Giuseppe Verdi’s “Nabucco,” the next presentation of The Met: Live in HD, will be telecast at Guild Hall on Saturday at 1 p.m. Placido Domingo performs the title role; his longtime collaborator James Levine conducts the Met orchestra.

The opera, Verdi’s third, which premiered in Milan in 1842, dramatizes the biblical story of the fall of ancient Jerusalem at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar, or Nabucco. The first part takes place around the destruction of the first temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C., with the remainder set in various locations in the city of Babylon.

Other principals are Liudmyla Mo­nastyrska as Abigaille, a female warrior, Jamie Barton as Fenena, and Dmitri Belosselskiy as the stentorian voice of the oppressed Hebrew people. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, $15 for students.

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor is bringing back its popular winter program “Fireside Sessions With Nancy Atlas and Special Guests,” starting Saturday at 8 p.m. and continuing weekly through Jan. 28. The first concert will feature Clark Gayton, who played trombone on Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball tour and has accompanied such other artists as Sting, Whitney Houston, Rihanna, Prince, Stevie Wonder, and Wyclef Jean.

Known for her raw, live performances, Ms. Atlas and her band, the Nancy Atlas Project, long-time fixtures of the East End music scene, have opened for an encyclopedic list of music icons, among them Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams, Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Buffet, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

Subsequent guest artists will include the keyboardist Danny Kean (Jan. 14), the violinist Randi Fishenfeld (Jan. 21), and, for the final show, a special guest to be announced. Tickets, which are selling fast, are $25.

“4000 Miles,” a comic drama by Amy Herzog that won an Obie Award for Best New American Play and was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize, will open at the Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue on Jan. 12 and run through Jan. 29.

The play begins with the 3 a.m. arrival of Leo Joseph-Connell, fresh from a cross-country bike trip, at the Greenwich Village apartment of his grandmother, Vera Joseph, a 91-year-old political activist. A supposed overnight stay turns into weeks, during which the story behind Leo’s arrival is revealed and the two roommates infuriate, bewilder, and ultimately reach each other.

The cast features Diana Marbury, H.T.C.’s artistic director, as Vera; Ben Schnickel as Leo, Amanda Griemsmann as Leo’s on-again-off-again girlfriend, and Samantha Herrera as a girl Leo brings home from a bar. 

The production will be directed by Sarah Hunnewell, the theatre company’s executive director, with set design by Sean Marbury, lighting design by Sebastian Paczynski, and costumes by Teresa Lebrun.

Performances will take place Thursdays and Fridays at 7 p.m., Saturdays at 2:30 and 8, and Sunday afternoons at 2:30. Tickets are $30, $25 for those over 65 (except Saturdays), $15 for those under 35, and $10 for students under 21.

Until recently, Matt Vega’s deck was home to a giant 10-by-18-foot canvas on a stretcher, hooked on to the exterior of his house in Amagansett’s Devon Colony so the winds off the bay wouldn’t blow it away. “Xenotropic Panspermia” is a work in progress and a kind of magnum opus. He now has it rolled up in a 10-foot PVC pipe, where it will spend the winter. He’ll bring it out again in the spring.

The painting, which he began by pouring acrylics with the canvas placed flat on the ground, includes snippets of a visual language he has developed in the last few years. Its placement on a larger-than-life canvas seems a metaphor for his practice, the copious products of which include a studio filled with hundreds of stretched and unstretched paintings, bookcases full of sketchbooks, and boxes of photographs.

For a show last September, Mr. Vega and a friend took close to 100 paintings from a single series and “laid them out on the floor of Ashawagh Hall, trying to edit. It was quite a tedious task.”

Although he pursued figurative painting in college, he received his Yale M.F.A. in photography and practiced it prolifically and exclusively until 2012, pursuing networks of reeds, vines, and branches that often resembled abstract drawings or the work of Cy Twombly. “Regardless of how advanced my photography was getting, I realized I was being influenced and inspired by painting,” he said recently.

His early attempts channeled some of the energy and style of his favorite painters, including Twombly, Cezanne, and Philip Guston. Poetry and the street art of his youth in New York City inspired his “Word Paintings” series, which incorporate snippets of verse or entire poems into expressionistic lettering on stark or colorful backgrounds. Sometimes the letters stand out; sometimes they are obscured. “As a painter, I had always thought of myself as figurative, but that was not where I was going.”

