Many notable artists — among them Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, and Brice Marden — worked at museums early in their careers, usually as security guards, but few kept one foot in the studio and one in a museum for three decades. George Negroponte managed to do just that. 

Since his first show at the Drawing Center in SoHo in 1977, his work has appeared in dozens of museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the world. Impressed by the breadth and clarity of the Drawing Center’s mission, he joined the staff in 1977 and eventually organized exhibitions, served on its board from 1991 to 2002, and as its president from 2002 until 2007. He remains a trustee emeritus. 

“I had fantastic dealers in New York, but somewhere in the back of my mind I probably felt some dissatisfaction with the marketplace and with my own work,” he said during a recent talk at his Springs studio. “So I did those two things, my art and the Drawing Center. It was fascinating to experience both the institution and my own studio.”

Mr. Negroponte and his twin brother, Michel, were born in New York City in 1953, the youngest of four boys. His parents were Greek citizens who came to the United States in 1939. “My father and mother probably guided us toward subjects that had either historical or cultural motivations.” His mother worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Jacob Bean, the curator of drawings, and she became friends with Henry Geldzahler, the museum’s first curator of 20th-century art. Mr. Negroponte’s father was a serious Sunday painter who copied the work of Cézanne.

“Because Michel and I used the Met as a playground, we were able to study quattrocento drawings, as Jacob thought it would be nice for us to see and even handle them. We also would go over to study what Henry was up to. We were there when he installed his landmark show ‘New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970.’ So at the age of 16 or 17, I came into contact with Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and Larry Poons. Art making became a tangible thing for me, and something I felt very close to.”

Mr. Negroponte enrolled in Yale in 1971 with a vague intention to study architecture. “I had an interest in building and form, but all the prerequisites for architecture were studio classes.” He took the legendary color class originated by Josef Albers and studied with Bernard Chaet, who was instrumental in transforming Yale’s art program into one that gained national prominence.

His classmates at Yale included such gifted artists as Frank Moore and Peter Halley, while Judy Pfaff, Nabil Nahas, Louisa Chase, and Haim Steinbach were among the graduate students at that time. Mr. Negroponte feels lucky to have been a part of that artistic community, but, he said, something very different was happening at Cal Arts in Los Angeles.

“You had John Baldessari teaching a kind of deconstruction of the Yale idea. We were considered too formalist, too theoretical, too pure, and probably too abstract. So a lot of us ended up in New York in the mid-1970s feeling that to some extent the education we had received put us at the lower end of the totem pole. I had to work hard at testing my own convictions.” 

Always rooted in abstraction, those convictions went through changes and refinements. During the 1980s Mr. Negroponte made large abstract paintings with a small brush. “Over the years my brush got bigger and bigger; I was making paintings that were about weaving form. I thought they were pretty good, but I kept sensing I had hit a point where I just couldn’t get them to the next level.” 

In the mid-1990s he encountered the drawings of Victor Hugo at the Krugier Gallery in New York. “I had no idea that somebody in the 1840s and 1850s had made something that was so close to abstraction. The work fascinated me, and we did this huge show of his drawings at the Drawing Center, ‘Shadows of a Hand.’ ”

Mr. Negroponte started to work on paper, tearing it down and bringing pieces together. “I could spend an entire day just making different marks on different pieces of paper. I would lay them all out on the floor, put some of them away, put some of them on the wall, and then go to another body of work. It was almost as if I were curating my own work. And that’s how I work on the pieces I’m doing now.”

He keeps remnants of things he has been working on for years.

For his most recent work, which is on view in a solo exhibition at Anita Rogers Gallery in SoHo, he has used premixed hardware store paint and discarded cardboard, pieces of which are stacked and superimposed and pinned to the wall. 

He has described his way of working as “cut-and-build. There is clearly a kind of architecture I’m pursuing in that the image is not necessarily rectangular. One piece was made six months ago, another was made last week, and they’re brought together. If they work, they work, and a kind of fusion takes place. That’s one of the things collage often does. When you bring the edges together you really do somehow impact the image in a way that’s very different, let’s say, from the skin of a painting.”

Mr. Negroponte and his wife, Virva Hinnemo, also an artist, moved to Springs with their three sons in 2012. “Virva is happy here, my children are happy here, and, as my oldest brother, John, says to me, that’s 95 percent of the battle.” While he misses the culture of the city, Mr. Negroponte sees a trade-off. “The big problem with the city is you have a tendency to feel that people are looking over your shoulder. Out here I’m able to very quietly work on what I need to do without that pressure, without thinking about what the next show or the next piece will look like.”

“Here I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting. I realize that as far back as 2006 I made a conscious decision to leave certain things behind. I knew the scale would be different, I knew that canvas and stretchers were not going to be part of the next phase. The thing that really remained the same and is so important to me is the relationship of the object to the wall. I’ve always thought of myself as a kind of fresco painter.”

