here’s to Life,” “Nice and Easy,” and “Bright Side of the Road,” among many other songs. She will be accompanied on saxophone, bass, and drums.

Before the Harlem Gospel Singers formed, Ms. Marrow worked in concerts, clubs, and on Broadway, where, in 1990, she wrote and starred in “Truly Blessed,” a musical about Mahalia Jackson, her idol and one of the many iconic figures with whom she has shared the stage. Others include Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Harry Belafonte, and Lena Horne. 

While Ms. Marrow works out of New York City, she recently moved back to her home in Virginia, where, she said, she can experience “a quietness, compared to New York” and a break from the tour, which will span the United States.

Almost two years ago to the day, she experienced “one of my most memorable moments,” participating in the re-making of the Sacred Concert on its 50th anniversary. “That was a full-circle moment for me, as I was able to stand in the Grace Cathedral and reflect on how far God has brought me since I stood in that very spot 50 years ago.”

Tickets to the concert are $25, $15 for students under 21, and can be purchased at scc-arts.org.

A broad discussion about art — and the business of art — engaged a capacity audience on Saturday at the Amagansett Library when Randy Lerner, an Amagansett resident and art collector, interviewed the artist Dan Rizzie, who lives on North Haven. 

In a program titled “Encryption/Description: Rizzie on His Art,” Mr. Lerner, clearly a fan and student of Mr. Rizzie’s career, probed the origins of, inspiration for, and recurring themes in the artist’s work. The discussion was the first in the third annual Art/History/Amagansett series, organized by Ellen T. White, which was followed on Sunday by “The Art of Collecting on the East End.” The series will resume this weekend and on Sept. 23 and 24. 

Mr. Lerner cited Minimalist, Constructivist, and palimpsest examples in Mr. Rizzie’s painting, printmaking, and collage. “To me,” Mr. Lerner said, palimpsest “refers to when you have a surface that can receive graphic information and then remove that and put more. It deals with whether the surface has memory, with whether or not there’s a conversation you’re having with the surface.” 

The medium is a fascinating one, Mr. Rizzie agreed. He collects discarded papers, including paper that children have written on and backings for photographs. “If you look through my work there’s a surface, a texture to it. I do create a situation that makes a conversation between all that stuff.” 

“Work that allows you to add information is kind of what the 20th century is about,” Mr. Lerner said. “The idea, once photography arrives, of looking at art as somehow conveying information is over.” The camera conveys information about whatever it captures, he said. “If somebody is able to create something that allows you to add information and create a dialogue with what you’re looking at, it becomes interesting to live with it, it becomes interesting to see it, it becomes interesting to attach memory to it.”

Mr. Rizzie, who moved to Sag Harbor after commuting between New York and Dallas, where he went to graduate school, discovered that he had drawing talent as a child. He explained that his interest in palimpsest media, and his use of symbols, might have sprung from having grown up as the son of a diplomat in Amman, Jordan, New Delhi, and Egypt. “Living in Egypt, India, Jordan, all you see are surfaces that are papered over. There’s an Abstract Expressionist painting on every corner in India. It worked its way into my work.” 

At the time, he wanted to be home in the United States, he said, but later realized the profound influence of the experience. He started painting tulips 25 or 30 years ago, but on a recent trip to India and the Taj Mahal in Agra, “I saw my work right there,” he said of the carvings and inlays of the 17th-century mausoleum. “Apparently going to the Taj at 16 stayed in my mind, and came out on paper one day.” 

Mr. Lerner “has often informed me about what I’m doing,” the artist said. “I just work . . . I have this laboratory, which I refer to as a studio but it is very much a laboratory, and I’m making experiments, some successful, some not.” Mr. Lerner said Mr. Rizzie “is in a constant state of conversation and dialogue in this laboratory.”

The late artist Alan Shields, who lived on Shelter Island, had given Mr. Rizzie a buoy attached to a chain, which he hung from a tree in his yard. “That circle is going to become, in many ways, a defining characteristic in your image making from then on,” Mr. Lerner said. 

Mr. Lerner described the art world in America as “a very unforgiving environment.” What is it to be an artist and sell one’s work in 2017, he asked. “I make something for myself,” Mr. Rizzie said. “It keeps me honest, doing something that I would like to have myself. . . . I try, when I make a piece of artwork, to make something that has value — not financial value, but something that has value to me.”

