LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton will hold a holiday gathering on Saturday afternoon from 2 to 4, rain or shine. The event offers an opportunity to see the gardens and toast the season before LongHouse closes for the winter.
Admission is $10, free for members.
It is clear early on in the Guild Hall exhibition “Connie Fox and William King: An Artist Couple” that there is fun to be had there. A sense of play and the absurd is introduced from the very beginning both by the artists and the exhibition’s curator, Gail Levin.
Dr. Levin, who has been a professor at the City University of New York for years in addition to being a curator and prolific writer on art and artists, decided to take the élan of her subjects as an overt and covert theme of the show.
Dr. Levin knew the couple socially, and there is a more intimate approach to the artists that registers with viewers. With works such as Ms. Fox’s “Dog Jazz” and Mr. King’s “Jazz Quartet,” along with his red vinyl sculpture and her take on it in a painting, it feels as though you might have stumbled into one of their conversations.
Mr. King was a curious artist, choosing unorthodox materials and working both with and against them to arrive at his forms. Red vinyl was a recurrent medium as was found wood, plaster, cast and cut metals with some dabbling in paint and drawings. Although there are some ceramic plates of Ms. Fox’s on view, she is represented almost entirely by acrylic paintings on canvas with a few drawings from the early days of her career. That she would paint one of Mr. King’s vinyl figures as opposed to recreating it in other ways, is a kind of cross-pollination or subsuming of his work, resulting in a creative offspring of sorts.
The couple met once, briefly, decades before they found themselves both playing fiddles in a bluegrass band formed by Audrey Flack, another artist and part of their circle. In a tour of the exhibition during its installation, Dr. Levin said Ms. Fox was classically trained on the violin, whereas Mr. King was self-taught.
In addition to their love of music, Dr. Levin said their interest in and reverence for early Modernism was a unifying theme. Ms. Fox was an admirer of Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, and Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Mr. King took Pablo Picasso, Elie Nadelman, and Constantin Brancusi as influences.
Although Ms. Fox adopted Abstract Expressionism for a time, under the mentorship of Elaine de Kooning, who became a friend when both artists were in Albuquerque in 1957, she did not work in that manner for long. She liked the freedom, but the lack of content led her elsewhere.
The earliest works of hers in the show reference things, flowers in particular. Drawn around 1955 and 1967, “Self Portrait as a Flower” and “The Flower Lifts (Self as Flower),” seem more tuned in to Georgia O’Keeffe. But the later drawing has more bite. It is too abstracted to be Surreal in the usual sense, but the “self” in the center of the petals is depicted literally as a cloud of being, with a stern face scribbled in the middle. Even though it seems playful, she’s no longer playing, at least at being an artist. Her voice has formed.
Mr. King gave some early drawings here to Ms. Fox as part of their courtship in 1983. One was a self-portrait in pastel and charcoal. He looks sharp and blurry at the same time. Known for assuming the character of others in his work, it is one of his few straightforward depictions of himself. That he dedicated the drawing to her, almost a decade after its execution, seems meaningful.
Other works in the show highlight their mutual admiration for Marcel Duchamp. Ms. Fox has a painting titled “Marcel’s Star: You don’t have to be a star baby to be in my show” from 1993 that includes a black star at the center of a receding frame. Its reference is the star Duchamp shaved into his hair that was photographed by Man Ray.
Mr. King’s self-portraits take on Duchampian guises such as Ancient 9Egyptian queens, earlier Modernists like the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who died in 1975, and Cindy Sherman, a contemporary artist and neighbor in Springs. While enjoying cross-dressing in his art, he also went cross-species, as in his “Bill-Dogg Hampton” sculpture from 1983, in which a smiling dog head is set atop a white-suited male’s body.
They were one in a long line of artistic couples who settled on the South Fork, and the show includes works that touch on that theme. There are photos and renderings they did of themselves as well as portraits of other couples such as Joan Semmel and John Hardy and April Gornik and Eric Fischl.
Place is also a recurrent theme: Ms. Fox’s paintings inspired by Sammy’s Beach, a subject to which she has dedicated much of her recent art, are included. They remind us how much the landscape continues to attract and inspire artists who come here to work and sometimes even fall in love.
The exhibition, shown concurrently with “Michael Knigen: The Holocaust and Anne Frank” and “William S. Heppenheimer,” will remain on view through Dec. 31.
