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.

Small Works Show in Bridge

Coco Myers, an art consultant who is the founder and owner of folioeast, an online art gallery, and her associate, Kay Gibson, will present a two-part exhibition of small works by East End artists beginning Saturday at Katherine Markel Fine Arts in Bridgehampton, with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m.

The first show, which will run through Jan. 15, will include work by Mary Ellen Bartley, Carolyn Conrad, Margaret Garrett, RTJ Haynes, Janet Jennings, Jane Martin, Bastienne Schmidt, Will Ryan, Barbara Thomas, Sarah Jaffe Turnbull, and Dan Welden. The second exhibition will run from Jan. 20 through Jan. 31.

Gallery Talks at Parrish

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will present the next iteration of “The Artists View,” an ongoing program of intimate gallery talks by artists from the exhibition “Artists Choose Artists,” tomorrow at 6 p.m. Monica Banks, Garrett Chingery, and Saskia Friedrich will illuminate their creative processes with reference to works in the exhibition.

The final program of artist talks will take place on Friday, Jan. 13, when Jackie Black, Marianna Weil, and Almond Zigmund will hold forth in the galleries. Tickets to each program are $12, free for members and students. “Artists Choose Artists” will be on view through Jan. 16.

East End Scenes

“Farms, Water, and East End Scenes,” a show of work by Aubrey Grainger, a plein-air painter from Sagaponack, is on view at the Quogue Library’s art gallery through Jan. 29. A reception will be held on Jan. 14 from 3 to 4:30 p.m.

Ms. Grainger is a former member of Plein Air Peconic, a group of artists who paint the farmland of the East End in connection with the Peconic Land Trust. Two years ago she launched “Thirty Squared,” a challenge to artists to paint 30 paintings in 30 days. The challenge was met in 2015 and 2016, with the results shown at the Water Mill Museum.

At Harper’s Apartment

“Twenty Sixteen,” an exhibition of new photographs and handmade books by William Eric Brown, is on view at Harper’s Apartment, the Manhattan outpost of Harper’s Books of East Hampton, through Jan. 19.

Mr. Brown’s dreamlike, stratified compositions result from an elaborate process that combines film and digital photography with gestural painting. Beginning with personalized photographs shot on film, he selectively scans images of lush forests, domestic interiors, barren airports, and urban landscapes, into digital files.

Over- and under-exposed images and the pixelation caused by low resolution files are integral to the images, which are printed with an inkjet or lightjet printer and then coated with desaturated acrylic pigment or spray-painted onto the surface using stencils. The pictures then pass through an inkjet printer a second time, with a different photograph layered over the applied paint.

The address of Harper’s Apartment can be learned by calling Harper’s Books, at 631-324-1131.

Jules Feiffer has been more productive in his 80s than many people are in a lifetime. Since 2014, he has published two graphic novels, “Cousin Joseph” and “Kill My Mother,” and next summer the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor will open its Mainstage season with the world premiere of “The Man in the Ceiling,” a musical comedy based on his 1995 children’s book of the same name.

The play, which will open during the Memorial Day weekend, has music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa, a prolific composer perhaps best known for his work on Broadway. The book is by the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Mr. Feiffer, who lives in East Hampton, with direction by Jeffrey Seller, the producer of the Broadway megahit “Hamilton.”

The second Mainstage production will be “Intimate Apparel” by another Pulitzer-winner, the playwright Lynn Nottage. The play received awards from the Drama Desk, the Outer Critics Circle, Lucille Lortel, and two Obies after its 2004 Off Broadway premiere. Scott Schwartz, Bay Street’s artistic director, will direct the production, which will open on July 4. 

“As You Like It,” a co-production with Manhattan’s Classic Stage Company, will complete Bay Street’s summer season. Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy will be directed by John Doyle, the stage company’s artistic director and winner of Tony and Drama Desk awards for his 2005 Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”

“I’m so excited about Bay Street’s 2017 productions,” Scott Schwartz, the theater’s artistic director, said by email from Japan, where he recently opened the Tokyo production of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” “In putting the upcoming season together, we have tried to give our audience the broadest and most diverse season possible. From a world premiere musical to Shakespeare to a revival of a play by a dazzling contemporary writer, Bay Street will offer so much to the East End audience. And we have thrilling artists involved in all the shows — Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winners. I know they will create theatrical magic on our Mainstage.”

