The Southampton Arts Center’s outdoor summer concerts will come to an end on Saturday at 6:30 p.m. with a free performance by The HooDoo Loungers, widely known as the East Coast’s New Orleans party band. The sound of the nine-piece group encompasses traditional New Orleans jazz, brass band, classic R&B, and funk in a blend of original music and rearranged Big Easy classics. 

The center has advised guests to take chairs, blankets, and picnics. In the event of rain the show will be held in its theater.

Billy Sullivan and Kathy Rudin at Ille

Works by Billy Sullivan and Kathy Rudin are on view at Ille Arts in Amagansett through Sept. 12. Mr. Sullivan is known for a body of work that chronicles his world and the people in it, and the exhibition includes paintings, photographs, and drawings that range from atmospheric images of New York’s demimonde to bright pastels and watercolors that deftly capture moments in people’s lives.

Ms. Rudin’s work often combines text with photographs or drawings, with results ranging from biting social commentary to humorous disjunctions between text and image. Leonardo’s “The Last Supper,” for example, is affixed to a takeout menu from a Chinese restaurant with the caption, “They ordered in.” A drawing of Mama Celeste from the Celeste Frozen Pizza box is subtitled, “Was a bag man for the mob,” while Little Miss Sunbeam of white bread fame was “later diagnosed with bipolar disorder.”

Legal Issues for Artists

The East Hampton Arts Council and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts will host “Legal Issues for Visual Artists: Copyright and Contracts,” a free presentation by Katie Wagner, executive director of the lawyers’ group, and Betsy Dale, a staff attorney, next Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Amagansett Library. 

Carol Steinberg, a lawyer who specializes in art and entertainment law and is a board member of the arts council, will moderate the discussion.

The East Hampton Arts Council was established to foster the economic value derived from promoting arts-related activities and businesses and to advise the town on issues concerning the arts.

Duncan and Burgos at Halsey Mckay

The Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton is presenting through Oct. 15 a group show organized by Nicole Klagsbrun and a two-artist exhibition of work by Ernesto Burgos and Chris Duncan.

Ms. Klagsbrun has selected four artists who apply inventive approaches to unique materials. Anna Betbeze dyes, cuts, folds, sews, scorches, and otherwise transforms textiles. In Brandon Ndife’s work, found objects collide with materials typically used in construction. Martha Tuttle’s assemblages are made with layers of silk, wool, paper, hematite, wood, indigo, and logwood. Jessica Vaughn’s visual “interventions” in the urban landscape reflect on the sociopolitical narratives that define America’s cities.

Visual surprises and formal harmony characterize the seemingly disparate approaches to art-making of Mr. Duncan and Mr. Burgos. Mr. Duncan’s fabrics are bleached by months-long exposure to sunlight before being painted with saturated color in the studio. Mr. Burgos’s sculptures, made from cardboard, fiberglass, and aqua resin, appear weighty despite the lightness of the materials.  

Two at Rental Gallery

Two solo shows will open Saturday at the Rental Gallery in East Hampton with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. They will continue through Oct. 31. 

Elsa Hansen Oldham will exhibit small-scale hand-embroidered works that draw from pop culture, history, and politics, often grouping tiny figures in tableaus that combine sophisticated humor and social commentary with deceptively simple imagery. (Picture, for example, samplers combining R. Crumb and R. Kelly or Marcel Duchamp with a urinal, or Kanye West and Sisyphus.)

The stylized forms of Geoff Mc­Fetridge’s paintings reflect in part his parallel career as a graphic designer. Of his paintings, which straddle the line between pattern and figuration, he has said, “Design language . . . is very accessible to me. My paintings are as much rooted in logos as they are in art history.”

Tim Conlon’s Trains

“Between the Lines,” a solo exhibition of new paintings and train sculptures by Tim Conlon, will open tomorrow and remain on view through Sept. 24 at Roman Fine Art in East Hampton. A reception will take place Saturday evening from 6 to 8.

The show features work from the artist’s “Blank Canvas” series, a collection of freight-train paintings that combine typography, abstraction, and trompe l’oeil to bring railroad logos, weathered metal and paint, and graffiti art into close focus.

In addition to the paintings, Mr. Conlon makes one-eighth-scale and G-scale trains, complete with long-vanished logos and graffiti.

On Representation

The new exhibition at the Karma Gallery in Amagansett, which will run through Sept. 10, engages perception and representation through the work of Duane Hanson, who was known for his hyper-realistic sculptures of ordinary people, and Dike Blair, who came to New York City in the late 1970s, when Hanson’s work was peripheral to the art world’s critical discourse.