If you can’t get to today’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a new book from Rizzoli that celebrates the event’s 90th anniversary might be the next best thing. “Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: A New York Holiday Tradition,” includes archival photographs and an essay by Steven M. Silverman on its past and present, but what really brings the parade to life are the more than 100 color photographs by Matt Harnick, who divides his time between East Hampton and New York City.
The book’s genesis can be traced to Mr. Harnick, who in 2009 took his Nikon D80 and a new lens to photograph the balloon inflation on West 81st Street the day before the parade. He didn’t have far to go. Because his parents, the lyricist Sheldon Harnick and the photographer Margery Gray Harnick, live at 81st Street and Central Park West, the younger Mr. Harnick has been a spectator since childhood.
He was happy enough with the inflation shots that he photographed the parade itself as well, and he shot both the setup and the parade again in 2010. “A lot of people saw those pictures and said I should share them with everyone,” he said. ”That’s where the idea for a book came from.”
Mr. Harnick and Jane Lahr, his rep and the actor Burt Lahr’s daughter, put the idea for the book together and began shopping it in 2013. After three publishers expressed interest, Ms. Lahr brought the book to Macy’s — “and they flipped over it,” said Mr. Harnick. Since Macy’s had been looking for a way to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the parade, they signed on, and in 2015 Rizzoli agreed to publish it.
“I’m actually more used to photographing natural subjects, like birds, so I’m used to things being in motion. Moreover, because I grew up in the neighborhood and I know the topography, I can guess where I’ll get the best shots.” While he had previously been limited to 81st Street, in 2014 and 2015 he had an all-access pass.
In addition to the parade and balloon inflation, the book also includes photographs from the 72,000-square-foot structure in Moonachie, N.J., where the balloons, floats, and costumes are designed. Preparations for each parade begin approximately 18 months before the event.
The first parade, which consisted of Santa Claus, several bands, and a circus contingent, took place in 1924. Tony Sarg, a noted puppeteer and theatrical designer, was the mastermind and artistic director of the event, which drew a large crowd but received only two paragraphs on page 17 of The New York Times.
In 1927, Felix the Cat, also the work of Mr. Sarg, joined the parade as its first inflatable. The original balloons were inflated by air and carried on sticks, but helium was introduced the following year. A 40-foot Mickey Mouse balloon, designed by Walt Disney himself, appeared in 1934, followed, a year later, by Donald Duck. Since then, two to four balloons have been added annually. In this century, Macy’s began inviting artists to create balloon designs, among them Tom Otterness, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, the Keith Haring Estate, and Tim Burton.
The crowds have increased exponentially; 3.5 million people attended in 2015. “The parade has become much more sophisticated,” said Mr. Harnick. “The detailing on the floats, the beautiful costumes, and all the thought that goes into it are very different from what I remember from when I was much younger. There were huge crowds then, but nothing like what we have now.”
He notes that the entire neighborhood shuts down on Thanksgiving Day, and that inflation day has become its own holiday, drawing people from all over the world. Even though he won’t have an all-access pass, Mr. Harnick plans to shot the parade this year.
Nature photography remains his year-round interest. “When I have a chance, I photograph in Central Park. My favorite places to photograph on the East End are Louse Point and Montauk Point. I’ve gotten some really spectacular stuff there.”
Group Show at Roman
Roman Fine Art in East Hampton will present “Get With the Program II,” an exhibition of contemporary painting, photography, and sculpture, from Saturday through Jan. 8. A reception is set for Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.
The show, which reflects the eclectic taste of the gallery’s director, Damien Roman, will include work by Scott Bluedorn, Ray Caesar, Darlene Charneco, Colin Christian, Eddie Colla, Tim Conlon, Gentleman’s Game, Grant Haffner, Elektra KB, Jessica Lichtenstein, Dan Sabau, Sarah Slappey, SWOON, and Dean West.
Open House in Gansett
Grain Surfboards in Amagansett will hold a holiday bazaar and open house featuring the work of East End artists and artisans on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. Participants include Peter Spacek, Scott Bluedorn, James DeMartis, Amanda Beckmann, James Katsipis, Bella Ornaf of Fin Montauk, Charles Ly, Brian Schopfer, Brittany Torres of Hamptons Handpoured, and Carissa Waechter of Carissa’s Breads.
Ned Smyth to Academy
Ned Smyth, an internationally known sculptor who lives on Shelter Island, has been inducted to the National Academy along with 19 other academicians. A select group of the nation’s most celebrated artists and architects has been elected to membership in the Academy since 1825. Among the many other notables, past and present, are Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederic Church, Chuck Close, Renzo Piano, and Joan Semmel.
Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton Township, N.J., is now showing “Moments of Matter,” an exhibition of large-scale sculptures and large-format photographs by Mr. Smyth, who is a visual arts instructor at the Ross School.
Nature Observed
East End Arts has paintings by Roxanne Panero of Sagaponack and photographs by Sara Cedar Miller of Hampton Bays on view at the Rosalie Dimon Gallery at the Jamesport Manor Inn in Jamesport through Feb. 1. A reception will take place Sunday from 3 to 5 p.m.
Ms. Panero is a painter whose subjects range from landscape and figurative to conceptual art. The exhibition will include works from her “Nature” series, which explores the diversity of pond life, flowers, and oceans.
Ms. Miller’s photographs capture the bays and ocean near her home in an abstract style that departs from more traditional ways of representing the East End’s waterways.
Sagg in NYC
Ashley Frost, an Australian artist, who has been painting in Sagaponack for several weeks will exhibit his plein air landscapes of the South Fork at the Parasol Projects Pop-Up Gallery on Rivington Street in New York City through Monday.
Residents and visitors to the South Fork may know that both John Lennon and Paul McCartney have spent time here, the latter an annual visitor to his house in Amagansett. Another member of the Beatles’ orbit, Peter Brown, who worked for their manager, the late Brian Epstein, has long summered in East Hampton.
Yet another of the extended Fab Four family will come as close as Riverhead on Saturday at 8 p.m., when Joey Molland, the guitarist and last surviving member of Badfinger, brings the power-pop legends to the Suffolk Theater. Badfinger, they of classics including “Come and Get It,” “Day After Day,” “No Matter What,” “Baby Blue,” and “Without You,” signed to the Beatles’ label, Apple Records, in 1968. While the latter song was a huge hit for Harry Nilsson and the others remain staples of classic-rock radio, the group suffered almost unimaginable bad luck, gravely wounded by unscrupulous management and a disorganized record label, which the Beatles birthed amid their own disintegration.
“We do the hits and a selection of other Badfinger songs,” Mr. Molland, who lives in Minnesota, said last week. “We might do one new song, but it’s really a Badfinger show.” The band now features Mark Healey, who joined in 1987, on bass; Mike Ricciardi, a decade-long member, on drums, and Gregg Inhofer, who played on Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” album, on piano and guitar.
While the founding members Pete Ham and Mike Gibbins hailed from Swansea, Wales, Badfinger’s Tom Evans and Mr. Molland came from the Beatles’ hometown of Liverpool, England. Mr. Molland, in fact, saw the Beatles at Liverpool’s famed Cavern Club in 1961 or ’62. Ultimately, he not only signed to their label but also collaborated onstage or in the studio with all of the Beatles after their breakup.
“They weren’t me absolutely favorite band, but they were really great,” Mr. Molland said of his first encounter with the Beatles. “I was really impressed by the two guys who sang — I didn’t know their names or anything. But they were really good and really powerful. Liverpool bands, at that time, were really punchy, nothing lightweight about them. That was what really impressed me, just how strong it was. That gave me a real thing about what it was to play onstage: to sing full out, play your guitar as hard as you could. It was a great introduction, and a great, fun time.”
Badfinger’s four albums on Apple Records are outstanding and, the hits notwithstanding, the band remains underrated. Mr. Molland’s contribution was considerable: In addition to superlative guitar work, he wrote or co-wrote many of the band’s songs. “We were very democratic about all that,” he said. “We did write a lot of songs together. It was easy, a collaborative effort.”
Comparison to the Beatles, he said, “is a great compliment. When people talk about us being great songwriters, it’s the greatest compliment we could get. I know if the guys were here, they’d all say the same thing.”
Alas, the guys are not. Ham, destitute with a child on the way and despondent over the realization that the band’s manager, Stan Polley, had long swindled them, hanged himself in 1975. “Stan Polley is a soulless bastard and I’ll take him with me,” a suicide note read. Eight years later Evans took his own life in the same manner, his wife quoting the musician as saying, “I want to be where Pete is. It’s a better place than down here.” Gibbins, who with Mr. Molland continued in Badfinger for several more years, died in 2005.
“We did have really bad luck with the managers, and of course the crooks were all over us — the music business was full of crooks in those days,” Mr. Molland said. “They took us to the cleaners. All we knew was to do our best and play. We were a pretty good band and could have gone a lot further.”
Tickets to Joey Molland’s Badfinger, Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Suffolk Theater in Riverhead, are $45 and $49.