“The Man in the Ceiling,” which had a staged reading at Bay Street in May as part of the venue’s New Works Festival, is the story of Jimmy Jibbett, a 12-year-old who is bad at sports, mediocre at school, and a disappointment to his father. The one thing he does well is draw cartoons, and his dream is to be recognized for what he loves doing most.

Esther Mills, the protagonist of “Intimate Apparel,” is a skilled African- American seamstress with her own successful business making lingerie for society women and prostitutes in New York City in 1905. She has a failed relationship with a man who is working on the Panama Canal, complicated friendships with the women in her life, and an unlikely bond with Mr. Marks, a Hasidic shopkeeper who shares his exquisite finds of fabrics and perhaps something deeper. The play is based on the life of Ms. Nottage’s great-grandmother.

In “As You Like It,” Rosalind, after being banished from the court by her uncle, disguises herself as a man, Ganymede, and embarks on a hilarious and romantic journey with her cousin Celia and Touchstone the Jester, to the Forest of Arden, where her father and his friends live in exile. Life, love, aging, the natural world, and death are central themes. 

The Classic Stage Company, now in its 49th season, is dedicated to re-imagining classic stories for contemporary audiences.

The stated aim of the Parrish Art Museum’s recurrent “Artists Choose Artists” exhibitions is to spark a visual dialogue between discrete triads of artists who work and live on the East End. Yet there is often a more comprehensive conversation that spreads between the walls and throughout the galleries, giving us a series of snapshots of current regional artistic practice and influences.

This year’s installation brings out these relationships, not always right next to each other and sometimes not even in the same room. Although there are practical issues at work in this decision, the effect on viewers is beneficial. Artists and their audiences do not necessarily need didactic demonstrations to make associations. If a piece is strong enough, a curator can trust that its themes and visual qualities will carry over from room to room.

The artists who participated this year lean heavily toward sculpture and the creation of objects, even when working in an essentially two-dimensional format. Those who have chosen exclusively two-dimensional mediums are predominantly figurative even when they veer toward abstraction.

Within those generalities, each artist’s work is quite specific. The closest visual affinities come from Dinah Maxwell Smith and RJT Haynes, who were chosen by Tina Barney, a photographer who delights in the quotidian and the banal. All three contribute works that are mostly ordinary evocations of leisure time. Ms. Barney’s photographs “American Flag” and “The Children’s Party,” with dates from the 1980s, have a timeless and generic quality. There’s not really a central subject in her compositions; the tiles become oblique references to something depicted that’s not immediately apparent.

Ms. Smith is more direct in her titles; “Beach Picnic” is just that. In “Five Suits,” however, the suited men standing in a huddle on the beach look out of place, even surreal. Mr. Haynes shares a good-size diptych that is photographic in its execution. One subject, who stands in the ocean in shallow water, may be taking a photo of the other with her phone. Yet each panel can stand alone, even as they are joined visually by the pattern of the water. As matter-of-fact as they look on the surface, the panels demand more than a cursory viewing.

The Parrish video of the curators’ visits to the chosen artists’ studios brought out a key contrast in both painters’ work when it came to photography. Mr. Haynes said in his interview that he preferred working from real life to photography, because of its inability to capture color and shadows accurately. Ms. Smith loves the details she can see in photographs that she said she would never pick up from direct observation.

Tony Oursler’s dynamic triad with Jackie Black and Marianne Weil demonstrates the artist’s occupation with both the figurative and varied mediums. Mr. Oursler’s “#ISO,” from last year, is a multimedia work that incorporates a large-scale panel of a man’s face inset with video screens for the eyes and mouth. The screens go through various permutations and produce sound, including ambient electronic noise and snippets of dialogue performed by Josie Keefe and Laura Hunt. 

Ms. Black’s photographs resonate visually with the stories they tell, whether documentations of the last meals requested by prisoners facing execution or the “Gun Show” series of photos that capture its subjects, such as a Smith and Wesson .22 caliber handgun, with the barrel facing toward the viewer, whereas Ms. Weil adapts her background in metal casting into works that use bronze and other materials as a framing or corseting device for blown glass. This is a case where the chosen artists are displayed in a separate room from the artist who selected them, but the affinities are strong enough to allow for comparison. 