Mr. Negroponte left the Drawing Center in 2007, after having taken a leading role in the effort to move the center to ground zero, as part of what was initially envisioned by Daniel Libeskind as a cultural complex. By 2005, the Drawing Center was one of four organizations still in the mix, but eventually the idea of a cultural complex was scrapped altogether.

“The politics of New York and the politics of ground zero ultimately doomed that idea. I regret that it didn’t get done. I felt I had a chance to do something for a city that I really, really love, and it didn’t happen. But it probably pushed me to take most of my mental resources and put them back into the studio. And for that I’m very happy!”

Clifford Ross, an East End multimedia artist known for his “Hurricane” series of dramatic, large-scale photographs of wild coastal storms, high-resolution landscape photographs, and mixed-media installations, has designed the sets for the premiere engagement of “Marksman,” a performance by the Kate Weare Company that will take place Wednesday through Nov. 13 at the Joyce Theater in New York City.

Lots of Locals at Ashawagh

“Uncommon,” a group exhibition presented by Hampton Photo, Arts, and Framing in Bridgehampton, will open at Ashawagh Hall in Springs with a reception on Saturday from 5:30 to 11 p.m. and continue on Sunday from 10 to 3.

The exhibition, organized by Franki Mancinelli, will feature more than 35 “unconventional” artists, among them Scott Bluedorn, Carly Haffner, Peter Ngo, Adam Baranello, and Miles Partington. The reception will include food, cocktails, and music by William Falkenberg.

The Leibers in Chelsea

“The Artist and Artisan,” an exhibition of work by Gerson and Judith Leiber, will open today at the Flomenhaft Gallery in Chelsea with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The show will run through Dec. 30.

The artists, whose work is on view at the Leiber Collection in Springs from Memorial Day through Labor Day, met in 1945 in Budapest, and married and sailed to the United States a year later. 

Ms. Leiber’s handbags, which are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and many others, have been carried by first ladies to most inaugural balls since 1953.

Mr. Leiber, a noted painter and printmaker whose work is included in the collections of more than 60 museums, is also the creator of seven acres of garden “rooms” on the Springs property.

Mixed Media in Brooklyn

The A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn will present “Overlap: Life Tapestries,” a group exhibition of photographs, fabric collage, clothing, video, paintings, and drawings by eight artists, from next Thursday through Dec. 18. A reception will be held next Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m.

The show will include three East End artists — Alice Hope, Bastienne Schmidt, and Linda Stein — and Sascha Mallon, Michela Martello, Shari Wechsler Rubeck, Martha Wilson, and Kumi Yamashita. A conversation among Vida Sabbaghi, curator of the exhibition, Karen Keifer-Boyd, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Penn State, Ms. Schmidt, and Ms. Stein will follow the reception.

Helen Harrison in London

Helen A. Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, will be among the lecturers this weekend at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in connection with the exhibition “Abstract Expressionism: Expressions of Change.”

Her talk, “Inside the Abstract Expressionist Studio,” will consider the practices of a representative group of artists and how their approaches define or contradict what we now call Abstract Expressionism.

At Halsey Mckay N.Y.C.

The second installment of Ben Blatt’s “Hovering” will open at the Halsey Mckay Gallery’s New York City space at 56 Henry Street with a reception on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. 

Mr. Blatt’s new paintings, his most abstract to date, explore the limitations of the pixelated image and the illusion of reality in the digital landscape. A previous iteration of “Hovering” took place at Halsey Mckay in East Hampton in September.

Guild Gatherings, an ongoing collaborative program designed to engage, cultivate, and connect artists, professionals, and the public on the East End, will take place tomorrow from 7 to 9 p.m. at Guild Hall. Presented in partnership with the East Hampton Arts Council, the evening will include presentations by four artists followed by a reception. 

They are Darlene Charneco, a mixed-media artist whose work draws on network theory, microbiology, virtual worlds, evolutionary theory, and educational tools; Lukas Ortiz, a poet whose interests include fiction, cultural studies, history, current affairs, and memoir; Brian Schopfer, who builds custom surfboards and develops new surfboard shapes in collaboration with some of surfing’s iconic figures, and Steve Roux, a writer and Jack Kerouac archivist who lives in East Hampton. Admission is free, and reservations have been encouraged.

The Southampton Arts Center on Job’s Lane and the Jam Session will present “The Music of Mali,” featuring Yacouba Sissoko and LUMA, on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

Mr. Sissoko is one of the world’s foremost players of the kora, a 21-string lute-bridge-harp used extensively in West Africa. He has performed as a soloist and with his band, SIYA, toured with a variety of well-known artists and recorded with Harry Belafonte, Paul Simon, and Abdoulaye Diabate.

LUMA, featuring Dan Lauter on saxophone, Jeff Marshall on bass, Claes Brondal on drums, and the singing of Natu Camara, has brought its music rooted in the funk and groove tradition to high-profile events on the South Fork and beyond.

