Some artists discover their medium and stick with it. Throughout most of her career, Carol Ross has shifted artistic gears with apparent ease between wood reliefs, metal sculpture, drawing, and painting. “I’m an artist who changes a lot,” she said during a recent conversation in Guild Hall’s sculpture garden, where her large aluminum pieces can be seen through Oct. 1. A selection of her wood reliefs is also on view in Guild Hall’s Wasserstein Family Gallery.

Surrounded by her sculpture in the garden, she said, “As a sculptor, you’re very earthbound. The piece has to stand. As a painter, you’re totally free. I’m fascinated that I ended up making sculpture like this. As a student, I said, ‘Sculpture? No way.’ I wouldn’t even take a class in sculpture.” 

Ms. Ross decided after her metal sculpture was installed at the Watermill Center four years ago that she needed a break and turned back to painting. “Last summer I painted, not too successfully,” she said. “This summer I’m painting very unsuccessfully. I might start drawing again and give up on the paintings. I have five or six different things I want to do all at once.”

Her student days started quite early. “By the time I was 13, I was going to the Art Students League.” She took classes there and at studios closer to her family’s home in Roslyn and, with her mother’s help, she had her own studio in the basement of a medical office building when she was 15. At the time, her painting was Abstract Expressionist. “It was the 1950s, what else did you do?”

A self-described teenage beatnik, she and her friends hung out in Greenwich Village and frequented the art galleries on 57th Street. When she left for the University of Michigan, “I was not interested in anything except art. There were a lot of forward-thinking faculty and my freshman year they had a happening on top of a parking garage. Claes Oldenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage took part.”

After graduate school at New York University and a year in Ibiza — “I was a real hippie then” — and a few odd jobs in New York City, Ms. Ross was hired to teach at Stevens College, a women’s school in Columbia, Mo. “They gave me a studio in the cupola of a three-story building, and I made some of the best paintings of my life there. I had always been interested in abstraction, and that was when I got the connection between the landscape and abstraction. I made calligraphic paintings with washes of thin colors.”

Another turning point came when she returned to New York. John Coplans, a photographer, artist, curator, and longtime editor of the influential journal Artforum, became a mentor. One day he said, “ ‘You’re never going to get anywhere until you make something you can’t make.’ That’s when I started with the wood reliefs, because I couldn’t make them. I needed a fabricator.”

The wood reliefs at Guild Hall are elaborately shaped pieces of plywood with curvilinear segments of veneer. The shapes are organic, as are most of the titles — “Gull,” “A Seed Lifting on a Breeze,” for example — and exemplify how nature and abstraction combine in her work. The veneers are ash, cherry, ironwood, and walnut. Their shapes intertwine in complicated patterns so that  the differently colored woods play off one another.

Her aluminum sculpture has a more angular geometry than the reliefs and an almost Minimalist symmetry. Enhanced by a bright palette that includes a lot of orange, red, and blue, most of the pieces have unique bases, each of which is designed as part of the overall work. 

Speaking of working with metal, she said, “I always do drawings first. The hardest part is getting a shape that’s really unique and interesting. It can take me a year, easily. I’ll have a stack of drawings before I move to the next step, which is to make a model or maquette. I do so much prep work in part because it’s so expensive to do metal work. I’ve made a few mistakes, but I try really hard not to.”

The maquettes are cardboard. At first she had them made full size, but her metal fabricator was so good she was able to scale the models down. “He does aluminum welding. It’s amazing how refined his work is.” All the metal pieces are finished with automobile paint at Corwith’s Auto Body in Water Mill.

Many of the metal pieces, too, allude to the landscape, with titles such as “Urban Moon,” “Ravine,” “Gorge,” and “Petit Piton,” the latter based on drawings she made in Trinidad and Tobago. The exhibition at Guild Hall has inspired her to take up metal sculpture again when she returns to New York City in the fall.

