Billy Porter, a Tony and Grammy Award-winning singer, composer, actor, and playwright, will present an evening of songs and stories from his career on and Off Broadway at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater on Monday at 8 p.m., as part of the venue’s ongoing Music Mondays series.

Mr. Porter’s many Broadway credits include “Kinky Boots,” which landed him the 2013 Tony Award for best lead actor in a musical; “Miss Saigon,” “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” and “Dreamgirls.” Tickets range from $69 to $125, with only a few seats available as of press time.

The Watermill Center will open its doors Sunday from 3 to 6 p.m. for an afternoon of art installations, performances, workshops, tours, and family activities both inside the center and on its eight-and-a-half landscaped acres. “Discover Watermill Day 2017” provides an opportunity for the East End community to meet and see the work of artists from more than 30 countries who are participating in the center’s International Summer Program. Admission is free, and reservations are not required.

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill is celebrating three West African countries tomorrow night with live performances and the screening of two 30-minute documentaries. 

West Africa’s vibrant and diverse contemporary culture is the subject of Ismael Kouyate’s 45-minute set of African music, to be performed outdoors on the museum’s terrace at 7:30 p.m. with his eight-piece band, the Radiant Select. Mr. Kouyate, a renowned Guinean singer, choreographer, and dancer whose vocals can be heard on Beyonce’s song “Grown Woman,” leads the band, which merges West African roots music with funk, soul, and international rhythms. Its members are Electra Weston and Iris Wilson on vocals, Matthew Albeck and Richard Padron on guitar, Ran Livneh on bass, Takafumi Suenaga on keyboards, Abdoulaye Touré on percussion, and Andy Algire on drums. 

Two short films from the documentary series “Afripedia” will follow at 8:30, also outdoors. The films, shot in Ghana and Senegal, focus on the young urban generation of African artists, filmmakers, fashion designers, musicians, photographers, and cultural activists, each challenging preconceptions and stereotypes through art and activism. 

Mr. Kouyate, who will perform again at 9:30, was born to a long line of griots, the oral historians who preserve history and culture through song, music, and dance. The tradition spans “my father’s father’s father’s father, going back 1,000 years,” he told The Star. His father, Elhadj Kankou Kemo Kouyate, who died last month, performed for 25 years with the late Miriam Makeba, the South African singer and civil rights activist who was a force against apartheid in South Africa. His mother, Mama Diabate, is also a vocalist and performer. 

Mr. Kouyate began a career in dance at age 15, joining Ballet Communale de Matam. He was its principal dancer for nine years. He later joined Ballets Africains, the national dance company of Guinea, which revived and celebrated dances and rhythms from all over the country for the troupe’s 50th-anniversary tour of the United States, called “Jubilee!” Ballets Africains has performed throughout the world. 

 In 2000, Mr. Kouyate was recruited by the national ensemble Les Percussions de Guinea, and spent three years as the group’s lead dancer and griot. He taught dance and song to international groups visiting Guinea, and taught and performed in Senegal and France. 

He came to the United States in 2006, was engaged as master choreographer for the musical “Fela!” and played a principal role in its Broadway production and international tour. It was in “Fela!”, which is based on the life and music of the late Nigerian composer, musician, and human rights activist Fela Kuti, that Beyonce heard his vocals and invited him to sing on “Grown Woman.” 

Mr. Kouyate “is an amazing performer, dancer, and singer,” Corinne Erni, the Parrish’s curator of special projects, said. “The griots are the storytellers and keepers of history in West Africa, like a walking library, if you will. It’s wonderful how he brings that into a contemporary American environment. I think it will be a real high-energy and stunning event.” 

Initially self-funded, and then broadcast on television in the filmmakers’ native Sweden, “Afripedia” is described as a platform and a visual guide to art, film, photography, fashion, design, music, and contemporary culture. “Afripedia, Ghana” features artists, acrobats, a singer and fashion designer, and another outspoken singer and performer. “Afripedia, Senegal” spotlights a few of that country’s artists, among them a photographer, fashion designer, cultural activist and blogger, and an organizer of urban dance circles.

