After a hiatus of several months, the Southampton Arts Center will resume its exhibition program today with “East End Collected 2,” a show of the work of more than 30 area artists organized by Paton Miller. An opening reception will take place Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

Among the participating artists are Monica Banks, Walter Channing, Toinette Gay, Fulvio Masi, Monica Mason, Dalton Portella, and Ned Smyth. The exhibition celebrates not only the artists of the region but also the collectors who have supported them.

An artists’ talk will happen June 5 at 2 p.m. Other receptions will be held May 28 and June 11. The exhibition will close June 12.

It wasn’t just a dream. Music for Montauk is back again this year, and in the capable hands of Lilah Gosman and Milos Repicky, who rebooted the popular classical music series last year with some off-season events and a week of musical surprises in August. The future of the concerts had been uncertain after the death of the founder, Ruth Widder, in 2013.

A spring concert highlighting themes of youth, energy, and creativity will take place at the Montauk School on Saturday at 4 p.m. The program will feature Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 13, which the organizers describe as an intensely passionate, beautiful, and exciting work, noting that the piece was written by a teenage prodigy experiencing the thrill of first love. 

Two young singers from Juilliard, Rebecca Farley and Alex McKissick, will embody Mendelssohn’s themes in their interpretation of this romantic work. They will be accompanied by the violinists Annaliesa Place and Joanna Mauer, Jessica Meyer on viola, and Diego Garcia on cello.

Music for Montauk will benefit from a reception to be held at Gosman’s restaurant after the concert, from 5:30 to 7 p.m., with drinks and a buffet dinner. Tickets are $30 in advance and $40 at the door.

The summer season is shaping up as well, with a week of concerts and events in unusual and evocative places beginning on Aug. 16. More to be revealed in the near future.

Gayle Kirschenbaum spent a long time figuring out how to forgive her mother for what she has described as a difficult upbringing, throughout which her mother was sharp-tongued, critical, and lacking in empathy and sensitivity.

Ms. Kirschenbaum and her mother, Mildred, have come a long way since then. She describes their mutual journey in her latest documentary, “Look at Us Now, Mother!” The film will be shown at the Sag Harbor Cinema right in time for Mother’s Day this weekend, with 3 p.m. screenings on Saturday and Sunday. The filmmaker will be at the Sunday showing, with a question-and-answer session planned following the film.

She said by telephone that she felt the need to make the film not only for herself but for others. Over the course of her work, Ms. Kirschenbaum, who is also a motivational speaker on the subject of forgiveness, said she found that “it really doesn’t matter how outwardly successful someone is — professionally, financially, with family. If they were hurt by someone when they were young, particularly a parent, it’s affecting them.”

“I knew that I had a funny mother today. She wasn’t funny when I grew up.” But, she said, “she was willing to go on this journey and make this movie with me. I’m an open person, my mother’s a laugh a minute, I saw the need, and I committed to doing it.”

Ms. Kirschenbaum has spent many years behind the camera, producing shows such as “Dwarf Adoption,” “Little Parents, Big Pregnancy,” and “Little Parents: First Baby,” which have aired on networks such as TLC and Discovery Health. In 2004, she ventured onto the stage herself, with the film “A Dog’s Life: A Dogamentary,” exploring the relationship between dogs and people through the story of her own bond with her Shih Tzu. Later came the short film “My Nose,” about her mother’s lengthy campaign to convince her to get a nose job, which received much critical acclaim. “Look at Us Now, Mother!” is the feature length follow-up to “My Nose.”

The mother-daughter relationship began to change a few years ago when Ms. Kirschenbaum was invited to show one of her films at a festival in France. Mildred Kirschenbaum announced she would be accompanying her daughter on the trip.

“A lot of people thought we would come back not talking to each other, but it was a turning point,” the filmmaker said. “I think she saw me in a new light, and we ended up being quite compatible for traveling together. My mother is an adventurous person, and I inherited that from her.”

“Look at Us Now” is a perfect way to celebrate Mother’s Day, she said. She recommended seeing it with your mother if possible, but “it’s really a film for everyone. It’s a human story.”

“The hardest forgiveness to give is someone who is very close to you,” she said. “No matter how good or great your upbringing was, there was some sort of pain along the way. The whole message is, you forgive for yourself. . . . It’s really about love.”

Philip Pavia at Pollock-Krasner

The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs will present “Philip Pavia: Sculpture and Drawings” from next Thursday through July 30.