Ms. Ross has spent the last 25 summers in a house on the bay in Noyac. “You have a total view of the water. It was very run down, but that didn’t scare me after having renovated a loft.” Such things became even easier in 1995, when she met and married Vladimir Kasa-Djukic, an architect who at that time was modifying Chuck Close’s studio. She also has a 5,000-square-foot loft on West 26th Street in Manhattan.

Ms. Ross has a 36-year-old daughter, Jackie, from an earlier marriage, and two grandchildren, who visit every weekend in summer. She makes time to work in her garden a couple of hours each day and has begun photographing its flowers. “I’m starting to think about a book of garden photographs. I’ll call it either ‘The Ecstatic Gardener’ or ‘The Ecstatic Garden.’ ” One of the “five or six different things” she’s working on or thinking about, it’s likely to find its way into print.

Guild Hall’s summer season will close this weekend with two very different musical performances. Suzanne Vega, a singer-songwriter whose voice is as distinct as her music, will perform Saturday at 8 p.m. Details of her concert can be found elsewhere on this page.

The Doo Wop Project, whose music is rooted in the 1950s and 1960s, will give performances at 7 and 9:30 p.m. on Sunday. The idea for the project arose backstage at the August Wilson Theatre in New York City, home of the Broadway hit “Jersey Boys.” The concert will feature the music of the Four Seasons, obviously, but also songs by Smokey Robinson, which will be performed by Charl Brown, a Tony Award nominee from “Motown: The Musical.”

The group, which will be backed by a full band, will also give the Doo Wop treatment to more contemporary songs by Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Amy Winehouse, and Bruno Mars. Tickets for each show are $40 to $95, $38 to $90 for members.

Two nonmusical programs are coming up at Guild Hall. This afternoon at 4, Dick Cavett, Robert Caro, Carl Bernstein, and Dan Rattiner will be on hand for the presentation of the 2016 Dan’s Papers Literary Prize for Nonfiction and its Emerging Young Writers Prize for Nonfiction. The free program will be followed by a cocktail reception.

The Save the Waves Film Festival will take place tomorrow at 7 p.m. The evening will include short and feature-length surf films, music, a raffle, and a cash bar. Tickets range from $40 to $100, with higher price tickets including a 6 p.m. pre-party and reception for the filmmakers.

The Southampton Arts Center will conclude its summer music programs with free outdoor concerts by the HooDoo Loungers on Saturday at 6 p.m. and Jazz on the Steps with Bill Smith on piano and Baron Lewis on trumpet on Sunday at noon.

Dubbed the East Coast’s New Orleans Party band, the nine-piece HooDoo Loungers perform music inspired by the rhythms, sounds, history, and spirit of the Big Easy, including New Orleans jazz, brass band music, classic R&B, and funk.

Surface Library Returns

Surface Library, which operated in Springs from 2006 to 2011, will return to the hamlet for “D-Tour,” a Labor Day weekend exhibition to be held at Ashawagh Hall from Saturday through Monday. A reception is set for Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m., with music by Job Potter and Friends.

Organized by Bob Bachler and James Kennedy, the founders of Surface Library, the show will include work by Fulvio Massi, Maeve D’Arcy, John Haubrich, Ted Tyler, Joe Eschenberg, Barbara Groot, Mr. Bachler, and Mr. Kennedy. According to Mr. Bachler, the title implies that the exhibiting artists have deviated from their usual stylistic pathways for the exhibition.

The exhibition will be open Saturday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Sunday from noon to 6, and Monday from noon until 8.

Gregory Johnston at Borghi

“Ultimate History,” a show of work by Gregory Johnston, will open at Mark Borghi Fine Art in Bridgehampton with a reception Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. It will continue through Sept. 24.

The exhibition consists of wall sculptures created from the parts of vintage racing automobiles. Mr. Johnston, who has 20 years of experience restoring vintage cars, transforms the parts into sculptural works that refer to the history and culture of racetracks.

Christopher French Solo

“An Alphabet of Sites,” an exhibition of new paintings by Christopher French, will open tomorrow at the Drawing Room in East Hampton and remain on view through Oct. 3.