In contrast, the room devoted to Donald Lipski, Suzanne Anker, and Ben Butler allows us to contemplate in a pure format the parallels in the artists’ work that inspired Mr. Lipski to select them. Scale, both large and small, is a primary consideration here. Mr. Lipski and Mr. Butler go for the grand gesture, and Ms. Anker forms her micro-worlds in petri dishes.

The aluminum canoe Mr. Lipski co-opts is hung on the wall like a recovered ark or indigenous people’s relic. It is studded with rolled-up New York Times newspapers, inserted through precisely drilled holes. Viewing it offers one of those vanitas moments where one becomes immediately aware not only of our evanescence relative to history but also our own inconsequentiality. It looks like something to be set afire and floated down a significant body of water to mark a passage or honor a dignitary.

The theme is made more literal by Ms. Anker, whose series “Vanitas (in a petri dish)” consists of 20 digital prints of still lifes of actual weird and wonderful objects. “Remote Sensing” is a corresponding series of three-dimensional forms in petri dishes, produced and colored by a printer and based on the photographs. As the founder of the Bio Art Lab at the School of Visual Arts, she is interested in the relationship between art and science.

Mr. Butler, too, concerns himself with science, in the form of geology. The natural forces of erosion are an inspiration for last year’s “Elegy to the Disappearance of Objects,” in wood, polymer, resin, and paint. The pale poplar framework is reminiscent of a toothpick sculpture with a case of gigantism. Standing 19 feet high, with a depth of 14 feet and width of 10, it is a colossal tribute, with the frame serving as a cage and support for the pieces of polystyrene he shaves and grooms into an undulating form referencing nature. There is a lot going on in this room, and it manages to coalesce nicely.

There are several other groupings: Lynda Benglis with Garrett Chingery and Saskia Friedrich, Jorge Pardo with Anne Bae and Monica Banks, Cindy Sherman with Bill Komoski and Toni Ross, and Leo Villareal with Karin Waisman and Almond Zigmund. All are meaningful and intriguing, but space demands brevity and these are relationships best explored visually, which can be done at the museum through Jan. 16.

On Jan. 6 at 6 p.m., Ms. Banks, Mr. Chingery, and Ms. Friedrich will discuss their works in the exhibition. The event is $12 and free for members, but requires reservations.

“Dreaming in Vinyl,” Caroline Doctorow’s latest release, is a fitting metaphor for the approach she has taken to a life in music. With songs by the likes of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Donovan, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and Randy Newman, as well as two of her own, the collection recalls the pop-music and folk revival’s peak years in the 1960s. 

“Dreaming in Vinyl” reached No. 2 on a folk radio airplay chart compiled from nationwide playlists in October and November, a feat Ms. Doctorow celebrated in a Dec. 4 performance at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett that featured guest artists including Hugh Prestwood, a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Her recording of Mr. Dylan’s “Time Passes Slowly,” from “Dreaming in Vinyl,” was the No. 4 song on the same playlists in October. 

“I feel incredibly gratified, at this time in my life, that it charted so well,” she said recently. “It did that for two months in a row so far. I’ve never had that happen, and I have been at this a while.”

Seamlessly fitting among the covers, which include “Across the Universe” by the Beatles and Donovan’s “Turquoise,” are Ms. Doctorow’s “To Be Here” and “That’s How I’ll Remember You,” the latter written for her father, the novelist E.L. Doctorow, who died last year.

“I wanted to try, at least, to hold myself to the standards of some of the great ’60s and ’70s folk and folk-pop albums I grew up listening to on vinyl,” the Bridgehampton resident said last week. “That was such a life-changing medium, vinyl. This happened to all my friends, too: You listened to these albums over and over, learned about life, fell in love, learned how to play guitar, learned stories of different cultures and times. It was literally a world unto itself. The whole concept came to me slowly, ‘dreaming in vinyl’ — that’s what I was doing.” 