Mr. Pavia, who had a house on Squaw Road in Springs, was a guiding force behind the Club, the Greenwich Village meeting place formed in 1949, where artists of the New York School held weekly, sometimes contentious, discussions.

The works in the exhibition focus on the 1960s, when Pavia began working in marble, treating blocks of stone as collage elements. One major piece, “Lily Pond,” will be installed on the center’s grounds. 

His drawings were not studies for specific sculptures but helped him visualize ideas for the three-dimensional work. 

A reception and gallery talk with Natalie Edgar Pavia and Paul Pavia will take place May 29 from 5 to 7 p.m. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog with an essay by Phyllis Braff.

Three at Ille Arts

Ille Arts in Amagansett will open concurrent shows of work by three artists with a reception on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view through May 25. 

“The Shadow of Numbers” features photographs by Mai Duong, who lives and works in Paris. Whether photographing architecture, people, or luxury products, her images reflect an almost mathematical precision.

Elizabeth Levine’s “Pet Show” is just that, a series of fanciful earthenware animals, each elaborately adorned with glazed clothing and accessories.

In “Streams/Glaciers,” Jonathan Smith, whose 2014 show at the gallery featured the coastline of the United States, focuses his camera on the beauty of Patagonian glaciers and Icelandic streams.

Nico Yektai’s 

Sculptural Furniture

The Tripoli Gallery in Southampton has reopened with “Cousins,” a solo exhibition of Nico Yektai’s sculptural furniture. A reception will be held Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Mr. Yektai, who was born in Iran and lives in Sag Harbor, has been working with wood for more than 25 years. Recently, he has been incorporating cement, metals, mirrors, and glass, transforming his materials into juxtapositions of line and form.

His unique creations exist simultaneously as modernist sculptures and functional furniture, inviting the viewer to engage with them both visually and physically.

New Group at White Room 

“Earth, Wind, and Fire,” an exhibition featuring work by EJ Camp, June Kaplan, and Susan Zises, will open Saturday at Bridgehampton’s White Room Gallery and continue through May 15. A reception is set for May 7 from 5 to 7 p.m.

For more than 30 years and throughout a successful commercial career, Ms. Camp has photographed the oceans, bays, and shorelines of the East End. Ms. Kaplan, too, focuses on the beauty of the region, but with acrylic paint on canvas. Ms. Zises’s abstract works on paper are built up with oil, Flashe, acrylics, fabric, metal, gilding, clay, and wood.

The exhibition will also include work by Ellyn Tucker, Mark Zimmerman, Kat O’Neill, Michele Dragonetti, Claudia Ward, Melissa Hin, Sally Breen, and Ann Brandeis. 

The gallery will also host a reading by Megan Chaskey from her “Birdsong Under the Wisdom Tree” on Friday, May 6, at 6 p.m.

Haim Mizrahi at Ashawagh

“Oops,” an exhibition of paintings by Haim Mizrahi of Springs, will be on view Saturday and Sunday at Ashawagh Hall, with a reception set for 4 to 8 p.m. on Saturday. In addition, a reading by local poets will presented Sunday at 3 p.m.

Mr. Mizrahi is also a poet, writer, jazz musician, and host of “Hello Hello,” a morning talk show on LTV. Israeli-born, he began making art in 1997, motivated by “the curiosity about blending and implementing experiences from all aspects of my life on to the surface-canvas.”

Four Photographers in Sag

The Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor will open “Spring Preview,” a show of work by four photographers, with a reception on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition will run through May 28.

Blair Seagram is best known on the East End for her photographs of surfers. Stephen Wilkes has documented cityscapes and landscapes across the United States.

Daniel Jones’s carefully composed images range from near-hyperrealism to near-abstraction. Ms. Booth, who is a jewelry designer as well as a photographer and gallery owner, is best known for her lush flower photographs.

Stephen Antonakos, a neon pioneer from the 1960s onward, discovered several different styles within that medium from that period until his death in 2013. From outlines of simple geometric shapes to complicated overlays on painted surfaces, and late work with neon-backlit painted wood assemblages, he found in the colorful gas tubing a visual language to explore relationships between two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms. 