For more than three decades, Mr. French has created Minimalist abstractions, often in series in which repetition of pattern was offset by brilliant variations in color. In his new work, symmetry has given way to pointed shafts of refracted color that surge across the canvas from distinct vortices like beams of colored light. 

According to the gallery, “Layering pigment in thin veils, French moves from tone to color as the animated surface gradually transforms color and form into light and space.” Mr. French, who lives in North Sea, has exhibited widely and is represented in numerous public collections.

Barbara Groot at Kramoris

Abstract paintings by Barbara Groot are on view at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor from today through Sept. 22. A reception will be held Saturday afternoon from 4 to 5:30.

Ms. Groot’s paintings draw energy from the sun and light of the East End, according to the artist, who grew up in Southern California. Active, bold brushwork, the layered use of color, and long, sweeping lines characterize her canvases.

Watercolors at Bridge Gardens

An exhibition of watercolors by Lois Bender is on view at Bridge Gardens in Bridgehampton through Oct. 2. “Flowers at Bridge Gardens” celebrates the abundance and variety of floral growth there. Ms. Bender, who has been painting and teaching watercolor at the site for four years, will be there on Saturdays. Fifteen percent of sales will be donated to the Peconic Land Trust, which owns and manages Bridge Gardens.

In addition, Ms. Bender will teach watercolor classes at the garden on Saturdays from Sept. 10 through Dec. 10, from noon to 3 p.m.

Joan Semmel in Chelsea

Alexander Gray Associates in Chelsea will open “Joan Semmel: New Work” next Thursday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The show will continue through Oct. 15.

The recent paintings and drawings by Ms. Semmel, who has a house in Springs, continue the representation of her own likeness as a site to consider the aging female body as an active, potent vessel for life and art. In the new work she applies saturated abstract colors in a variety of styles, sometimes in linear strokes, others in flat swaths of pigment. Her work continues to transcend traditional notions of scale and color.

Southampton Artists Show

The Southampton Artists Association’s annual Labor Day show is on view through Sept. 11 at the Southampton Cultural Center. A reception will take place Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m.

The exhibition includes photography, paintings, drawings, and sculpture. Gallery hours are Sunday through Thursday, noon to 4 p.m., and Friday and Saturday, noon to 6.

New Parrish Curator

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill has appointed Corinne Erni as curator of special projects effective today. Ms. Erni comes to the Parrish from the New Museum in Manhattan, where she was senior producer of “Ideas City,” a collaborative arts initiative and internationally recognized biennial focusing on art and culture as essential to the future vitality of cities.

She also co-founded “Artport,” a global curatorial platform that commissioned, curated, and produced public art projects, exhibitions, artist residencies, educational programs, and publications, with a focus on art and climate change.

Born in Switzerland, Ms. Erni was educated in Milan and New York. She began her career in fashion design in Switzerland and New York before turning her attention to interdisciplinary arts programming. 

Four at White Room

“Through Time and Space,” an exhibition of work by four artists, is on view at the White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton through Sept. 18. A reception will take place Sunday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Ellyn Tucker is showing collages created from fragments found in old books, letters, papers, fabrics, and photographs. Robert Tucker, a veteran of the film and graphic arts fields, creates detailed monoprints on handmade rice paper.

Joe Currie, who grew up in England, will show paintings that explore a split-second look into an object in motion, emphasizing speed and light. Gabriele Vigorelli’s canvases feature vibrant colors, abstracted figures, and complex geometric arrangements.

As the Hamptons International Film Festival has grown, so has its commitment, through its signature programs, to films that engage a range of social and political issues. This year’s festival, which will take place Oct. 6 through Oct. 10, will include the 17th iteration of Films of Conflict and Resolution, the second Compassion, Justice, and Animal Rights program, and a new signature program, Air, Land, and Sea.