Mr. Blair’s new oil paintings capture the banal and transitory details of everyday life with deadpan perception. In 1994, he took issue with a review of Mr. Hanson’s work by Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times in a text that concluded, “There is magic happening at the edge of representation, and this suggests to me that Hanson’s work was not, and is not, the ‘dead end’ that Mr. Kimmelman concludes [it is].”

Images of Water

“Water: The Element That Surrounds Us,” a show of work by five photographers, will open at the Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor with a reception tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. It will remain on view through Oct. 15.

Stephen Wilkes has photographed sites throughout the world, among them the crowded beaches of Coney Island and Santa Monica. Daniel Jones takes a painterly approach, creating pristine images usually devoid of people. 

By contrast, Herbert Friedman’s beach scenes are packed with bathers and their accouterments, including colorful umbrellas. Blair Seagram is drawn to the panoramas and dynamism of surfers, while Dawn Watson’s favorite subject is “the water . . . from Montauk to Westhampton.”

Nick Weber in Montauk

Paintings by the Amagansett artist Nick Weber will be on view at Boo-Hooray Summer Rental in Montauk from Sunday through Sept. 15, with a reception set for Sunday from 4 to 6 p.m.

Mr. Weber is a figurative painter of people and moody night landscapes, whose work has loosened up in recent years to the point where details are blurred or partially obscured by the free handling of paint and the buildup of surfaces. 

Southampton Artists Show

The Southampton Artists Association’s annual Labor Day show will be on view at the Southampton Cultural Center through Sept. 10, with receptions scheduled for Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m. and Friday, Sept. 8, also from 4 to 6. The exhibition includes painting, sculpture, photography, and works on paper.

In conjunction with its current exhibition, “Abstract Expressionism Behind the Iron Curtain,” the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs will present “Cinema Behind the Iron Curtain,” a series of four film programs organized by Marion Wolberg Weiss, a film historian and professor.

The series will kick off tomorrow at 7 p.m. with a program of short films made by Roman Polanski while he was a student at the Film School in Lodz. These early works are marked by a surreal/absurdist style that appears throughout the noted director’s body of work.

When Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania were under Communist rule, cinema was among the most important avenues for social criticism and debate. On successive Fridays at 7, the series will include Andrzej Wajda’s “Kanal,” a 1957 film about resistance fighters in Warsaw during World War II; Milos Forman’s “The Fireman’s Ball,” a 1967 satire that was banned for several years and that forced Mr. Forman to leave Czechoslovakia, and Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days,” a 2007 Romanian film that speaks out against Communist-era policies.

Bryan Fogel’s documentary “Icarus,” which will be shown at Guild Hall on Saturday as part of the Hamptons International Film Festival’s SummerDocs series, establishes its original intentions early on. It opens with voice-overs of the track and field star Marion Jones and the champion cyclist Lance Armstrong asserting that they never used performance-enhancing drugs. 

The film cuts to Mr. Fogel in Boulder, Colo., preparing to race in the seven-day Haute Route in France, the hardest amateur cycling event in the world. He has been a passionate cyclist for 28 years and competed in many amateur events. The last time he rode in the Haute Route, “totally clean, I finished 14th out of 440 masochists. I was destroyed. I couldn’t walk for the next three weeks.”

When Mr. Armstrong confesses his use of drugs to Oprah Winfrey, Mr. Fogel says, “I always suspected as much but didn’t really want to know.” Enter Don Catlin, who operated the U.C.L.A. Olympic lab for 25 years. He tested Mr. Armstrong 50 times, and the cyclist passed every one. 

“They’re all doping,” says Mr. Catlin. “With knowledge, it’s really easy to beat, very easy.” Mr. Fogel then presents his idea: to prove testing doesn’t work by doping himself in preparation for the next Haute Route and subjecting himself to testing. 

Mr. Catlin puts the filmmaker in touch with Grigory Rodchenkov, the director of Russia’s antidoping lab. As the training-doping process begins, with Mr. Rodchenkov and Mr. Fogel communicating by Skype, the suspense concerns whether the regimen will lead to a better result at the Haute Route and whether Mr. Fogel will evade detection.

When, in December 2014, a German television documentary alleges systematic doping in Russian athletics, it becomes clear to Mr. Fogel that there is a bigger story than he at first realized. His relationship with Mr. Rodchenkov moves forward, they become friends, and the doping regimen continues, but at the same time the stakes for both men are raised.

