The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs will open a new show today featuring artists who managed to transcend totalitarianism to pursue pure abstraction in defiance of Communist Party doctrine during the Cold War.

“Abstract Expressionism Behind the Iron Curtain,” organized by Helen A. Harrison, the director of the center, will feature little-known paintings from Eastern Europe. Ms. Harrison worked with Joana Grevers, a Munich scholar and specialist in Romanian art, to show that the influence of the New York School of abstraction extended far beyond what even international art historians have assumed.

Artists from Slovenia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, and Romania, who became aware of the development of Abstract Expressionism through travel, contact with artist friends, and international exhibitions, will be featured. Inspired by the breakthroughs taking place in midcentury Modernism, they risked punishment for pursuing a personal vision outside of the sanctioned norms.

The works will illustrate how they adapted the fundamentals of the period: spontaneous gesture, subjective imagery, and emotional content. The paintings will come from institutions and private collections in the same countries where they were created.

“Behind the Iron Curtain” will remain on view through Oct. 28.

Sweet Honey in the Rock, a Grammy-nominated a cappella ensemble rooted in African-American history and culture, will perform at Guild Hall on Saturday evening at 8. Featuring the vocalists Carol Maillard, Louise Robinson, Nitanju Bolade Casel, Aisha Kahlil, and Romeir Mendez on upright acoustic bass and electric bass, the group draws upon a repertoire of spirituals, blues, folk, gospel, jazz, and world music. Tickets range in price from $55 to $150, $53 and $145 for members.

Cary Hoffman will provide a change of pace on Sunday at 8 p.m. with a performance of  “My Sinatra, ”which ran off Broadway for two years. The show is not a tribute concert, but rather the story of Mr. Hoffman’s obsession with Sinatra and how it affected his adult life, intertwined with the greatest Sinatra classics and culminating in a meeting with the great man himself. Tickets are $40 to $75, $38 to $70 for members.

Sunday will also mark the beginning of  “Stirring the Pot,” a series of 11 a.m. conversations with culinary icons hosted by the New York Times food writer Florence Fabricant. Jacques Pepin will be this weeks guest, with Andrew Zimmern, Michael Symon, and Daniel Humm scheduled for subsequent Sundays. Tickets are $20, $18 for members.

Who better to consider the question “Is fashion art?” than Valerie Steele, a writer, fashion historian, and director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Dr. Steele will do so at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill tomorrow at 6 p.m. in a talk that will explore how the exhibition of fashion in museums has blurred the line between art and fashion and how fashion designers, curators, and critics weigh in on the subject. A question-and-answer session will follow the lecture. Tickets are $12, free for members and students.

The Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett will take a break from its music programs on Wednesday evening at 8 to present “Harlequins in the Hamptons,” a stand-up comedy show hosted by Jen Hellman and featuring two comedians, Tim Dillon and Wendi Starling. Tickets are $10.

The Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival kicks off its month-long, 13-concert series on July 30 with a program of music by Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, and Robert Schumann, in a composer portrait called “Love, Genius, Madness,” narrated by Alan Alda. To tell one of the most intriguing stories in music history, Mr. Alda has put together a narrative based on the letters of the three composers, which will paint a picture of their lives and relationships. The six-time Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award winner narrated a similar program on Mozart last season.

The concert has already sold enough seats that a second performance of it has been added, on July 31. Mr. Alda’s narrations are sure to bring an immediacy to the dramatic personalities and relationships of these historic figures. One of his many interests is improving the art of communication, particularly in the field of science, and this is the subject of his recently released book “If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?”

In this program he will use the same tools for communicating that he writes about in the book, and various Romances and Quartets of the three composers will be performed by Marya Martin, founder and artistic director of the festival, playing flute; Kristin Lee on violin, Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu on viola, Jakob Koranyi on cello, and the pianist Gilles Vonsattel. The 6:30 p.m. concerts take place at the festival’s main venue, the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, noted for its fine acoustics.

A free outdoor concert on the grounds behind the church will put Italian Baroque in the spotlight on Aug. 2 at 6:30. With two Vivaldi Concertos and the beloved Albinoni Adagio for Strings, it is sure to please. There will be seating under a tent, or concertgoers may bring lawn chairs or have a picnic on the grass. Though it is free, tickets should be reserved.

This year there is a water theme running through the series that reflects the “seaside setting” of the festival: A Vivaldi concerto with the subtitle “La Tempest di Mare” (“Storm at Sea”), “Jeux d’eau” (“Water Games”) by Ravel, Debussy’s “Poisson d’or” (“Goldfish”), and “Seven Seascapes” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts, commissioned by the festival in 2013. There is a new work as well, also commissioned by the music festival, that will have its premiere on Aug. 9, “Island Nocturnes” by Elizabeth Brown, scored for flute, horn, violin, viola, cello, and piano.