“Then,” she said, “I didn’t want to not contribute songs, so the first track, ‘To Be Here,’ is my reflecting back on my childhood.” Her father’s death, she said, spurred memories of a family road trip to California, where Mr. Doctorow had been hired to teach at the state university’s Irvine campus. “In the car were my parents, three kids, a large dog, and a parakeet,” she recalled. “I was remembering how my parents lived in the moment then. Even though we didn’t have much money, they seemed to have time, and a lust for life, and a bravery.” With “That’s How I’ll Remember You,” she said, “I hope other people can relate to it as well. I tried not to be too specific in my imagery.”

Like several prior releases, “Dreaming in Vinyl” was co-produced by Pete Kennedy, a multi-instrumentalist who also recorded, mixed, mastered, and provided string arrangements. The 10-song album was recorded at Narrow Lane Studios, the Bridgehampton studio they share. The relationship has proven fruitful: Their first collaboration, a collection of songs by Richard and Mimi Fariña, “was really a career-advancing album for me,” Ms. Doctorow said. Several have followed that 2009 release, including an album of songs by Mary McCaslin, and she and Mr. Kennedy have co-produced recordings by South Fork-based musicians including Fred Raimondo, Job Potter, Jeff Bragman, and Dick Johansson. 

Ms. Doctorow plays about 120 shows a year, she said, traveling often to the fertile folk scenes of the Hudson Valley and Connecticut, and, last summer, to the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah, Okla. “I’m loving the traveling, loving playing the folk festivals,” she said. “I’m just trying to simplify my life more and more. I started to do that about two years ago, really stripped away a lot of the noise in my life. That seems to be working beautifully for me, because I can get to the thoughts that are important, the lyrics and sounds that are important. Just working hard at my craft, doing vocal exercises, practicing guitar, keeping my health as much as any of us can control that. Living the simple life.” 

“Dreaming in Vinyl” may see a sequel, she said. “I would like to follow up this record with one that takes the concept perhaps a little further. It seems to be one people really enjoy. The interesting thing about recording songs that others have recorded is that you are triggering memories in people. For instance, I know how I feel when I hear a Donovan song: I think very pleasant, almost bittersweet things. In a little bit of a way, you’re cheating as a singer and recording artist — in a wonderful way — in that you’re gaining the listener’s personal history. You can’t always achieve that with a new song. I guess if you want to call it nostalgia, that’s okay with me. That concept interests me: where the person’s mind is going, how they were when they first heard it.”

Upcoming gigs include a set opening for the Kennedys, featuring Mr. Kennedy and his wife, Maura, on Jan. 15 at 3 p.m. in the Gillespie Room at the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook. She will perform at the Turning Point in Piermont, N.Y., on Jan. 21, and at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork’s meetinghouse in Bridgehampton, in a benefit for the Bridgehampton Childcare Center, on March 3. 

Her overarching goal, she said, “is just to get better. The other part is that I love sharing these stories and songs that perhaps people haven’t heard before. I just realized this the other day — I love everything about the music business. I love to tour, record, write songs, and perform for people. I don’t like everything that’s happened to the music business, which is another issue, but I still enjoy the challenge of trying to solve those problems and be clever in how to go about this.” 

Recent developments in the political realm notwithstanding, “personally I feel the happiest I’ve ever been, just pursuing my music, hanging with my family. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but I certainly don’t think I’ll be quitting any time soon.”

Christian Scheider will read Truman Capote’s holiday short story “A Christmas Memory” on Sunday afternoon at 1:30 at the Amagansett Library. The largely autobiographical tale, first published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1956, takes place in the 1930s and tells the story of a 7-year-old boy and an elderly woman who is his distant cousin and best friend.

Mr. Scheider is an actor, filmmaker, and theater director who lives in Los Angeles and on the East End. He is currently working with Tucker Marder and the BBC’s Dale Templar on the feature comedy film “Animal Party.”

In this time of Instagram’s palm-sized square images, it is hard to imagine walking through the cavern of Grand Central Station and looking up to see a 60-foot-wide panoramic transparency of India’s Taj Mahal, astronauts in space, a field of Oregon wheat, Machu Picchu in Peru, a seaplane on Lake Placid, or skiers landing by plane near the Matterhorn in Switzerland. Yet millions did, courtesy of an advertising campaign by Kodak.