Mr. Rodchenkov emerges as a very likable character, retaining his senses of humor and irony even as the World Anti-Doping Agency is keeping his lab on a “short leash” in the wake of the German documentary. 

Eventually, Mr. Rodchenkov comes to the United States, where he is subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. When the head of the Russian antidoping agency suddenly dies of a heart attack at 52, Mr. Rodchenkov is skeptical. In part because going public with his story might in the end protect him, the Russian talks to The New York Times, which publishes his revelations in May 2016.

“Grigory and I had and have a real friendship,” said Mr. Fogel, “and his life was in my hands . . . he wants to tell his story, and the best way to actually protect him is to make this story public. As long as it’s sitting in my hands and Grigory’s hands and he’s the only person on the planet who is alive and can corroborate the story, he is incredibly in danger.”

Not only is the entire Russian antidoping program exposed as fraudulent, with details revealed about how urine swapping enabled Russian athletes to escape detection at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, Mr. Rodchenkov’s revelations also implicate Vladimir Putin. 

The story is complicated, but never less than riveting. Asked if he ever considered abandoning the project as the complications and risks increased, Mr. Fogel said, “I never thought to myself that I was going to back away from the story. As an athlete I had already taken extraordinary risks, racing my bike down a mountain at 70 m.p.h. in the Alps where I could have had a horrific crash.” 

Nevertheless, his commitment to the project, to Mr. Rodchenkov, and to the telling of the story are remarkable for someone who, prior to “Icarus,” had been an actor and comedian best known for co-writing an Off Broadway play, “Jewtopia,” and later directing the film version.

The screening will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, with Alec Baldwin and Mr. Fogel set to discuss the film afterward. “I’m secretly wishing that Alec could introduce the film as Trump,” said Mr. Fogel. “What could be better than that?”

Guild Hall will offer two distractions from the grim events of recent weeks with a new comedy by Eugene Pack and the lowbrow eccentricity of “The Gong Show.” 

A staged reading of “Sweet Birds,” a comedy that juxtaposes two stories revolving around an avant-garde production of “Sweet Bird of Youth” — the outrageous backstage drama of the stars and a romantic adventure of two Long Island teachers — will take place Sunday evening at 8. The cast includes Mario Cantone, Tate Donovan, Carol Kane, Chloe Dirksen, J. Smith Cameron, Kathryn Grody, Dayle Reyfel, and others to be announced. Tickets range from $30 to $75, $28 to $70 for members.

“The Gong Show Off Broadway,” the re-creation of the television classic that showcased offbeat talent acts for a rowdy audience and three judges, will come to Guild Hall on Tuesday at 8 p.m. In the current iteration, the judges are celebrities and the cast features legitimate comedians, actors, and other performers, among them Ray Ellin, Chuck Nice, Brian Scott McFadden, and Leslie Gold. Tickets are $40 to $75, $38 to $70 for members.

The Montauk Library will present “A Summer Cabaret,” the 12th annual concert by the Aviva Players, a chamber ensemble devoted to the work of female composers, on Sunday afternoon at 3.

The free program includes vocal and piano music performed by the soprano Karen Jolicoeur and the baritone Lars Woodul. Mimi Stern-Wolfe, a pianist and conductor, will accompany the vocalists.

The afternoon features ragtime compositions by Adaline Shepherd, Irene Giblin, Julia Lee Niebergall, and May Aufderheide, songs from “Annie Get Your Gun” and “Guys and Dolls,” and a selection of works by Mira J. Spektor, a composer, lyricist, and poet who is the founder and director of the Aviva Players. 

Kate Mueth and the Neo-Political Cowgirls will present their production of “Andromeda,” the story of a girl trying to find her place in the world, from Tuesday through Sept. 3 at the Montauk County Park. 

The outdoor production includes music, dance, puppetry, and recited dialogue. The cast of both East End and New York City actors includes Josh Gladstone, Sawyer Spielberg, Raye Levine, Matthew Conlon, and Juliet Garrett. Liz Joyce, a board member of the Jim Henson Foundation, is the puppeteer.

All performances will begin at 7 p.m. Tickets are $25, $18 for senior citizens and children 18 and under, and are available at npcowgirls.org. Audiences have been encouraged to take blankets, lawn chairs, and picnics.