“Imagined Landscapes,” which recall or interpret other artists’ painted landscapes, came next. Marked by square-ish strokes that distill Cezanne’s blocky abstractions of Mont Sainte-Victoire, these are not faithful renderings but pixelated sense memories. For those marks, Mr. Vega said he used a screwdriver. “You get a lot of energy without applying a lot of paint. There’s a lot of movement there.”

From there, he pursued still more abstraction. “I wanted to work on ideas from Cy Twombly without being too Cy Twombly. I had to let myself do some obvious things to get to the next phase.” He sometimes paints over his practice pieces or works he is dissatisfied with, first photographing them and often leaving traces of them in the new composition.

His compositions became refined into “Morphic Resonance,” a series inspired by his readings of the parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake, who has defined the term as “the basis of memory in nature” and the “interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species.” Although Mr. Vega uses the term specifically for this series, it carries over into the others. The “Imagined Landscapes,” for example, are his attempt to “channel information gathered from paintings I had seen, been impacted and influenced by, without referring directly to the paintings again,” to tap into “a kind of collective unconscious reservoir of the history of painting.”

The works are a purer version of the forms that came out of his denser abstractions. They are even further refined in the later “Dimorphism” series, which pairs objects that loosely resemble flora and fauna seemingly excavated from layers of paint. “The ‘Dimorphism’ series is about forms, organisms perhaps, which are related yet different, and the possibility of how those forms interact with one another as a result of, or in fact, because of those differences,” he said.

“Ordered Entropy” has elements of Jackson Pollock in its scale and dripped quality, but the paint application is far denser, with the bottom layers revealing daubs carried over from “Imagined Landscapes.” There is evidence of brush application and even the use of strings to apply paint. “I then plaster the string to the painting for texture.” He hopes the unorthodox use of applicators, including bubble wrap, will prompt the viewer to ask, “What am I looking at?”

He thought of bubble wrap, Mr. Vega said, while trying to figure out how to protect his outdoor painting from the elements. “I poured some paint on it while it was on the ground and then wrapped it, but the paint was still wet and the bubble wrap left marks. I liked it. Now I’m using it in other paintings.”

His latest abstractions leave more white space exposed, but still incorporate poured paint and string. The series is untitled as of now. 

Mr. Vega was inspired to begin pouring paint by the work of the early color-field artist Morris Louis, but “I’m pouring with an urban-guerrilla mentality, pouring it on and making a mess of it, letting it do what it wants.” He sometimes uses a grout trowel for texture. 

Those series pretty much account for all of Mr. Vega’s time spent on painting and the ideas he has percolating in his colossal outdoor canvas. From his earliest doodles to his purest abstractions, the work takes it all in. “I like the idea of asking the viewer to think, but only for the process of thinking, rather than a specific idea,” he said. “I want my paintings to elicit that.”

Click for the 2014 Matt Vega at Ille review

Online Gallery Goes Live in Sag Harbor

ArtUNPRIMED, an online art gallery and consultation service specializing in emerging and mid-career artists from the East End, will mount three exhibitions at 7 Main Street in Sag Harbor, beginning Saturday with an opening reception for “Water,” a group show, from 6 to 8 p.m. The shows will take place in Addo Women’s Clothing Collective, which is closed for the season.

“Water” includes paintings by Bruce Lieberman, a large wave drawing by Scott Bluedorn, photographs and paintings by Dalton Portella, photographs by Jane Martin, and paintings by Christian Little, among other works.

ArtUNPRIMED is owned by Casey Dalene, who lives in East Hampton and has a background in art history, studio art, and textile design. Ms. Dalene was creative director of textiles for Elizabeth Dow Ltd. from 20006 to 2011, when she founded artUNPRIMED. 

“Water” will remain on view through Feb. 7.

De Kooning and Zao

Imagine the challenge of finding a new context for the art of Willem de Kooning, whose work has appeared in thousands of exhibitions worldwide over the past 70 years. Lévy Gorvy, a new Upper East Side gallery, has done just that with its first show, “Willem De Kooning and Zao Wou-Ki,” which will open Wednesday and remain on view through March 11.

Although contemporaries, the two artists never met, and the exhibition marks the first time their work has been presented together. With more than 20 paintings, from the late 1940s through the early ’80s, the show intends to establish a conversation between them by means of their work, specifically their abstract landscapes.

According to the gallery, Zao, who was born in China in 1920 and immigrated to Paris in 1948, abandoned the subject that was so fundamental to the Chinese tradition of landscape painting and instead sought to express a transcendental quality in his abstract landscapes through the use of color, line, and scale. De Kooning arrived at the abstract landscape through a desire to do justice to the female form beyond the confines of the nude.