“Everybody come enjoy the show,” Mr. Kouyate said. “We don’t just tell a story; I’m here to make people happy and excited, and to give them more power in their life, to make sure they forget about bad things and think about the nice things in their own life. If you come see my show you will say, ‘I’m so happy, my body feels good.’ ” 

Tickets for “Music and Films from West Africa” featuring Ismael Kouyate, tomorrow night at 7:30, are $20, $5 for members, children 5 and older, and students, and include museum admission. Reservations have been strongly encouraged.

When Teri Kennedy, a Springs artist, agreed to serve as curator for the 50th annual Springs invitational art exhibition, she received advice from friends about how to approach it. Some suggested she make it a very small show with only the best people.

“After thinking about that,” she said over coffee at Starbucks, “I thought it was an inappropriate response to the 50th anniversary. I decided to try to tell the story, as much as you can with disparate pieces of art on the walls, of what art is in this community.”

It was originally called “Artists of the Springs,” and in its early days Jackson Pollock and friends gathered in August during the annual Fisherman’s Fair and raffled art for the benefit of Ashawagh Hall, where the show has always taken place. The net was cast wider over the years to include some artists from outside East Hampton.

While she didn’t feel she could restrict the show to Springs artists, Ms. Kennedy’s first step was to limit participation to artists living in East Hampton Town. “I never expected it to become so controversial. There has been a lot of pushback about that decision.”

Not as controversial, perhaps, but in a departure from previous shows, she decided she wouldn’t just choose artists, she would choose particular works. “That meant a lot of studio visits, a lot of footwork.” The result was 150 studio visits and 110 artists selected.

“Usually the selections are kept secret until close to the show, and I didn’t feel good about doing that. So I came out of the curatorial closet. I put out my email address, and if somebody invited me to his or her studio, I went.” She also consulted Hamptonsarthub.com and artists’ directories, went to galleries, and solicited names.

“One thing I wanted to do was find new artists who haven’t been in this show before, especially young artists, which isn’t easy, since it’s so expensive to live here. But I feel it’s really important to expand the Ashawagh Hall idea.”

She also wanted to include artists with deep historical ties to the region’s art community, among them Connie Fox, Audrey Flack, Phyllis Baker Hammond, Roy Nicholson, Reynold Ruffins, and Athos Zacharias.

Thirty-two artists are exhibiting in the show for the first time, and participants range in age from early 20s to 90s. In addition to recent work, she selected pieces from as early as 1976.

Among several special events associated with the exhibition will be the investiture of Jackson Pollock as an honorary Bonacker, which will happen on Friday, Aug. 11, at 6 p.m. “The town will give the Pollock-Krasner House a proclamation, there will be beer and clams, and past curators will be invited to be special guests.”

In addition, the hall’s vestibule will be dedicated to Pollock, courtesy of Helen Harrison, the director of the Pollock-Krasner House. She will bring to the opening “Untitled (After Number 8, 1951),” a screen print made by Pollock’s brother, Sanford McCoy, from a photograph of one of Pollock’s black enamel paintings from that year. A photograph of the print will remain on view in the entryway, as will other photographs and explanatory text.

The opening reception will take place tomorrow from 5 to 8 p.m., and a reception for the 2017 “Summer of Sculpture” show is set for Aug. 12 from 5 to 7:30. Ms. Kennedy will lead a curator’s tour on Aug. 13 at 11 a.m.

With so many artists, Ms. Kennedy faces a daunting installation. “There are walls and corners there that artists dread. I’m choosing some significant pieces for those locations to counteract the idea that those spots are less desirable.”

“I think the show is a way to tell the story of the East Hampton art community. It’s not only famous artists, but all those who have come here to make art.” The exhibition will be on view through Aug. 20. 