Summer’s end must be nigh, as here comes Bay Street Theater’s annual Under the Stars open-air concert in Mashashimuet Park in Sag Harbor. This year’s alfresco theatrical offering tomorrow and Saturday at 7 p.m. is a reading of “Kiss Me, Kate,” one of the most beloved musicals of all time, featuring a Cole Porter score full of lush, romantic, and singable tunes. Entry to the concert is free with no tickets required.

“It’s more a concert staging than a reading,” said Scott Schwartz, Bay Street’s artistic director. “The actors will sing and there will be dialogue, though they’ll be reading from scripts.” The event is modeled after the New York City Center’s Tony-honored Encores series, devoted to celebrating great American musicals in concert revivals and featuring high-wattage Broadway stars with only a few days of rehearsals. 

“Kiss Me, Kate” was inspired by the onstage and backstage battling of the husband-and-wife actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne during their 1935 production of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.” The marital fireworks were witnessed by future Broadway producer Arnold Saint-Subber, who asked the playwrights Samuel and Bella Spewack to pen the script; Spewack in turn enlisted Cole Porter to write the music and lyrics, and a timeless classic was created, featuring songs such as “So in Love” and “Too Darn Hot.” The show premiered on Broadway in 1948, with Patricia Morison and Alfred Drake in the lead roles.

Sag Harbor’s weekend concert staging will feature its own powerhouse cast of 14, led by an ex-Encores series couple, Melissa Errico, a Broadway star and Tony Award nominee, and Richard Troxell, a Metropolitan Opera star. Ms. Errico has starred in the Broadway musicals “Anna Karenina,” “My Fair Lady,” “High Society,” and “Dracula,” as well as the first national tour of “Les Miserables.” She collaborated with Stephen Sondheim on the revival of “Sunday in the Park With George” at the Kennedy Center, and performed in John Doyle’s production of “Passion,” for which she was nominated for a sixth Drama Desk Award.

Richard Troxell, a tenor with the Metropolitan Opera, has spanned the gamut of performances from a naval officer named Pinkerton in Martin Scorcese’s film “Madame Butterfly,” to a recurring guest on Jimmy Fallon’s “Late Night,” to singing the national anthem at Major League Baseball games. His lyrical tenor voice has been heard in leading roles at opera houses and concert halls around the world including in Los Angeles, Sydney, Beijing, New York City, Monte Carlo, Seville, Philadelphia, Boston, and this weekend at Mashashimuet Park.

Will Pomerantz, Bay Street’s assistant artistic director, will direct the performances, which will feature a live ensemble of musicians on piano, drums, and bass.

“This is a lovely event,” said Mr. Schwartz, “and we’re really excited to be doing it again. It’s our way of saying thank you to the community for all their generous support. We are so grateful.”

While in the past, the theater has staged readings of Shakespeare for its Under the Stars series, it chose a musical this year since Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” is currently onstage at the Sag Harbor theater.

Mr. Schwartz suggested that attendees take chairs, blankets, beach chairs, and picnics to “enjoy a night of music and comedy on a balmy summer evening.”

Given the South Fork’s vibrant and talented artistic community, it seems indulgent to keep harking back to the glory days of midcentury titans like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, aside from breathlessly reporting their stratospheric auction prices. 

There are, however, unsung and rather forgotten peers of the New York School, who still deserve their due. In the last few years, art dealers have done much rediscovering of some of the brighter lights of former decades, whose torch never managed to pass into more recent years.

Eric Firestone has been on a unique quest for a South Fork art dealer. While most of the interest in such artists as Norman Bluhm, John Little, Charlotte Park, James Brooks, Costantino Nivola, and Kyle Morris, is coming from galleries in the city or completely outside of the region, he has mounted a treasure hunt from his base in East Hampton. Some of the gems he has unearthed so far are on view for the next few weeks in “Montauk Highway: Postwar Abstraction in the Hamptons.”

Concentrating on the 1950s and 1960s, the show includes examples from the giants and the unsung (or not lately sung) from the period. Quite a number of them are female, whose exclusion from the mainstream history of the period has been a blight until very recently. Years of demand for works by the top 10 artists in the marketplace have given what is available a picked-over quality, which has forced dealers to look beyond them to the best canvases of artists who are not household names.

Morris, represented in the show by a relatively small painting from 1953, surprises with thick palette knife strokes of rosy pink, corals, and reds imbued with black marks from under-painting along with flashes of sky, aqua, and gray. It’s a feminine palette, and the circular swirls suggest a floral garden. Its energy is quite wonderful, as is the powerful push-pull of its tones. Morris, a longtime East Hampton resident who died in 1979 at the age of 61, was an instructor at Cooper Union among other schools and was a visiting critic at Yale University’s graduate school in addition to being in the collections of the Guggenheim and Whitney Museums, but it is easy to see why this painting might have been lost in an era defined by aggressive masculinity. Let’s hope we see more of this artist in years to come.