The gallery is a partnership between Dominique Lévy, a prominent Swiss art dealer, and Brett Gorvy, the former chairman and international head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s. The exhibition will later travel to Hong Kong.

RJD Gallery to Reopen

Richard Demato, the proprietor of RJD Gallery, which was destroyed during the recent fire in Sag Harbor, has announced plans for a new facility on Main Street in Bridgehampton, which he hopes to open in mid-March. The new gallery will have more than twice the floor space of the Sag Harbor location, as well as a separate upper studio.

Mr. Demato noted that while a number of works were lost, the gallery has a large storage facility offsite with many additional pieces, which can be seen by appointment by calling him at 631-725-1161.

The Hamptons International Film Festival never sleeps. Just when you might think it is on a hiatus, along comes its annual Winter Classic screening.

 “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the film adaptation of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which sold more than 40 million copies, will be shown on Saturday at 7 p.m. at Guild Hall.

Released in 1962, the film was produced by the late Alan J. Pakula, who was a South Fork part-timer. It was directed by Robert Mulligan and stars Gregory Peck as the attorney Atticus Finch, for which he won a best actor Oscar. It was nominated for seven additional Academy Awards, including best picture, and the playwright Horton Foote took home the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. The film marked the screen debut of Robert Duvall.

“We’ve been doing this for eight years now,” said David Nugent, the festival’s artistic director, who selects the films with Alec Baldwin. “Last year we did ‘McCabe and Mrs. Miller,’ which is honestly one of my all time favorite movies. Vilmos Zsigmond, the cinematographer, who also shot a lot of Spielberg’s movies and many other wonderful films, had just passed away, and I had been thinking about him. And it’s such a winter movie.”

In previous years, the selections were “Vertigo” and “The Searchers,” which are often regarded as among the great movies of all time. “We liked digging into that and seeing what people think of them and how they hold up.”

Mr. Nugent said that after the festival each year he tries to catch up on his reading, and this year he realized he had never read “To Kill a Mockingbird” or seen the film. “I decided to do both, and I really enjoyed it, especially the movie. Alec and I talked about it, and we both felt that some of the themes it engages, among them racial inclusion and trying to imagine yourself in somebody else’s shoes, would be good things to explore at this time.”

Mr. Nugent noted that with the approach of the festival’s 25th year, he and his colleagues have been researching its history, and he discovered that Pakula had received the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996, two years before his death.

One element of the Winter Classic program is an extended discussion between Mr. Nugent and Mr. Baldwin, which follows the screening. With the issues of race, the justice system, and ethics raised by the film, this year’s conversation is likely to be spirited. 

Tickets are $22, $20 for members.

Guild Hall has announced the five recipients of its spring Artist-in-Residence program, which will run from March 11 through May 7. Artists in the fields of literary, performing, and visual arts, and in curatorial/critical studies, were selected from 131 online applicants by members of the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts.

The program provides the recipients with living space for two months, at Guild House on Dunemere Lane in East Hampton, as well as a monthly stipend, access to mentorship through the Academy of the Arts, and introductions to the cultural community of the East End. The application process, which drew submissions from 10 countries on five continents, was overseen by Marianna Levine, the program’s coordinator, and Eric Fischl, the academy president.

Lucia Davis, the founder of the Art Bus Project, which provides access to art in communities across the country, was selected by the architectural critic and editor Paul Goldberger for her work in the field of curatorial/critical studies. The actor and director Stephen Hamilton chose Tanya Gabrielian, a pianist who has won several prestigious competitions and performed on four continents.

The photographer Ralph Gibson selected Lydia Hicks, a photographer and cinematographer whose work explores generational poverty, race, gender, and sexual orientation. Mr. Gibson also chose Walter Price, a painter whose work has been shown at galleries and art fairs throughout the United States and abroad.

Judson Merrill, a writer whose work has appeared in The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and The Southampton Review, among others, was picked by the science writer and novelist Dava Sobel.

“Most people are not familiar with the Latin side of Charlie Parker,” Claes Brondal said last week. The musician, who organizes the weekly Jam Session at Bay Burger in Sag Harbor, will be on drums on Jan. 14 for the fourth concert in a series that brings world-class musicians to the Southampton Arts Center. 