The Drawing Room has an exhibition of work from the artist’s mid-career early-neon phase, in years spanning 1973 to 1977. The work is simple and elegant, only six sculptures, each set on its own wall, only in colors of red and blue. The balance of the show is a series of preparatory and standalone works on paper and one gallery devoted to a visual conversation between the artist and two of his contemporaries, Vincent Longo and Jack Youngerman.

We learn much from these selections. One important lesson is that Antonakos understood the value of placement in his works. An earlier work, from 1974, is called “On the Floor Corner Neon Square,” and offers a clear directive to any ambitious curator to save a creative installation for another piece. The Drawing Room, as in a photo from his studio, places the work on a floating wall, at the corner of where the wall ends and the floor begins. This makes that white space become part of the sculpture in a way that could be lost if it was merely placed at the intersection of two walls.

Was that the artist’s intention? Naomi Antonakos, his wife, said the piece was “defined by its position on the floor, at the left edge of the wall.” But, she said, the wall does not have to be free-standing. The sculpture could be placed where two walls meet. The artist was concerned about the height and widths of the walls in the context of these pieces. “There is a point beyond which the proportions would feel wrong to anyone used to looking at architecturally sited art,” she said. This is something that can be determined by a sense of proportion to the piece’s three-foot-square dimensions, or what feels right, rather than a specific measure.

It is important to note that the artist defined the space of his art as containing both the work and the viewer. If that is the case, proportion does become key to the work’s success. Too much white wall space and the intimacy established is lost; too little, and the space becomes too crowded to connect with the piece. The gallery’s decision to place it on a naturally backlit wall uses its architecture to provide a hint of the artist’s later work with a kind of novelistic foreshadowing. 

On an opposite wall in the front room is “Ruby and Red Incomplete Neon Circles,” taking up all of the real estate there. The one-sculpture-to-a-wall ethos that the installation works under is liberating and eye-opening, allowing each piece to have a chance to sink in and leave a mark. These fractional spheres, seen here and at other points in the gallery in shades of blue, have a balletic grace that seems as natural as breathing or a gurgling stream.

“Incomplete Blue Circle Inside Corner Neon” has the evanescence of the Cheshire Cat’s smile, the floaty feeling of an apostrophe, or the promised wish of a fallen eyelash. It is the simplest, yet perhaps the most satisfying of the neon works. Placed in the middle gallery among its racks and stacks of inventory, it is a happy surprise in an unexpected nook.

“Small Corner Incomplete Square” is all angular business, yet at the same time has a strong resemblance to the letter L, which makes it seem more lighthearted, especially in the color red. Neon’s long relationship to signage makes it difficult to banish such references, and it is curious that someone who brandished the medium to make larger statements about pure geometry and spatial relationships would risk such an allusion. Perhaps he was so completely taken with his own abstract aims for the work and its placement within architecture that he didn’t notice the association.

The exhibition is completed by a selection of drawings that may be as simple as preparations for his sculpture or vastly more complex, employing their own drawn architectural framework as the setting on paper. In them, he doesn’t veer too far from the same basic colors he used in neon. But they might have added layers or other elements missing from the studied minimalism of the sculptures.

In a further collection of drawings in a back gallery downstairs are more solid representations of the linear relationships Antonakas explored in previous years. Dating from the mid-1970s, these colored pencil-on-paper compositions hint at, quite literally, broader examinations of planes and surfaces in following decades. The show is on view through May 9.

Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater will present its annual New Works Festival this weekend with free readings of plays and musicals in development by four writers, beginning tomorrow evening at 7 with “The Roommate” by Jen Silverman.

Subsequent programs will feature “Community” by Stephen Kaplan, Saturday at 3 p.m.; “From Ship to Shape” by Walker Vreeland, Saturday at 8, and “The Man in the Ceiling” by Jules Feiffer, Sunday afternoon at 3.

“The Roommate” is a dark comedy about a recently divorced woman, Sharon, looking for someone to share her Iowa home. She finds Robin, who needs a place to hide and a chance to start over. Ms. Silverman’s plays have been produced at theaters around the country, including the Playwrights Realm in Manhattan, the Yale Rep in New Haven, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and InterAct Theatre in Philadelphia. 

“Community” is a play-within-a-play that engages issues of race in the theater, as reflected by the interaction, onstage and off, of actors in a community theater production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Mr. Kaplan has written 13 plays that have been produced throughout the U.S. and was a playwright-in-residence at the True False Theatre Company in New York City.