 Women make up about a fifth of this show--which isn’t bad, considering that their work takes up more than a fifth of the wall space — and the obstacles women artists faced during that time. It will be wonderful to see the day when the inclusion of women in art exhibitions, particularly those focused on the mid-20th century, attracts no special notice. 

Notably, half of the women whose work is on view were married to better-known male artists. Having co-founded the feminist art movement, Schapiro managed to eclipse her husband, Paul Brach, who seemed happy to be her champion. But as an Abstract Expressionist during her early career, she had been painting  in relative obscurity.

Audrey Flack’s lasting impact has been felt most strongly in photorealism, even though she got her start in Abstract Expressionism. Her two works here, from 1950, demonstrate a strong, confident voice for someone still in her 20s. The horror vaccui that marks these works, relieved only by a few black voids or some airy white gaps in these works, is something that has continued throughout her career.

Other abstractions come from Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Park, and Perle Fine, all welcome additions to the dialogue going on here.

The women are not the only surprises, however. Alfonso Ossorio, known primarily for his later compositions of found gewgaws and the ever-present evil eye, also has a traditional oil on canvas action painting from 1955. Al Held, known for hard-edged, geometric abstraction, has a more painterly, freehanded homage to the rectangle. Although not a regular resident of the East End, he did spend two summers in the area, not far from Sag Harbor.

There are other great examples on canvas from lesser-known artists such as John Ferren, Michael Goldberg, Manoucher Yektai, Friedel Dzubas, Larry Zox, as well as Little, whose Duck Creek Farm is now being used intermittently for contemporary exhibitions. Also of note are sculptures by Philip Pavia, Ibram Lassaw, and Sidney Geist.

Then there are those well known locally or to scholars of the period, such as Bill King, Nick Carone, Nivola, James Brooks, and Esteban Vicente. In this show, Nivola has both a sand-cast piece, which is what he is known for, and a mid-relief bronze that is rather fascinating. 

Bluhm was once in this category, but his work is becoming so prevalent at art fairs that he may enter the more general art world consciousness. The same might be said for Brooks. Maybe with enough similar efforts here and nationally, recognition could spread to all of these artists, who so richly deserve it. As for Vicente, he is well known in Spain, his home country. 

Reading this far, you will see the big names are last. It is not that the pieces by Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, Ray Parker, and de Kooning are poor or minor. It’s hard to imagine Kline ever having had a bad day, even with his well-known hangovers. Yet, the other works look so fresh, surprising, and worthy of their moment in the spotlight, why not let the sleeping dogs lie? Their light will continue to shine until Sept. 17.

During the summers, which the artists Donald Lipski and Terry Hyland spend at their house in the Amagansett dunes, his studio consists of a desk and computer inside a tent. It’s a far cry from his old workspace in Greenpoint, a former movie theater and factory. “I had 3,000 feet of metal shelving there,” Mr. Lipski said during a recent conversation on his patio.

That was when he stockpiled materials found on the streets near his loft on Greenwich and Canal Streets. “I would pass Dumpsters that were full of stuff from some factory or warehouse that was closing. I started taking the stuff up to my loft and making things that  were fed by those materials.” 

His stockpiling days are over now that he works almost exclusively on public art projects. “I still make things,” he said, “but not very much. Most of my work is fabricated.” He likes being able to operate on the large scale offered by public projects and welcomes the challenge. “Working with objects never got boring, but it got easy. In public art, there’s a situation, and it’s sort of unique, and the only real given is you’ve got a budget.”

Over the past 20 years, he has created more than 25 public artworks throughout the United States and has eight in progress, including one in Calgary and one in Honolulu. No two look alike. What links them is not appearance or style but his way of approaching each situation, which is to let his mind wander freely over the specifics of the site, its purpose, and its history. “I can propose anything that comes into my mind.”

One project is in the works for Penn Treaty Park, where William Penn signed his treaty of peace in 1683 with the local Lenape tribe just off the Delaware River north of the center of Philadelphia. The park will be reached by a pedestrian underpass beneath I-95. 