“South of the Border: The Latin Side of Charlie Parker!” will serve as a tribute to the saxophonist’s foray into “the Latin Tinge,” as Latin music’s influence on American music and culture is known, best exemplified by “South of the Border,” a collaboration with the band led by the Afro-Cuban jazz musician Machito. Recorded mostly in 1951 and ’52, “South of the Border” features the Chico and Arturo O’Farrill-penned “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite,” an epic 17-minutes-plus composition, among other “Latinized” selections. 

“It was a period of a few years where he was into the Latin universe,” Mr. Brondal said of Parker. 

Mr. Brondal, who also serves as music director, has assembled a group comprising Morris Goldberg on alto saxophone, Diego Urcola on trumpet, Bill O’Connell on piano, Marcus McLaurine on bass, and Cristian Rivera on percussion. Mr. Goldberg, who is from South Africa, performed on Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album; Mr. Urcola, from Buenos Aires, is a three-time Grammy Award nominee who has been a member of the Paquito D’Rivera Quintet for 25 years. Mr. O’Connell, “one of the hottest Latin jazz players in the city,” Mr. Brondal said, leads the Latin Jazz All-Stars and has played with artists including Sonny Rollins, Chet Baker, Gato Barbieri, and Astrud Gilberto. Mr. McLaurine has toured with the trumpeter Clark Terry for 25 years and has played with artists including Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Burrell, and the Count Basie Orchestra. 

The series, which launched in October with another concert focusing on Afro-Cuban jazz, is intended to “represent a wide variety of styles, all under the jazz umbrella,” Mr. Brondal said. “We are presenting it in a format that is inclusive, and will make it a wholesome experience by including food relating to the style.” The food, included with the cost of admission, will be provided by Union Cantina in Southampton. 

The concerts have been well received, Mr. Brondal said, with a capacity audience at each. With the exception of March, the monthly series will continue through June. Next month, Mr. Brondal will present “Beneath the Underdog,” featuring a group performing music of Charles Mingus. The title, he explained, comes from the late bassist’s autobiography, which Amazon.com called “wild, lyrical, and anguished . . . a jumble, but a glorious one, by a certified American genius.” 

Tickets for “South of the Border: The Latin Side of Charlie Parker!” on Jan. 14 from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Southampton Arts Center on Job’s Lane are $15, $5 for children, and are available at southoftheborderconcert.bpt.me.

Correction: An earlier version of this story referred to the restaurant as Urban Cantina. 

Amid a flurry of holiday film releases and the inevitable handicapping of the races for Oscars and Golden Globes, “American Masters,” the award-winning PBS biography series, will launch its 31st season on Tuesday at 8 p.m. on PBS with the nationwide premiere of “By Sidney Lumet.” 

The film, directed by Nancy Biurski and shown at the 2015 Hamptons International Film Festival, is remarkable for many things, among which is that Mr. Lumet, who directed 44 films, six of which won Academy Awards, never received a best director Oscar. (He did, however, win the Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.)

His career, which began in 1957 with “12 Angry Men” and concluded in 2007, four years before his death, with “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” offers an object lesson in the commitment to quality filmmaking and the examination of moral and ethical issues.

In 2008, PBS commissioned an interview with the director that yielded 18 hours of footage shot over a period of several days. The project lay dormant until 2014, when Ms. Biurski was engaged to undertake it. 

The resulting film alternates excerpts from the interview with clips from dozens of his films. The only talking head is that of Mr. Lumet, and talk he does, with candor, insight, humor, and self-effacement. When asked if “12 Angry Men” was fueled by his interest in the justice system, he said, “No, I was interested in doing my first movie.”

Among the films he discusses at length are “The Verdict,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The Pawnbroker,” “Network,” “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” and “Serpico,” in which Al Pacino portrays the idealistic New York City policeman who ultimately testified before the Knapp Commission. While Mr. Lumet acknowledges that he was often criticized for not having a thematic line in his work, he says, “It’s nonsense. There is always a bedrock concern: Is it fair?”

“Prince of the City” also examines the issue of police corruption. A new, exclusive interview with Treat Williams, the Golden Globe and Emmy Award-nominated actor who starred in that film, will follow the telecast of “By Sidney Lumet.”

Speaking of her film’s focus on the moral and ethical questions examined in Mr. Lumet’s work, Ms. Biurski said, “The film could have gone in many different directions, because Sidney talks about a lot of things that aren’t in the movie. In all the hours of that interview there were certain things that began to come through that were important to him, and I wanted to make sure that’s what our movie dealt with.” 

Ms. Biurski was a documentary photographer and a picture editor before becoming a filmmaker. Her first film, “The Loving Story,” from 2008, was a documentary about Richard and Mildred Loving, who fought to overturn Virginia’s law against interracial marriage. Their arrest and subsequent struggle were dramatized in this year’s narrative feature “Loving.”