Ms. Brown, a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, has also received grants, awards, and commissions from Orpheus, St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, the Asian Cultural Council, and the Electronic Music Association, among others. She said earlier this week that she has known Ms. Martin for a long time, as she too is trained as a classical flutist. “Last summer she programmed one of my pieces; then after that she asked if I would write something for this year. And of course I said yes.”

Speaking about how she might begin the process of composing, Ms. Brown said, “Sometimes I imagine I’m at the concert and see the performers onstage and try to hear what they’re playing — it’s pretty intuitive.” She does not work fast, she said; “Island Nocturnes” took her “many months . . . the piece gradually took shape and there was a lot of melancholy music and a lot of dreamy music.” Of the finished work, she writes, “The nocturnes are mostly the stuff of sleep and dreams. Emotion is magnified and logic is forgotten.”

The program at the Parrish Art Museum on Aug. 14, now an annual feature, is called “Light|Waves” and is inspired by the museum’s exhibition of Clifford Ross’s photography. The concert, of Debussy, Ravel, Glass, and Part, will be preceded by a brief introduction to the show. Tickets include access to the Parrish’s collection.

A benefit concert at Bridgehampton’s Atlantic Golf Club on Aug. 5 is called “Get in the Groove,” with works that have been influenced by the popular music of the day: the American composer and fiddler Mark O’Connor’s lively “F.C.’s Jig for Violin and Viola” from 1991, selections from Kenji Bunch’s “Ralph’s Old Records” for flute, clarinet, viola, cello, and piano, written in 2015 but inspired by 1930s and ’40s big band and pop music, and the Brahms Piano Quartet in G Minor, which has a Rondo based on the colorful music of the Roma.

Another regular event that is a big draw is the Wm. Brian Little concert, named after a late member of the festival’s board, which takes place in the delightful sculpture garden of the Channing Daughters Winery. On Aug. 18, the Gypsy-jazz guitarist Stephane Wrembel will appear again with festival artists. The program is called “Bach & Django,” as in Django Reinhardt. Speaking recently about this program, Ms. Martin wondered, “Who would have thought that this French Gypsy guitarist in the 1940s was a Bach fan?”

On the Bach side, there will be the Vivace from the Partita in G Minor for solo violin, the Django-Grappelli version of the Bach D Minor Concerto, and the famous “Air for the G String.” These will be interspersed with jazz improvisations on the music just heard, as well as some of Reinhardt’s music. “It’s a program made in heaven,” said Ms. Martin. Wine and hors d’oeuvres start at 6 p.m., with the hour-long concert at 7.

The Saturday Soiree on Aug. 26 showcases music of “Beethoven: The Young Lion.” Ms. Martin explained, “I’ve been getting into how a perfect little program can be crafted around one area of a composer or one time and place in history, and that’s interesting to me these days, and that’s how the young-Beethoven program came about. These are fun pieces. Not many composers have written horn sonatas; it’s sort of rare. The ‘God Save the Queen’ Variations is highly unusual but very funny and quite wonderful. It’s not played often.”

In addition to all this, there are six Core Classics concerts highlighting Mozart, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Ravel, Faure, Beethoven, and Schubert, but imaginative programming usually has outstanding American contemporary composers alongside the classics.

The Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival always puts together an exciting and top-notch array of performers. Fans of the festival will recognize the names of players who have appeared often: Ani Kavafian, violin; the New York Philharmonic concertmaster Frank Huang; the principal violist Cynthia Phelps; Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet, and Orion Weiss, piano. The roster of 34 names includes some new ones also, such as Nikki Chooi, concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera; Scott Lee, a violist who in 1996 was the youngest-ever winner of the Concert Artists Guild Competition, and the bassist Xavier Foley, who won the Young Concert Artists Auditions last year.

About the yearlong process of preparing for the festival, Ms. Martin said, “You put the work in, then you angst about these programs and change it 20 times — but now is the time when I’m really getting excited and can’t wait.”

Tickets range from $35 to $175, with $10 student tickets available for many programs. Details can be found at bcmf.org, or 631-537-6368 after Tuesday, along with clips of previous and upcoming performances, and CDs from past years. 