Mr. Lipski discovered that the Lenape have three clans: the turkey clan, the wolf clan, and the turtle clan. To illuminate the path to the park, which passes through a derelict area, he will place two tall lights just west of the underpass. A monumental turkey will be atop one, a wolf atop the other. On the other side of the highway will be a row of lamps rising from the backs of turtles. 

Animals have figured in a number of his projects. A school of 25 fiberglass sunfish, each seven feet long and lit from within at night, are suspended over the San Antonio River Walk. For another installation in a vast convention center, three flocks of big birds fly toward an eight-foot-diameter acrylic nest, each with a piece of acrylic in its beak.

“The Yearling,” originally sponsored by the Public Art Fund of New York and now situated on the mall outside the Denver Public Library, consists of a life-size fiberglass horse looking out from the seat of a red 20-foot-tall steel replica of a child’s chair.

In 2009 Mr. Lipski was commissioned to build a piece for the Cleveland Indians’ spring training ballpark in Arizona. His first thought was a feather made out of baseball bats. During the process he met with some Native Americans in Phoenix and learned that the feather is a holy object that should never touch the ground. “I decided I’d put a feather on a pedestal. The committee loved the idea, but the team shot it down.”

The final piece, titled “The Ziz,” is a fiberglass, concrete, and steel recreation of Brancusi’s “Bird in Space,” but white, with stitching like that on a baseball. It is 60 feet 6 inches tall, the distance from a pitcher’s mound to home plate. “The Ziz” is typical of Mr. Lipski’s work in that it operates elegantly on both conceptual and material levels and with a witty repurposing of elements, in this case a baseball and Brancusi’s sculpture, into something unlike either one.

Mr. Lipski was born in Chicago and raised in the suburb of Highland Park. He made art in high school, and he won a Scholastic Art Award in 1965 for “Bird of Prey,” which he welded from steel rods. 

At the University of Wisconsin, he became “a child of the ’60s,” living on a farm and more active in antiwar protests than class work. “I flunked all my courses my sophomore year, including a sculpture course, but I got very good at bridge.”

During his senior year, he studied woodworking and ceramics and decided to become either a furniture maker or a potter. When he visited Denmark and explored the former option, he learned “you start an apprenticeship by sanding for a couple of years. It wasn’t for me.”

After a brief stint as a graduate student at the University of Colorado, he went to the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he studied ceramics and first experienced being around artists. “Most were very much isolated in their departments, but I was all over the school, doing everything.” When he graduated, he found a job teaching sculpture and ceramics at the University of Oklahoma.

During the course of his four years there, he started a student-run arts club that brought to the campus as visiting artists such prominent art world figures as Carl Andre, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, William Wegman, and John Baldessari. “But after four years, the bloom was off, and I decided to move to New York in 1978.”

Mr. Lipski had a solo show that same year at Artists Space, one of the first and most important nonprofit exhibition venues for emerging artists. That installation, “Gathering Dust,” consisted of pocket-sized sculptures he had been making since he was a child that were affixed to the walls throughout the gallery. The piece was installed at the Museum of Modern Art the following year as one of its Projects exhibitions.

Of “Gathering Dust,” he said, “Thanks to Baldessari, who was such a hero of mine, I began to realize what those modest little sculptures had to do with art is that they were art. I had and still have a deep belief in that work because it’s so elemental, so unaffected by any sophisticated ideas of art.”

In 1981, after having shown the piece at MoMA and elsewhere around the country, “I felt I had made my great statement and I was going to be like Newton, who, at 25, had had all his best ideas. I was sort of depressed. I made a plan to build a staircase in the forest that would start at the forest floor and go up until it was above the trees. It would be like a knife going through the woods.”

That idea morphed into “Progress,” a wooden stairway built at Battery Park in New York City. The original idea called for ropes with flags on them to run from the stairway to the top of World Trade Center. “I had an engineer, and we figured out how to do it. I bought two half-mile lengths of rope. When I made my presentation, there were people from aviation, from risk management, from about a dozen different agencies. Needless to say, I was shot down, but I loved the piece as it was.”

In 1987, mutual friends fixed up Mr. Lipski and Ms. Hyland. They were married in 1989 and bought the house in Amagansett that same year. They also owned a house in Sag Harbor for 10 years that they rented out every summer to pay for the beach house. Their son, Jackson Hyland-Lipski, who was born in 1992, will become director of special projects for Women’s March Global in the fall.

For an artist with so many irons in so many fires at any given time, Mr. Lipski remains surprisingly unflappable, a captivating raconteur who talks about each project with the same clarity and wit found in the artworks themselves.