“It’s as far from 53rd Street as you can get,” Victor D’Amico once said about the Art Barge on Napeague Harbor, which he founded in 1963, most likely referring to the spiritual distance between the beached idyll for artists and midtown Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, where he served as director of education for over 30 years.

Standing on the sun-bleached deck of the isolated barge, officially known as the Victor D’Amico Institute of Art, facing the bay’s gentle silver ripples with the high rise of the ocean dunes looming behind, it feels even farther away today from the surrounding hype of a South Fork summer. In fact, it could easily top a list of the most un-Hamptons of places in the Hamptons.

Adding to the barge’s time-stands-still charm are its $200-a-week classes, taught from June through September by professional artists, usually offering 15 hours of instruction over five days. (That’s $40 for each three-hour lesson. For context, a private lesson at the nearby Napeague Tennis Club would set you back $150 for one hour. A lobster roll from the neighboring Lobster Roll restaurant costs $30.)

“I think they should be less,” said Christopher Kohan, speaking not of lobster rolls but of the classes. Mr. Kohan, president of the Art Barge, arrived on the East End in 1975, a recent college graduate with “a degree in whatever and looking for any job.” He took painting classes with Mr. D’Amico and was offered free accommodation in exchange for assisting older artists, carrying their easels, and doing odd jobs around the studio. Today, in addition to stewardship of the organization, Mr. Kohan is a devoted protector and historian of the Mabel and Victor D’Amico Studio and Archive, the couple’s Modernist-style cottage on Lazy Point, which they built during World War II and lived in until death: Victor in 1987 and Mabel in 1998.

One reason Mr. Kohan would like to minimize the cost of classes is to honor Mr. D’Amico’s credo of humanizing the arts — the democratizing power of a place where an East Hampton estate owner is working next to a Montauk fisherman, he explained.

“The effectiveness of art is to rediscover the dignity of man, to help man find his self-respect and to enjoy this greatest natural endowment, the power to create,” Mr. D’Amico wrote in the late ’60s. “In an era that has been brainwashed by science and has been idolized by the computer, man needs a new and respectable image.” Indeed, his thoughts seem even more relevant in today’s device-addled, dehumanized times.

The “power to create” at the Art Barge is offered through classes in a variety of media: pastel, watercolor, drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, ceramics, encaustic, printmaking, photography, and children’s workshops. Students are equally varied, a mix of locals, summer residents, transients, year-round weekenders, professionals, dabblers, and dreamers. Mr. Kohan noted a recent increase in international visitors; last year, he said, a family from Monaco came to paint.

From wherever they hail, one thing is constant: Disciples of the Art Barge speak of it as though it is a national treasure.

“Please don’t write an article about this place,” said Mallory May, an artist from New York City and Sag Harbor. “I don’t want anyone to discover it.” She discovered it last year when she took a painting class, and returned this summer for another in collage.

Her friend Katherine Fichthorne described the setting as “inspiring.” As for the cost of classes, an East End dinner for two “can cost more than $200.”

Then there are the “lifers,” as Mr. Kohan calls them, artists like Joyce Parcher and Judy Friedlander, both grandmothers who have been using the studio as a place to create for over 30 years. “Make that 100,” aid Ms. Friedlander, who leaves the East End for Florida each winter.

Mr. Kohan pointed to Ms. Parcher’s acrylic work-in-progress and said, “This is high-quality work. She’s a master with acrylic, and we’re just happy she comes here to do it.”

Mr. D’Amico never intended the barge to be a school, rather a facility that would bring artists into the elements, as close as possible to both land and water. Although loosely affiliated with MoMA, the nonprofit establishment is entirely self-funded, which means it has to find ways to stay afloat.