On Saturday at 6 p.m., the Art/History/Amagansett series continues with a screening of the documentary “Alexander Calder.” On Sunday, also at 6, Carol Steinberg, an attorney, will present “Reading the Fine Print: What Artists Should Know . . . but Are Afraid to Ask.”

The Southampton Arts Center on Job’s Lane and the Southampton African American Museum will stage “Harriet, Rosa, and Me,” a theatrical presentation written and directed by JD Lawrence, an actor, comedian, and playwright, tomorrow at 7 p.m.

The show opens at a bus stop where a young woman named Hope has decided to skip school to avoid a black history exam. She eventually encounters Rosa, who refuses to get on the bus for a very different reason, and, later, Harriet. Both women identify themselves and impress on Hope the importance of black history. 

The show, which is both entertaining and educational, will be followed by a jazz performance by Charles Certain and Certain Moves. Tickets are $25, $15 for students.

On Sunday at 5 p.m., the classical pianist Tanya Gabrielian will launch a nine-date tour accompanying the release of her debut album, “Remix,” with a performance at the center. The program will include works by Bach, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, and Gershwin. Tickets are $15.

While it is unlikely that anyone will ever replicate the perfectly assembled mix of ur-modernism that Edward Albee achieved with his collection of paintings and primitive sculptures, those who might want to try can bid on the sale of his estate on Sept. 26 at Sotheby’s in Manhattan.

The playwright, who died last September, directed that the sale benefit the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, which provides residencies for writers and artists. The Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning author of such seminal works as “The Zoo Story” (1958), “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1962), “A Delicate Balance” (1966), “Three Tall Women” (1991), and “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” (2000), started the foundation in 1967 from the proceeds of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

In the auction catalog, Jakob Holder, executive director of the foundation, writes that Albee was taken to Montauk in 1964 by the actress Uta Hagen, the original Martha in “Virginia Woolf.” He bought a cottage on a bluff and a barn, which would become the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center, named for a partner of his. He renovated the space to include two studios and five bedrooms. Some 1,000 artists and writers have since been granted one-month summer residencies there.

Albee had a wide circle of artistic friends, including Lee Krasner, who served on the board of his foundation. The more than 100 artworks in the auction are from his TriBeCa loft, and fulfill his vision of “art that is about art.” They include pieces by Krasner, Wassily Kandinsky, Jean Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Jack Youngerman, Milton Avery, Pablo Picasso, Richard Serra, Marc Chagall, Elizabeth Murray, Saul Steinberg, Louise Nevelson, Donald Sultan, Esteban Vicente, Alfred Leslie, and John McLaughlin, in addition to several African and Oceanic sculptures, which inspired many of the earlier modern artists.

Mr. Holder writes that Albee thought of his collecting as “accumulating”  — satisfying a primary utilitarian function — “to satisfy his desire to successfully communicate in ways where humans are prone to fail.” Not a casual observer, he chose challenging objects that he also deemed useful. “The merely decorative held no interest.” He tended to cultivate works of art the way he chose his friends.

Sotheby’s has compiled some of Albee’s musings on art: “There is something that makes something art. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything except the piece itself.” Sculpture, he said, “mutates faster than any other art form I know of.”

A fan of Milton Avery, Albee began collecting his work directly from the artist when his paintings were still affordable. Avery’s “Two Nudes,” a work that inspired Albee to go “industriously back to my desk to write another play so that I could get some more,” has an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000. “Meditation,” a painting of a seated nude woman, is expected to fetch $2 million to $3 million.

Some works, like an early Jack Youngerman collage, have local provenances from galleries such as the Drawing Room in East Hampton. The 2013 purchase is evidence of an eye that was always searching and finding things to acquire.

Albee was not known to sell things from his collection, but Bill Katz, a friend, relates in the catalog that he once had to sacrifice a large Henry Moore bronze that graced the Montauk property to settle a tax debt. Mr. Katz says the playwright did not buy art as an investment, but understood that many of his pieces were of significant value and worth selling to ensure the future of his foundation. Works not in the sale will become part of the foundation’s collection.

Although there are clear multimillion-dollar masterpieces in the mix, the bulk of the Albee sale consists of more moderately priced small pieces or works on paper, many with estimates below $5,000. These include works by Burgoyne Diller, Vicente, Nevelson, and some Picasso etchings. Objects in the five-figure range include a Frank Lloyd Wright window and a Tiffany chandelier, in addition to several artworks. The catalog is on the Sotheby’s website.

Works from the sale will be on view from Sept. 20 to Sept. 25 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.