Mr. Vreeland’s voice is familiar to East End radio audiences. In addition to his current role as host of the Afternoon Show on WBAZ-FM, he has been heard on stations throughout the metropolitan area. He is also an actor, singer, and playwright, whose “From Ship to Shape” chronicles his experience as a lead singer for the Norwegian Cruise Line, which led to a mental breakdown and subsequent recovery.

Last week’s issue of The Star included a feature on Mr. Feiffer and his illustrated musical comedy, “The Man in the Ceiling,” the story of a young would-be cartoonist who considers himself a failure.

Bay Street has also announced the addition of a fourth production, “The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey,” to its summer Mainstage schedule. The one-man play, written and performed by James Lecesne, will run from July 18 through July 24.

The story concerns the disappearance of a 14-year-old gay boy harassed by his peers in a small New Jersey shore town. Leonard never appears, but Mr. Lecesne, who wrote the Academy Award-winning short film “Trevor,” portrays various other characters in the town, from the detective investigating the case to a mob widow who sees one of Leonard’s shoes floating in a lake to a hair stylist who reports the boy’s disappearance.

In a 2015 review for The New York Times, Charles Isherwood wrote, “A show about the brutal murder of a 14-year-old boy should not, logically speaking, leave you beaming with joy. And yet that’s the paradoxical effect of ‘The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey,’ a superlative solo show at Dixon Place written and performed by James Lecesne, himself a pretty darn dazzling beacon of theatrical talent.”

Tony Speciale, artistic director of the Abingdon Theatre Company in Manhattan, will direct the production, which will have music by Duncan Sheik.

Yung Jake, an artist and rapper based in Los Angeles who grew up in Bridgehampton as Jake Patterson, will perform as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Slithering Screens: 10 Years of New Frontier at Sundance Institute” show tomorrow at 9 p.m. in Manhattan.

He will be part of the main event, at which work from “Slithering Screens,” stories that move from the screen and onto the stage with cinema-inspired performance, interactive documentary, and immersive media storytelling, will be shown. Yung Jake and his friends will then present a mixture of music, performance, and video in the museum’s main lobby. 

The $25 admission price includes the performances, a D.J. set, and an open bar. Attendees must be 21 or older. Tickets are available on the MoMA website. 

The Salon Series of concerts by a new generation of classical musicians will return to the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill tomorrow at 6 p.m. with “Fourtissimo,” a concert by four pianists who will play together on two Yamaha grands.

The group includes a married couple: Ran Dank, a laureate of the Cleveland International Competition, the Naumburg Piano Competition, and the Sydney International Piano Competition, and Soyean Kate Lee, first-prize winner of the 2010 Naumburg competition and the 2004 Concert Artist Guild International Competition. Completing the foursome are Konstantin Soukhovetski, recipient of more than 15 awards and a board member of Southampton Cultural Center, and Vassilis Varvaresos, who, following his Carnegie Hall recital debut in 2012, was invited to perform at the White House for President Obama.

Subsequent concerts will feature Solomon Eichner with Mr. Soukhovetski (Friday, May 6), Carol Wincenc (May 13), and Yoonie Han (May 20). Tickets are $20, $10 for members and students.

The Rising Stars Piano Series at the Southampton Cultural Center continues with a concert by Mohamed Shams, an Egyptian-born pianist now studying at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, on Saturday at 7 p.m.

Mr. Shams, whose repertoire ranges from Bach and Mozart to Gershwin and Bernstein, has performed as a soloist with the Cairo Symphony, the Egyptian Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, the London Chamber Players, and the Repertory Symphony. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in April 2015 with a solo recital in the Weill Recital Hall.

While studying at the Royal Conservatoire of Music in Glasgow, he won numerous awards, including the Governor’s Prize and the David Knox Memorial prize. He has been a featured artist on WQXR, New York’s classical music radio station, on four occasions.

Guild Hall will present The Met: Live in HD’s simulcast of Richard Strauss’s one-act opera “Elektra” on Saturday at 1 p.m. First performed in Dresden in 1909, the opera focuses on Elektra, the character from Greek mythology who seeks revenge for the murder of her father, Agamemnon, at the hands of her mother, Clytemnestra, and her stepfather, Aegisthus.

Nina Stemme plays Elektra, one of the most demanding roles in the soprano repertoire. The cast also includes Waltraud Meier, Adrianne Pieczonka, and Eric Owens. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students.