Revenue from classes covers the cost of instructors and art supplies. An annual fund-raiser helps toward maintenance of the 500-ton Navy barge, which was towed up the East River and into Napeague Harbor in 1960. But the very elements that Mr. D’Amico hoped would stimulate artists — sky, sea, and salt air — have taken their toll and left the almost 60-year-old structure “in need of a facelift,” said Mr. Kohan. He also dreams about having it winterized, but knows that such an extensive upgrade would require dedicated donors and believers.

In the South Fork’s ever-morphing landscape, where beloved landmarks are scooped up by developers and ransacked for profit, it is comforting to know that the Art Barge is protected by a zoning stipulation that it be used for educational purposes only. One hopes it will always remain just so, like time threaded through the eye of a needle, where one man’s dream continues to fulfill his expectation.  

Fifteen years ago, the journalist Warren Strugatch found himself “at a party on the East End, stuck between people like Jerry Della Femina and Christie Brinkley and surrounded by A-list characters, but it was so loud I couldn’t hear what all these people were saying to each other. I thought it would be interesting to find out.” 

His curiosity led him to launch “Out of the Question,” a series of panel discussions during which prominent East End­ers are invited to address issues of “national scope and local preoccupation.” This summer’s discussions at the Southampton Arts Center have taken on real estate, the art market, and the restaurant business. 

Thursday night's topic, “Architecture: Does Modernism Still Matter?” will be tackled by Paul Goldberger, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic, Jake Gorst, a filmmaker, writer, and grandson of the Long Island Modernist architect Andrew Geller, and two architects, Robert Barnes of Barnes Coy and Anne Surchin, co-author of “Houses of the Hamptons: 1880-1930.” 

While the subject might sound more scholarly than controversial, any discussion of architecture on Long Island is bound to move from the modest and often quirky beach houses of Geller and Peter Blake to the more mainstream East End work of such notable Modernists as Robert Gwathmey and Robert A.M. Stern to the elephants in the room — what Mr. Goldberger referred to during a recent conversation as “the tsunami of shingled traditional houses.”

Modernist architecture, which arose early in the 20th century, rejected traditional neo-Classical and Beaux-Arts styles in favor of purity, functionality, and the elimination of decoration. It was driven in part by new construction technologies such as the use of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete.­

Many of the Modernist architects who became well known in the United States came from Europe, among them Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and Albert Frey, who worked on Long Island in the early 1930s.

Mr. Gorst, who has directed documentaries on Modernist architecture on Long Island and in Southern California, noted that both were characterized by simplicity of design. “My grandfather worked for many years with the industrial designer Raymond Loewy, who believed the simpler the design, the more it resonated with people on a psychological level.”

While that simplicity can be found on both coasts, there were differences. “In Southern California, a lot of the houses have glass walls. You’re sitting in the dining room, but you’re also outside in the desert. On Long Island, it gets cold and it can be extremely windy. You don’t want sand to blow into your house here.”

Both Mr. Strugatch and Mr. Gorst cited another characteristic of the midcentury Long Island architects and their clients: a sense of humor. “The architects enjoyed flouting tradition, thumbing their noses at it,” said Mr. Strugatch. 

Mr. Gorst said, “My grandfather wanted to give his clients a place to play. A lot of his clients wanted a place to escape their work environment and do something crazy.” He cited as an example the house Geller designed for Irwin and Joyce Hunt on Fire Island. “They wanted something that would turn heads. It wasn’t a huge departure, because in reality it was a rectangular box. The difference was that it was rotated on an axis so that it sat on a point. Like Blake’s Pinwheel House, it kind of skewed the original notion of Modernism for the purpose of having fun.”

According to Mr. Strugatch, the “double-diamond” Pearlroth House in Westhampton Beach, another Geller achievement, “almost looks like a pair of angular sunglasses. I think the spirit of humor and innovation are missing today. There’s not a lot of humor in McMansions.”