The Rochester company used the Colorama, its name for the world’s largest transparency, to promote its film products to the commuters and travelers who passed through the station from 1950 to 1990.

The Southampton Arts Center has an exhibition of these images, in smaller, but still panoramic prints through Dec. 31. The images, chosen from a total of 565 installed at the station over those four decades, are mostly from the 1960s and focus on the idealized world concocted by advertisers for white upper middle-class America in colossal size and intense color.

Walking by these images, which stood almost two stories high, one can sense Don Draper of “Mad Men” hurrying along to his track for the train back to Ossining after a long day of brainstorming advertising copy, drinking martinis, and chasing women in the city. It was a world he could have created and admired: a jolly family at bath time, reading a picture book by the fire, an outing to the zoo to see the giraffes, a couple cavorting in a botanic garden when the tulips are in bloom. They very well could be vivid visions wrought from the fictional character’s background of deprivation and the imagined bounty and beauty of the bourgeoisie channeled through his empty heart. These are scenes of yearning and aspiration.

Equal parts Currier and Ives, Norman Rockwell (who was actually one of the photographers), and jet-setting space-age reverie, they represent the best of capitalism in the middle of the Cold War, a world of abundance, recreation, and leisure. Photographers such as Ansel Adams captured farmers harvesting wheat in Oregon, fishermen in a Portuguese village, and cowboys in the Grand Tetons, but labor is downplayed. Its depiction either provides a scenic background or is ignored in favor of dancing at a discotheque, waterskiing five-across in Florida, boating to a cove in the Bahamas, or biking on the Monterey Peninsula.

America looks young, vibrant, and free-ranging. Its inhabitants follow the sun to San Diego or Miami or travel to exotic locales in Asia and Europe, recently made faster and easier by plane. According to the Kodak company blog, Edward Steichen, a photographer who began his career as part of the Alfred Stieglitz circle and lived into his 90s, sent a telegram back to Kodak after the first Colorama was revealed in 1950 stating: “Everyone in Grand Central agog and smiling. All just feeling good.”

Although the prints indicate a wide variety of subject matter, there is one constant. Someone in the frame is always taking a photograph of a portion of the scene. After all, these are advertisements, and not just for the camera. The campaign was developed in the post-war period to introduce mass market color film as an antidote for the preceding gray decades, and what also had to be an inspiration for the hue-saturated fashion and design of the era.

The images were feats of analog technology. According to the Kodak blog, “each print required a task force of Kodak experts.” The photographers, sometimes famous like Ansel Adams and Elliott Porter, but often Kodak employees, would use large format cameras to make 8-by-20-inch negatives. Given the costliness of the materials, they had to achieve perfection in just a few shots looking at an image upside down and in reverse while they were taking it. One photographer told Kodak, “There were no mulligans.”

The size required printing the transparency in strips that were spliced together, first with glue and later a tape that Kodak invented to make the process easier. Having nothing large enough to dry the transparencies in, the technicians co-opted the company pool where they placed them overnight to dry. Once ready, they were rolled up and trucked down to New York City. The new images, typically turned over every two to three weeks, were installed overnight “for the much anticipated reveal just in time for the morning commute,” according to Kodak.

In later years, Kodak did become more inclusive in its choice of subjects. It culminated in one of their most successful and iconic photographs of 15 seated babies lined up in a row. Taken in 1984 just around the time of the “United Colors of Benetton” campaign, the picture is a rainbow of skin tones and onesies.

It is understandable why the George Eastman Museum focused on this period in time when it first put together the exhibition in 2010 to mark the two decades since their removal. It is cohesive and instructive, revealing an America self-conscious in its sense of place. It freezes moments in time as if Kodak realized people would look back through the haze of memory and refer to them as the “good old days.” 

The show’s opening the weekend after this year’s presidential election was no doubt coincidental, but it is hard not to see the exhibition in that refracted light. It carries with it a suggestion of something less dazzling and more menacing, the kind of world an increasingly vocal minority of white supremacists might wish to revisit, even though it never actually existed.