The JDTLab at Guild Hall will stage “Door of No Return,” a one-woman show written and performed by Nehassaiu deGannes, on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. Kelli Wicke Davis will direct the free program, which has a new score by Janice Lowe.
Ms. deGannes gives voice to experiences of immigration, displacement, enslavement, and resistance through the perspectives of more than a dozen characters drawn from history, memory, and present-day interviews.
At home in both classical and contemporary productions, Ms. deGannes has been cast as Cordelia in the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s “King Lear,” the nurse in “Equus” with Alec Baldwin, Catherine in “Proof” at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., and Lady Capulet in “Romeo and Juliet” at the Stratford Festival in Ontario.
Marlene Markard and Ellen Johansen will give a free concert, “American Piano Works for Four Hands,” on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. at the Montauk Library.
The East End pianists will perform a program of challenging works written for piano duos by the American composers Henry F. Gilbert (“American Dances”), William Cheadle (“Picture Postcards”), John Corigliano (“Gazebo Dances”), Samuel Barber (“Souvenirs Ballet Suite”), Aaron Copland (“Walk to the Bunkhouse”), and George Gershwin (“Walking the Dog”).
Conservatory-trained pianists, both Ms. Markard and Ms. Johansen perform as soloists and collaborative pianists throughout Long Island and the New York metropolitan area.
Members of the Shinnecock Indian Nation will perform traditional and contemporary dances at the Southampton Arts Center on Sunday at 2 p.m. The performers will talk about the history behind the dances, and a reception with samples of traditional Native American fare will follow.
Considering the issues it examines, the timing of this year’s African American Film Festival could not have been more fortuitous, according to Brenda Simmons, executive director of the Southampton African American Museum and organizer of the festival.
“I think it’s amazing, especially given what happened yesterday and since,” she said a few hours after Donald J. Trump became president-elect. “To me, these films are very significant, because we still have serious divisions in this country. It would be great for people to see where we were 50 years ago and how far we’ve come, but also to think about whatwe still can do to move forward.”
The festival, which will take place on Saturday from noon to 10 p.m. at the Southampton Arts Center, includes two feature films, two shorts, an evening of spoken word and live jazz, and a short play by students from the Southampton Youth Bureau’s Act Two programs.
The feature films focus on pivotal events in the civil rights struggle of the early 1960s. “Two Trains Runnin’,” a documentary directed by Sam Pollard and narrated by Common, documents separate migrations that took place in June 1964. The best known was the Mississippi Summer Project, later known as Freedom Summer, during which civil rights leaders recruited hundreds of college students, most of them white, to teach and register voters in that state.
At the same time, two groups of young men — musicians, college students, and record collectors — also traveled to Mississippi, their mission being to find Son House and Skip James, legendary bluesmen of the 1930s who were driven into retirement by the Great Depression. The musicians’ careers resumed during the folk revival, and they are now considered music revolutionaries.
Three of the young volunteers for Mississippi Summer disappeared on June 21, and their bodies were not found until Aug. 4.
“Two Trains Runnin’ ” will be shown at 2:30 p.m. with “You Can Go,” a short narrative by Christine Turner, a New York University film student, in which a high school administrator talks down a troubled pupil.
“PRAEY,” a short by the N.Y.U. film student Kyleel Proda Rolle about the violence of city life and the struggle to escape it, will be shown at 3:45, followed by “4 Little Girls,” a 1997 documentary by Spike Lee about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in September 1963 that killed four young black girls. The film places that tragic event in the context of the civil rights struggle in Birmingham, which Martin Luther King Jr. called “probably the most segregated city in the United States.”
The festival will open at noon with “Judging Fred,” a production by the Southampton Youth Bureau’s Act Two program. “An important thing the Southampton African American Museum does is collaborate with everybody,” said Ms. Simmons. “Tracy Koisin of the youth bureau told me about ‘Judging Fred,’ which stresses the need for people to respect each other, not judge each other.”
Spoken word and live jazz take over the stage at the arts center at 7:30. The program will feature a performance by Dominique Fishback, followed by the Certain Moves jazz band. Ms. Fishback is an actress and poet from Brooklyn whose many television credits include “Show Me a Hero,” “The Affair,” “Royal Pains,” and the upcoming HBO series “The Deuce.”
Nigel Noble, an Academy Award-winning filmmaker who is on the museum’s film committee, saw Ms. Fishback’s one-woman Off Broadway play, “Subverted,” and told Ms. Simmons it was brilliant. She then found Ms. Fishback’s agent on Facebook. “Dominique is an actress,” said Ms. Simmons, “but she’s also a very strong poet, and she sends a strong message.”