Mr. Goldberger also spoke of “a certain kind of modesty and understatement and simplicity of the post-World War II era that has had very little role in the world of the Hamptons during the last 30 or 40 years. We lost a huge number of important early-modern houses here, largely because the land was more valuable than the house. People tore them down to build McMansions.”

He is encouraged, however, by the direction of some recent architecture of the region. “What we’ve seen in the last few years is a substantial number of larger, more elaborate, more elegantly detailed, and more expensive modern houses that have the grandeur of true mansions but use a modern architectural vocabulary. There is more and more of that, and a lot of it is really good.”

One of the first of those extravagant modern houses, Toad Hall, was designed for Francois de Menil by Mr. Gwathmey. “It was important because it was one of the first times somebody had tried to do a really grand villa that was modern,” said Mr. Goldberger. “We’re seeing a lot of houses like that now. Some of them are exceptionally beautiful and well done and refreshing. That’s one kind of modern house.”

He went on, however, to question whether there is anything on the East End that’s modern in the sense of “pushing forward the boundaries of architecture. There is less of that. I wouldn’t say absolutely zero, but not a huge amount. The house that Diller Scofidio and Renfro just did at the end of Two Mile Hollow Road [in East Hampton] is perhaps one example of a house that really pushes the envelope in different ways.”

As Mr. Goldberger sees it, Modernism can be represented by both cutting-edge architecture and architecture that uses a modern vocabulary without trying to redefine what architecture can be. “I hope one of the things that will come out of this discussion will be an opportunity to talk a bit on both sides of this equation.”

Tickets to Thursday night's program, which will begin at 7, are $15.­­ A reception will follow the program.

LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton will hold a birthday concert for its founder, Jack Lenor Larsen, on Saturday at 6 p.m.

The annual event will feature Eve Queler, an acclaimed conductor and the emerita artistic director of the Opera Orchestra of New York; the soprano Mia Pafumi, and the tenor William Davenaport. After a reception, the concert will take place at 6:30 near Peter’s Pond. The program is dedicated to the late Ingeborg Ten Haeff, an artist who summered in a converted barn in Amagansett for 43 years.

Tickets are $100, $75 for members for the reception and performance. With the inclusion of an 8 p.m. supper, tickets range from $300 to $1,000. All tickets can be purchased at the LongHouse website.

BodyStories: Teresa Fellion Dance, a contemporary dance company that captures and communicates universal human encounters through dynamic, purposeful movement, will perform three works from its repertory, “Agawam,” “Home,” and “The Warm-Up,” at the Southampton Cultural Center on Sunday afternoon at 4. Tickets are $10.

“Layer it on, you know?” were the last words of Justin Lowe in a 2015 interview in Art News. He was referring to the writer’s comments on an installation he’d constructed in New York that year with his creative collaborator, Jonah Freeman, but he could have easily been talking about the current show at the Fireplace Project in Springs.

“High Rise Lazarus” has the same layered effect, a jumble of works in several series and mediums, or what they refer to as a genre mash-up. Four different series of works are interspersed throughout the space so that their disjunctive and uniting effects can be experienced at once.

Their inspiration, “High Rise Laz­arus,” was the product of a group of anonymous amateur authors who, beginning in the 1980s, sought to conjoin a number of science-fiction universes into a single magnum story. They ended up with a grand mess, “a mass of narratives that do not create a unified universe as much as a meandering jump-cut reality,” according to the artists and the gallery.

Not only do the artists borrow the idea of the mash-up, they also address some themes similar to the initial project, such as alternative universes, artificial intelligence, dystopian megacities, drug use, and machine/biological mutation.

The showiest works are the “Chopped Sheetrock Mirrors.” These large-format compositions are in the six-to-eight-foot range and sound simple enough in their description of medium and support: U.V. ink on mirror-polished stainless steel. Yet the process the artists go through to arrive at their imagery is far more complex. A high-resolution scanner captures images of smashed sheetrock that has been combined with Windex, water, food coloring, paint, canned air, and more. The aim is to create an image of a wall, captured in the act of someone smashing through it. The size of the pieces puts the experience in human scale.