After hearing a performance of a motet by J.S. Bach, Mozart was heard to exclaim: “Now, here is something one can learn from!” Both composers were represented in a program presented recently at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church by the Choral Society of the Hamptons and the South Fork Chamber Ensemble. Anyone caring about choral music, and community choral music in particular, might have uttered a similar exclamation.

Under the baton of its longtime music director, Mark Mangini, the Choral Society, accompanied by an accomplished instrumental ensemble, performed a thoughtfully chosen program of seasonally thematic compositions offering both vocal and musical challenges. Engaging program notes by Mr. Mangini and Fred Volkmer added to the enjoyment of a large, diverse, and appreciative audience.  This is what community music-making can and should be.

The afternoon began with a setting of “Hodie Christus Natus Est” by Heinrich Schütz, arguably Germany’s first great composer. It is joyful, optimistic music by a composer who lived and worked during the Thirty Years War, one of the darkest periods of German history. The singers not only did justice to the recurring, jubilant Alleluias, but, with clear direction from Mr. Mangini, smoothly navigated the kinds of changes in tempo and meter that plague many amateur choirs. From at least one seat in the house, the balance between singers and instrumentalists tilted rather heavily in favor of the players, but this did not detract much from the impact of the overall performance.

Although there is no direct evidence that he studied Schütz’s music, Johann Sebastian Bach was of the same musical lineage, so it was altogether fitting that the “Hodie” was followed by Bach’s K 61, “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland,” written in 1714 for the first Sunday in Advent. In both the overture and the closing chorale, it was clear that the chorus benefited from careful attention to German diction in rehearsal. 

In the overture, where each voice part sings the long notes of the melody alone against the dotted rhythms in the orchestra, some of the problems of having a high proportion of women singing tenor were exposed. The notes were present, but in that part of a woman’s vocal register they cannot be sung with the kind of authority called for by the text and musical setting. In fairness, though, that was the only moment where this was a glaring problem. 

The three professional soloists, Rada Hastings, soprano, Nils Neubert, tenor, and Jason Eck, bass, acquitted themselves well, especially in the tenor recitative and the bass aria.

Henry Purcell’s “Behold, I Bring Glad Tidings” followed. This is largely a piece for soloists, one of whom, Carol Balodis, an alto, is a member of the Choral Society. Ms. Balodis did an outstanding job, more than holding her own vocally and musically with Mr. Neubert and Mr. Eck. The chorus made the most of its limited role, contrasting a beautifully soft “To God on high and on earth” with the exuberant “Glory!” that preceded it. 

In a nifty bit of programming that quietly acknowledged the coincidence this year of Christmas Eve and the first night of Hanukkah, the Purcell, with its call for peace on earth, good will toward men, was followed by Hugo Weisgall’s  “Evening Prayer for Peace.” The sentiments expressed in the two works may have been similar, but the “Prayer for Peace” was sung a capella, in Hebrew, and in a strikingly different harmonic language from anything earlier in the concert. Even without instrumental support, for the most part the chorus handled the melodic and harmonic challenges quite well. This short piece was followed by Weisgall’s “Fortress, Rock of Our Salvation.”

Performances of early compositions by musical prodigies often provide more of a curiosity than a satisfying musical experience, but this is not the case with the Missa Brevis in F, written when Mozart was just 18. There is unmistakable sophistication in this six-movement setting of the Mass. From the precision of the off-beat entrances in the Kyrie to the wonderfully subtle, dynamic inflections of the Gloria’s “Amen,” both singers and instrumentalists rose to the occasion at the end of their second performance of the day, recovering nicely from some slight ensemble issues in the Credo.

Among the most impressive aspects of the entire day was that all of the solos in the Mozart were sung by members of the Choral Society — Hannah Faye Huizing, Suzanne Nicoletti, Christine Cadarette, Joshua Huizing, and Thomas P. Milton were simply outstanding in the composer’s musically and vocally challenging solo lines. The future of the Choral Society is exceedingly bright with singers such as these leading the way.

Community choruses offer their own unique opportunities and challenges, and they require a musical director with a special blend of gifts to get the kind of results that a sellout audience was on hand to appreciate Sunday evening. This was indeed “something one could learn from.” And enjoy.