Comedy for a Cause, an evening of dinner, drinks, and a comedy show hosted by Felicia Madison, will take place on Monday at 7 p.m. at the Topping Rose House in Bridgehampton. Four comedians, Jocelyn Chia, Clayton Fletcher, Nancy Lombardo, and Erin Maguire, will round out the program, which is a benefit for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

Tickets are $185 and can be purchased in advance at feliciamadison. com.

NYFA Studio Tour

The New York Foundation for the Arts will hold its annual East End studio tour on Friday, Aug. 4. Led by Christina Mossaides Strassfield, Guild Hall’s museum director and chief curator, the group will visit the studios of Quentin Curry, Donald Lipski, Arlene Slavin, and Elizabeth Strong-Cuevas. The tour will conclude with a seated lunch with the artists, at a private home in Bridgehampton, at 1 p.m.

Mr. Curry’s work explores and blurs the boundaries between different mediums. His photographs resemble paintings, his paintings are object-like, and his sculptures register as objects built out of paint. Mr. Lipski is a sculptor best known for his installations and large-scale public works, which often combine a variety of materials and technologies in unexpected ways.

Ms. Slavin’s work has included public projects, murals, laser-cut steel sculpture, prints, and paintings that range from hard-edged abstraction to stylized figuration. Ms. Strong-Cuevas is known for her monumental sculptures in fabricated metal and cast bronze, and stainless steel, each of which is a meditation on the human face and the idea of thought traveling.

Tour members will meet at 9 a.m. at a Bridgehampton address that will be provided when tickets are purchased. Transportation is included. Tickets, which will benefit programs for artists throughout New York State, are $300 and can be purchased through eventbrite.com.

Women in Water

“Immerse,” a new series of paintings by Reisha Perlmutter, will be on view at Roman Fine Art in East Hampton from tomorrow through Aug. 27, with a reception set for Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m.

Ms. Perlmutter’s work explores the human body and its relationship to nature. The paintings in the exhibition portray women in water, alternately swimming, floating, and breaking through the surface. While her work evokes aspects of photorealism, the human forms are abstracted by the play of light moving through water and across the body.

Groot and Condon in Sag

The Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor is showing paintings by Barbara Groot and Thomas Condon from today through Aug. 17. A reception will be held Saturday from 5 to 6:30 p.m.

Ms. Groot finds the sun and light of the East End energizing, and her bold, active brushwork and layered use of color express the energy of the natural world without representing it literally.

Mr. Condon’s paintings range from meticulously rendered flowers to landscapes and portraits that, while figurative, are lent an element of abstraction through their unusual viewpoints or compositions.  

Baron Von Fancy

Baron Von Fancy, a.k.a. Gordon Stevenson, will take over Boo-Hooray Summer Rental in Montauk from Saturday through Aug. 6. His work moves among mediums to experiment with concept, color, and humor.

He is especially known for his paintings and drawings in the style of classic hand-painted signage that range from song lyrics to homilies with an edge to straightforward, if sometimes profane, exclamations.

Show on the Road

Parrish Road Show, the Parrish Art Museum’s summer series of off-site exhibitions and installations, will feature a 35-mile-long public art project by Auto-Body, an artists’ collective based in Bellport, from Tuesday through Sept. 4.

The group will transform common roadside signs by placing text-based artworks along a stretch of Montauk Highway. Instead of promoting consumerism, the signs will call attention to the natural environment of the region while turning the thoroughfare into a space for viewing art.

Consisting of nature-themed colloquial phrases painted on wood boards, the signs highlight nearby natural sites, among them the Great South Bay, a bird sanctuary, a hiking trail, and a scenic outlook.

Two free receptions will be held, one at Bush Farms and Museum in Brookhaven on Aug. 12 from 3 to 5 p.m., and a second at the Parrish Art Museum on Aug. 27 from 5 to 7 p.m. The project has been organized by Corinne Erni, the museum’s curator of special projects.

At the Art Barge

The Art Barge on Napeague will present “Greetings From,” an exhibition inspired by its location and mission, from tomorrow through Aug. 25. A reception will take place tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m.

The show was organized by Simran Johnston, who asked 10 artists to express the literal, emotional, political, or conceptual nature of their surroundings. It includes featured works and artist-made postcards, and visitors will be provided with materials to make their own postcard from the shores of Napeague Harbor.

Optimism in a Barn

“Unquestionable Optimism,” a group exhibition of work by more than 20 artists, will open tomorrow with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. and remain on view through Aug. 13. The venue is a barn in East Hampton whose address can be obtained by contacting [email protected]. 

Organized by Lindsay Howard, the show brings together artists whose work focuses on positivity, often in an attempt to persuade, exaggerate, or cultivate a point of view.