What are they aiming at? The artists said in a statement that they are referencing Chicago’s Cabrini Green Housing Projects, buildings constructed so cheaply that residents broke down the walls between rooms and apartments to create a complicated maze for law enforcement agents attempting to raid the buildings. The mirrored background gives these compositions an illusive depth that helps heighten the effect of a broken/open space and a further dimension beyond the crushed wall.

Pieces of sheetrock seem to fly in the air as Pepto-pink walls with teal accents explode. Some of the solvents added to the printing process act as smoke or clouds of dust, adding further drama. The remaining open-mirrored surface captures glimpses of the artwork in the room, layering the visual experience even more.

 In keeping with the sci-fi theme are the “Starchamber Collages,” composed of chopped-up book covers from the genre. Here the artists celebrate the “spectacle and cliché of pulp sci-fi” as they create a pastiche of “unlikely and often absurd cut-up illustrations.” Odd-looking but stock alien creatures pop up, as well as “Avatar”-inspired and inspiring figures, like a woman apparently made out of plant life.

Surreal landscapes and sterile urban centers primed for an invasion make up some of the other tropes. Some images come from old advertisements for things like paint. An old stereo receiver looks like a kind of command-and-control device here, even though it was once a common electronic appliance. Groups of ecstatic acolytes surrounding a guru are also a recurrent visual.

The “Cactus Crystal Hybrid” sculptures are in keeping with both the leitmotifs of sci-fi and the idea of a mash-up. These are part of a series the artists have worked on previously, creative fictive organisms that are half plant and half mineral, organic and manmade. In artistic terms, they fall into the category of assemblage. Often spiky and full of texture, the objects could plausibly be thought of as being harvested from an alternate universe’s sea.

While everything in the show was created this year, the one series that seems to not quite work in this environment is the “Narcolepsy Paintings,” which were produced during a residency in East Hampton at Elaine de Kooning’s old house. They too have a complicated back story involving a collector with a predilection for Art Brut paintings, a fetish for primitive objects, and an addiction to naps. As layered as this narrative is, however, it feels out of place, even as the artists claim its “untrained mimicry and the spirit of the unfinished picture” is similar in spirit to the aims of the “High Rise Lazarus” authors.

The exhibition will be on view through Aug. 14.

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will open “From Lens to Eye to Hand: Photorealism, 1969 to Today” on Sunday, showing works of art capturing time and space precisely.

Photorealism began in California and New York City nearly 50 years ago, when it was acknowledged that using photographs to make realistic paintings was a legitimate technique, and that artists who did so were not “cheaters.”

“We know and cannot unknow the fact that the labored-over painting is the end product of a nearly instantaneous mechanical process — a 60th of a second stretched out over months and months,” Richard Kalina, an artist and author, wrote in an essay accompanying the show. “This discontinuity works against the smooth comprehension that we quite rightly apply to normal life, and leaves us with the sense that something else is afoot.”

The exhibition will feature 73 works by 35 artists ranging from Robert Bechtle and Chuck Close, two original photorealists, to those of younger generations, like Raphaella Spence and Yigal Ozeri. Paintings will include “Wheel of Fortune” by Audrey Flack and “Kandy Kane Rainbow” by Charles Bell.

In addition to displaying large works on canvas, “From Lens to Eye to Hand” will showcase 30 small watercolors and acrylics on paper never before seen together publicly. Noting the intimate scale, Terrie Sultan, the museum’s director, said the works on paper offer a “pathway to experimentation, and, more important perhaps, a way to express a sense of light and air that is not obtainable with oil on canvas.”

While photorealism has a specific definition, the subject matter of the works differs greatly, with paintings and watercolors featuring diners, children’s toys, food, people, and even magical elements. It will run through Jan. 21.