Films of Conflict and Resolution, dedicated to work dealing with the effects of war and violence, will include the East Coast premiere of “Disturbing the Peace,” an American documentary that follows a group of Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters who join to form “Combatants for Peace” in search of a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Another film in that program, “Sonita,” is the story of a young Afghan refugee living in Iran and dreaming of becoming a famous rapper. To her family, however, she is worth $9,000 as a bride. The German-Iranian-Swiss production chronicles Sonita’s defiance of local expectations and the condemnation of a violent and oppressive society.

Two films concerned with animal rights issues are “The Ivory Game” and “Unlocking the Cage.” The former illuminates the dire fate of the African elephant and the efforts to stop the systematic slaughter driving it to extinction. The film was shot in Africa and Asia with the help of conservationists, intelligence organizations, frontline rangers, and undercover activists working to expose the corruption of the illegal ivory trade.

“Unlocking the Cage,” the most recent film from the Sag Harbor team of Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, follows Steven Wise, an animal rights lawyer, as he attempts to break down the legal wall that separates animals from humans by seeking to transform a chimpanzee from a “thing” with no rights to a “person” with legal protections.

The Air, Land, and Sea program will debut with “Sonic Sea,” a documentary about whales and other marine life that are guided toward food, mates, and safety by underwater sounds, and the impact on their frail sonic environment of industrial and military ocean noise. Additional films in the signature programs will be announced in the coming weeks.

The festival will collaborate with Variety for the fifth year to present the 10 Actors to Watch program. This year’s selections will be celebrated in the Oct. 4 issue of the venerable entertainment trade magazine in conjunction with coverage of the festival. 

They are Riz Ahmed, Mahershala Ali, Rachel Brosnahan, Ana de Armas, Alden Erhenreich, Lucas Hedges, Aja Naomi King, Tavi Gevinson, Kara Hayward, and John Legend. Previous nominees include Oscar winners and nominees such as Viola Davis, Taraji P. Henson, Brie Larson, Lupita Nyong’o, Michael Shannon, and Melissa Leo.

Suzanne Vega, a singer-songwriter who has forged a three-decades-plus career in an ever-shifting musical landscape, said “a mix of old and new songs” from her extensive catalog is in store when she performs at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Saturday at 8 p.m. 

While “Luka” and the a cappella “Tom’s Diner,” from her 1987 album “Solitude Standing,” remain her best- known songs (along with the latter’s 1990 pairing with an electronic dance beat on a track called “Oh Suzanne”), Ms. Vega, who has a house in Amagansett, has continued to push the boundaries of the contemporary-folk label affixed to the artist early in her career. 

Her 2014 album “Tales From the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles” was produced by Gerry Leonard, Ms. Vega’s longtime collaborator, who will accompany her at Guild Hall. Next month, she will release “Lover, Beloved: Songs From an Evening with Carson McCullers,” a song cycle about the life and work of the late Southern Gothic novelist. The recordings follow her one-woman play about the author, who wrote such works as “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” “The Member of the Wedding,” and “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.”

Ms. Vega continues to perform around the world, and spoke with The Star earlier this summer, on the eve of a European tour. 

“I play songs from ‘Tales from the Realm,’ and mix in a lot of other things people want to hear — usually one or two songs off each album,” she said of her contemporary performances. “I always do the hits,” among which is also the dreamlike “Caramel,” from 1996’s “Nine Objects of Desire.” At Guild Hall, she said, “I will probably do five new songs from ‘Lover, Beloved: Songs From an Evening With Carson McCullers.’ ” 

On Saturday afternoon, Ms. Vega will perform in Springs along with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie, Rufus Wainwright, Teddy Thompson, Jenni Muldaur, and G.E. Smith at a family picnic and concert to benefit the Perfect Earth Project, which advocates for toxin-free landscaping practices. 

“I’m really looking forward to it, to all the fun of doing it,” Ms. Vega said of Saturday. “I really love what I do. This is the life I always imagined as a teen: traveling, playing the guitar. It brings me a lot of joy.” 