The Watermill Center’s annual summer lecture series provides a platform for accomplished workers in every imaginable field to share the cutting-edge ideas that shape their work. This year’s talks, which begin on Tuesday and continue through Aug. 17, will feature an architect, a research scientist, an artist, a ballet dancer, a museum curator, a writer, and a mountaineer.

The first program, “Silence in the Age of Noise,” will feature a conversation between two Norwegians, Petter Skavlan, a writer and screenwriter, and Erling Kagge, an explorer, author, publisher, lawyer, and the first in history to reach all three Poles — North, South, and the summit of Mount Everest.

Mr. Kagge is the author of an extended meditation of the same title in which he poses three questions: What is silence? Where can it be found? Why is it more important now than ever? As a man who once spent 50 days walking solo in Antarctica without radio contact, it is likely he has the answers.

Mr. Skavlan, who wrote “Kon-Tiki,” which was nominated for both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best foreign-language film, is currently working with artists as diverse as Brian De Palma and Marina Abramovic. As a longtime walking companion of Mr. Kagge, he is certain to have ideas of his own on the subject.

“It Is All About Particles” is not about physics but about architecture. Enric Ruiz Geli is the founder and director of Cloud 9, an architectural team in Barcelona that works at the interfaces among architecture, art, digital processes, and technological material to create green structures that emulate nature. His talk will take place next Thursday.

Justine Kupferman, a postdoctoral research scientist currently working in Franck Polleux’s lab at Columbia University, is interested in what makes the human brain unique. Her talk, scheduled for Aug. 8, will discuss recent findings from anthropology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience, including her own research on brain development.

“Dancers as Interpreters of the Past and Present” is the title of Jared Angle’s talk on Aug. 10. A principal dancer with the New York City Ballet since 2005, he will share his experiences interpreting the great roles created by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins and discuss dance’s obligation to both history and innovation.

Carrie Mae Weems, a 2017 Watermill Center artist in residence and Inga Maren Otto Fellow, can be expected to continue to aim her critical and insightful lens at history, how it is constructed, layered, juxtaposed, and articulated, and people’s roles within it. Her talk, “The Considered,” will take place on Aug. 15.

In the final program, on Aug. 17, Alexandra Munroe, the Guggenheim Museum’s senior curator of Asian art and senior adviser of global arts, will discuss the museum’s fall exhibition, “Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World.” The largest show of this subject ever mounted in North America, it will survey Chinese experimental art against a framework of geopolitical dynamics.

All lectures take place at 7:30 p.m. Reservations must be made in advance for a $12 fee per seat at watermillcenter.org.

Not satisfied with one house, this year the Hampton Designer Showhouse, which benefits Southampton Hospital, will feature two next-door houses in a new subdivision to the west of Southampton Village.

The two layouts gave designers more flexibility in addressing the functions of different rooms. Instead of the endless interpretations of bedrooms that are often a feature of these presentations, there are multiple living areas, outside porches and terraces, dining rooms, lounges, and mudrooms to consider. 

Separated into the “Beachcomber” and “The Linden,” the houses don’t seem to have any overarching theme that is unique to each one. This year, however, the more than 30 designers seem particularly enamored of color in a way they have not been in recent years. There is still an engagement with natural and organic materials, but the grays and drabs have been replaced with deep pinks, greens, and many shades of blue.

Some of the designers and firms based on the East End include Brady Design, East End Home, English Country Home, Greg McKenzie, Old Town Crossing, East Hampton Gardens, MancAVes, Grayson De Vere, Sea Green Designs, Mabley Handler, and Wolf Interior Design.

The showhouses will open with a preview cocktail party on Saturday from 6 to 8:30 p.m. and will run until Labor Day. Mario Buatta is the honorary Showhouse chairman. Jamie Drake and Alexa Hampton are the honorary design co-chairmen.  The houses are located at 78 and 82 Rosko Lane. Regular hours for viewing will begin on Sunday and will run sevens days from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 

Children 6 and under, infants, stroll­ers, and pets are not admitted in the showhouses. Admission is $40 and the cocktail party tickets are $225 each. 

“Barney’s Wall,” a new documentary about Barney Rosset, the Grove Press and Evergreen Review publisher who successfully waged battles against censorship and introduced to American readers such writers as Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, and Jean Genet, will be shown at Guild Hall next Thursday at 8 p.m. 

The film’s title refers to a 12-by-15-foot three-dimensional mural Rosset constructed on a wall of his East Village loft while in his late 80s. That creation offers a way into the psyche of a legendary figure who did nothing less than shatter America’s sexual taboos and revolutionize its cultural landscape. 

Tickets are $15, $13 for museum members.