“By Sidney Lumet” will be available on digital video on demand and DVD/Blu-ray from FilmRise in early 2017.

Now in its 12th year, the Tripoli Gallery “Thanksgiving Collective” has become a holiday season institution on the South Fork. 

After an ambitious three-venue extravaganza last year, Tripoli Patterson has cut back the range of the show to a more manageable and intimate scale, well suited to his Southampton gallery space. 

The exhibition features a mix of the work of artists associated with the gallery and some new faces: Alice Aycock, Max Blagg, Jennifer Cross, Robert Dash, Sabra Moon Elliot, Eric Freeman, Saskia Friedrich, Jeremy Grosvenor, Judith Hudson, Keith Sonnier, Susan Tepper, and Lucy Winton.

Mr. Blagg’s painted and stenciled typewriter case bottoms lead viewers into the space. The series, called “Autumn Rhythm,” refers to a painting by Jackson Pollock and contains snippets of verse such as “Tonguelashed to the masts of indifferent ships, cast up like a gift or a sacrifice” in black lettering on a matte gold background. “A loaded bough bends low, inhaling the tender mercy of November light,” keeps the mood appropriately autumnal.

Bright and acid where Mr. Blagg’s work is rich but not ostentatious, Mr. Dash’s untitled painting from 1998-99 could be anything and nothing. Although the artist is most known for his more realistic evocations of South Fork life, this is one of his non-objective works, an arrangement of yellow and orange bands interrupted by a few vertical linear blips.

Mr. Freeman’s nearby installation of small works are a study in contrasts, particularly light and shadow. The bands of color can often look like a faded madras shirt, but seem more like spliced strips of landscape or bars of light, or an electric Ad Reinhardt. On an adjoining wall, Ms. Eliot finds her own use for grids in ceramic sculptures that take the square forms and melt them into more undulating curves. Her forms can seem like a marriage of Mary Heilmann and Ray Johnson.

The trunk-like appendage of Mr. Sonnier’s stone sculpture “Tablet Diptych A” also has a resemblance to Johnson’s doodles. But his “Bua Study C” appears to be a study for one of his neon sculptures.

Ms. Aycock contributes a hand-painted inkjet print, “Timescape #2B Over Triton’s South Pole (One of Neptune’s Moons),” from 2011. It too plays in the realm of fantasy, an imagined topography activated with digitally derived colored ribbons. 

The painterly allusive symbolism of Ms. Cross gives her section a spiritual presence. Each work incorporates a blue palette and uses traditional and naturalistic subjects as a starting point. Then, things get a little weird. Staircases don’t go anywhere, landscapes give rise to ghostly vegetal forms, a skull floats in the sky. Her titles, such as “Fate,” “An Ill Wind,” and “Youth and Beauty,” bring out the Symbolist intent of her work.

Ms. Cross’s subtle darkness is brought out more intensely in Ms. Hudson’s nearby watercolors of clowns. Long the vessel of inherent and mostly unintentional creepiness, her subjects look intentionally creepy with bulging eyes, running Joker-style makeup, and grim expressions. These are clowns with bodies hidden in the crawl space.

The collection of abstracted heads by Ms. Tepper could be related in some respects. Without the scary clown context, however, they are mostly neutral in their expression, when an expression can be discerned. The acid-colored planes and orbs of the faces are more like evocations of psychological states. 

Rounding out this room, Ms. Winton’s fantastical landscapes on paper and an old wool tapestry seem light and fluffy, even though they too exude a vibe of something amiss, a light too vivid, or an approaching storm.

Mr. Grosvenor’s untitled sculpture, made in polyurethane and acrylic, reads as colorful, but it’s primarily black and dark gray. It is an amalgamation of stalky forms that also resemble surfboards. Only two forms painted in Day-Glo versions of green and red lend the piece a visual punch, yet the impression they leave is indelible.

Ms. Friedrich, who is in the current “Artists Choose Artists” show at the Parrish Art Museum, is represented by a large wall piece, “Rolling Stars.” Her brightly colored fabric, cut into rounded forms, may be more colorful over all than Mr. Grosvenor’s, but the piece seems subdued in contrast.

Although the show could seem like a string of unrelated quick takes, the affinities between the artists do bubble up with some contemplation. Its disparate parts work as showcases for individuality, but they eventually coalesce into a satisfying whole. It will remain on view through Jan. 30.