Certain Moves is a mainstay of the East End jazz scene, “what I call our house band,” said Ms. Simmons. In addition to Charles Certain on saxophone, the group includes Randy London on drums, Wayne Hart on bass, Billy Gaines on keyboards, and Abdul Zuhri on guitar.
In addition to recommending Ms. Fishback, Mr. Noble has been instrumental in the festival’s success. “We’re really blessed to have him on our film committee,” said Ms. Simmons. “He’s the one who reaches out to get us the films, which isn’t always easy, and he is friends with Sam Pollard, who made ‘Two Trains Runnin’ ’ and was also involved in ‘4 Little Girls.’ ” A festival pass, which includes all programs, is $55. The film programs are $15 each, $12 for students and senior citizens. Tickets for spoken word and jazz are $35 and $30, and a $5 donation has been requested for admission to “Judging Fred.”
Who would have thought a stage version of a classic 19th-century novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne would also work as a commentary on our recent politics? Certainly not me, who took the opportunity to view “The Scarlet Letter” (running through Nov. 26 at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater) as a respite from election exhaustion.
This new adaptation, however, was written specifically for this production by Scott Eck and the play’s director, Joe Minutillo, and while it loses no opportunity to allude to the rhetoric of our president-elect, it is careful not to overwhelm the spirit of Hawthorne’s masterwork.
Of course the material is rich for contemporary analogies, with its themes of sin, sanctimony, and forgiveness. “The Scarlet Letter,” many will remember, is set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the mid-1600s, where Hester Prynne has been accused of adultery and must wear a scarlet A stitched to the front of her dress. As the play begins, she is forced to stand in the stocks in the town square, where its residents heap scorn upon her. When she is asked to name her lover, she refuses.
Among the crowd is her former husband, who now calls himself Roger Chillingworth, and the town minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. Much of the plot is generated by Chillingworth’s pursuit of the identity of his wife’s paramour, and by the minister’s need to conceal the fact that it’s he who is Hester’s lover and the father of her daughter, Pearl.
Was it really adultery? When their affair began, Hester apparently believed her husband had been lost at sea. Not that it mattered either way to Hawthorne, whose real theme is not fidelity but the folly of sanctimony and the danger of casting aspersions.
Chillingworth, for example (played with measured agony by Nick Gregory), becomes physically misshapen in his pursuit of vengeance; and the mystery of Hester Prynne’s lover, which consumes the colony for seven years, has literally torn the town to shreds by the story’s end. The bitter irony is that simple forgiveness might have healed them all long ago.
Local audiences are by now familiar with the lead actress, Chloe Dirksen, who was brilliant in last year’s “This Wide Night” at Guild Hall, and who acquits herself well here as Hester, portraying her with a gentle but defiant dignity. Also notable is Kathleen Mary Carthy as Mistress Hibbins, the governor’s eccentric sister, who injects much-needed energy and humor into the play with her Gothic, operatic style. And Dakota Quackenbush as Pearl brings added light to what at times can seem like a gloomy melodrama.
Missing from this adaptation is the dense grandeur of Hawthorne’s prose, which may be rivaled in American literature only by Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” But there’s no denying that there is pleasure in a production that hits all the thematic touchstones of a classic in under two hours. Mr. Eck and Mr. Minutillo wrest all the drama from the novel, and they have preserved its dialogue whenever possible.
Whether Dimmesdale actually says in the novel that “we can choose fear and hatred, or love,” as he does here, or whether that is a paraphrase meant to comment on Donald Trump’s immigration policies, I cannot say — like most of us, I haven’t read the novel since high school. But certainly this production has Mr. Trump on its mind. When the newly elected governor, for example, is asked about his pre-election promise to build a road from the town to the city of Boston, he admits that he didn’t have an actual “plan,” and now it’s up to the voters to figure it out. And the hissing cries of the “goodwives” — “Sinner, sinner, sinner” — as Hester stands in the stocks, seem uncomfortably reminiscent of the blame-and-shame rhetoric from both sides during this mind-boggling campaign.
It is the measure of Hawthorne’s true genius, when a nearly 200-year-old text can still have contemporary resonance. In a world where few have the time to revisit a classic novel, this adaptation is a satisfying shorthand, and one can only hope that local students will get a chance to see the play. In a nation so deeply divided, its themes of love and forgiveness have never been more poignant.