Tickets are $10, $5 for children and students. For those unable to make the concert, it will be recorded live for broadcast on “The Jam Session Radio Hour” on WPPB 88.3 FM.

“From Bach to Rock,” a piano duet performed by Nadia and Vladimir Zaitsev, will take place at the Montauk Library on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. The husband and wife will perform music by Mozart, Bach, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Barber, Gershwin, Gottschalk, and Legrand, as well as Mr. Zaitsev’s arrangements of American rock ‘n’ roll medleys.

The two have performed at Alice Tully Hall, the 92nd Street Y, the Merkin Concert Hall, and Symphony Space in New York City, as well as at concert venues in Europe, Asia, and Israel. Mr. and Ms. Zaitsev made their Weill Recital Hall debut at Carnegie Hall as winners of the Artists International Chamber Music Award.

The concert series “Bach, Before & Beyond” will begin its second season at the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor with a performance by Emilia Donato on Sunday at 3 p.m. A 22-year-old soprano from New York City, she received a degree in voice from Bard College, where she won the Concerto Competition and the Lombardi Prize.

The program will include the music of Monteverdi and Bach, operatic arias, and Broadway show tunes. Walter Klauss, the artistic director of the series, will accompany Ms. Donato on piano. Tickets are $20.

A comedy show to benefit the Southampton Lions Club and the North Sea Fire Department will take place Saturday at 8 p.m. at 230 Elm Street in Southampton. Laughs will be provided by Lynne Koplitz, a veteran of stand-up who has appeared on “The View,” Comedy Central, the Food Network, and elsewhere, and Pete Correale, whose many credits include “Let Me Tell Ya,” a one-hour Showtime special. Tickets are $30, and a 50-50 raffle will be part of the festivities.

Exactly one week before Halloween, two artists decided to offer their own trick and treats at a small beachfront cottage in Bridgehampton destined to face the wrecking ball. 

On Oct. 24, the artists, both East End residents who wish to remain anonymous, mounted a temporary show of textile and ceramic works at 77 Dune Road. According to an email sent by someone representing the artists, the pieces were made in tribute to the memories they had of growing up in the community during the 1970s and similar cottages that have vanished over the years, replaced by much larger houses.

In place of a long-gone door screen, a sampler of sorts was stitched to a piece of sheer white fabric. It said, “This house has survived 23 hurricanes, 14 nor’easters, two super storms, 22 blizzards. But it will not survive their plans to demolish it. Save this house and keep its gentle footprint.”

A colorful knitted scarf or runner seemed to replicate a series of windowpanes where ospreys, whales, and other indigenous creatures were represented in drawings that were attached to the knitted material. Ceramic vases and trays were embellished with shells.

The theme of the work was “the inherent beauty of a small footprint created in tandem with the natural landscape.” The artists said such Dune Road beach cottages were once plentiful and “were cherished getaways for working middle-class families, as well as the wealthy.” The occupants maintained them with care and minimal decoration. Their attention was focused on the beauty of the “outer environment rather than the house itself.”

According to the property listing, the house was built in 1956 and is 1,200 square feet with two bedrooms. Zoning allows the half-acre lot to accommodate  a building of 2,700 square feet, but an architect has already devised plans for a 4,000-square-foot house with a pool and deck. Variances would be needed to realize them.

The artists said the house was maintained until the mid-1990s but has had virtually no occupants since then. The price tag is $8.9 million.

In addition, they said, the dunes in front of the house are home to many indigenous species of plants and wildlife that used to characterize Dune Road, including beach rose, various beach grasses, bayberry, pitch pine, and goldenrod. “On a recent morning, monarch butterflies were seen flying in and out of the dunes,” the email said.

On the day of the guerrilla installation, 40 invited guests viewed the show and then enjoyed a party on the beach near the house.

“We realize what we did was not particularly legal, but it was important to us to honor this beautiful house and spotlight the unsound trend of tearing down these shingle beach houses to build gigantic ones in their place,” the artists said.

Although the show was temporary, they did leave two of the pieces at the house. “We hope that our message will be heard, by realtors and potential buyers, that this house, and the land it sits on, is worth saving.”

National Theatre Live will return to Guild Hall with an encore screening of “The Deep Blue Sea,” a masterful drama by the English playwright Terence Rattigan, on Saturday evening at 8. 

Set in West London in 1952, the play centers on Hester Collyer, who is discovered by her neighbors following a failed suicide attempt, after which the details of her affair with a former R.A.F. pilot and the breakdown of her marriage begin to emerge. Directed by Carrie Cracknell, the production stars Helen McCrory as Hester, which is considered one of the greatest female roles in contemporary drama. Tickets are $18, $16 for members.

Guild Hall’s artXchange, a free celebration of cultural diversity, will take place Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. The family afternoon will include workshops led by visual and performing artists, a multilingual poetry reading, dance and music performances, and other activities aimed at fostering respect and interaction among the East End’s communities.