Tickets for Suzanne Vega, Saturday at 8 p.m. at Guild Hall, are $55 to $150, $53 to $145 for members, and are available by calling the box office at 631-324-4050 or at guildhall.org. 

Tickets for the family picnic and concert start at $1,000 ($100 for children) and can be reserved online at perfectearthproject.org. In case of rain, that event will be held on Sunday.

When Jill Musnicki says “I’m very much into nature,” it’s no wonder. A fourth-generation East Ender whose ancestors were Bridgehampton and Sagaponack farmers, the local terrain was her birthright. For the past five years, that legacy has informed her artwork.

A Parrish Road Show installation in 2012, “what comes around,”  marked the beginning of a photographic venture. She had placed numerous motion-activated surveillance cameras at various remote locations on the South Fork and recorded the ordinarily unseen behavior of animals in natural habitats. The images were assembled into a three-channel video installation shown in a barn at the Bridgehampton Historical Society. “It was something I had always wanted to do,” she said.

Since then Ms. Musnicki has undertaken several similar projects, one at the Andy Warhol Preserve in Montauk in connection with the Nature Conservancy, another with the Long Pond Greenbelt Nature Center. Her most recent work, “The Next Generation,” will be unveiled for one day only, on Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m., at her family’s nursery in Bridgehampton.

For this, Ms. Musnicki placed her cameras in Wainscott at Georgica Pond last spring, where a friend had told her a family of foxes lived. “The camera was supposed to keep going,” she said, “but it only worked for one day. However, I did get something like 5,000 images.” She explained why she had chosen not to turn the images into a video. “It’s just too technical. At this point, if I can’t do it myself, it’s upsetting to me.” Instead she will exhibit 10 photographs of the fox family, each one affixed to a tree in a wooded area. 

The photographs and the site are perfectly suited to each other. She will also show photographs of eagles taken by cameras set up in Sagaponack after a tip from a friend. “People get drawn into nature when you do a project like this, and they want to help; they keep their eyes open.”

“Fox are usually so elusive, it’s hard to get them, but in these photographs they look as if they’re posing. I couldn’t have staged it any better myself.” The photographs, each 10 x 10 inches, in editions of 30, will be sold through Salomon Contemporary. 

Speaking of her recent work, Ms. Musnicki said, “I hope to sit down someday and turn it all into something. In 20 years, when there’s no land left, it’ll be a real document.”

The reception will take place at 297 Paul’s Lane in Bridgehampton. The entrance to the long blacktop driveway will be marked.

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will conclude its Jazz en Plein Air season with an outdoor performance by the Philippe Lemm Trio tomorrow evening at 6. Consisting of Mr. Lemm on drums, Jeff Koch on bass, and Angelo Di Loreto on piano, the group will draw from its repertory of traditional jazz, music influenced by progressive rock and classical, and their own arrangements of jazz standards.

Tickets are $10, free for members and students. Because table seating is limited to patrons of the Golden Pear Café, guests have been encouraged to take chairs and blankets.

Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor will present a klezmer concert featuring the renowned composer, singer, and pianist Polina Skovoroda-Shepherd and Lorin Sklamberg, lead singer of the Grammy Award-winning Klezmatics, on Saturday at 7 p.m.

The concert will include Yiddish folk and Slavic melodies in Yiddish, Odessa songs, Russian lyrics put to klezmer tunes, collective farm songs from a century ago, and modern original material exploring the musical connections between the steppes and the shtetl.

Klezmer music draws on centuries-old Jewish traditions and incorporates various sounds from European and international traditions, including Roma music, Eastern European folk music, French cafe music, and early jazz.

Tickets are $25 at the door, free for children under 13.

Kinnaman and Ramaekers in Bridgehampton will introduce Grace Coddington’s newly issued perfume, “Grace,” with a reception on Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. Ms. Coddington, creative director-at-large for Vogue magazine, developed the scent with Adrian Joffe and Comme des Garcons Parfum. Two sizes will be available for purchase, including specially designed labels that will be signed by Ms. Coddington at the reception.