Although the box office for the Hamptons International Film Festival doesn’t open until Sept. 26, its organizers are attracting early interest with intermittent announcements of its significant films.

The festival, which will be held over Columbus Day weekend, will open on Oct. 8 in East Hampton with James Vanderbilt’s “Truth,” with Robert Redford, Cate Blanchett, Topher Grace, and Elisabeth Moss. Mr. Vanderbilt served as a mentor for the festival’s Screenwriters Lab in 2009.

In the film, Mr. Redford plays Dan Rather, a former news anchor at CBS who broadcast a report in his final days about how then-President George W. Bush used family connections to avoid combat in the Vietnam War. The film, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, will open in theaters on Oct. 16.

On Oct. 9, the festival’s Southampton opening night film will be “Youth,” a film by Pablo Sorrentino, which looks at a long friendship between two older men played by Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel and how they each confront thoughts of retirement. The supporting cast includes Jane Fonda, Paul Dano, and Rachel Weisz.

The festival has also announced its narrative competition feature films, which include Matt Sobel’s “Take Me to the River,” Ciro Guerra’s “Embrace of the Serpernt,” Avishai Sivan’s “Tikkun,” Grimur Hakonarson’s “Rams,” and Diasteme’s “French Blood.”

The feature documentaries in competition will be Jon Fox’s “Newman,” David Shapiro’s “Missing People,” Jean-Gabriel Periot’s “A German Youth,” Michael Madsen’s “The Visit,” and Ilinca Calugareanu’s “Chuck Norris vs. Communism.”

The feature jury prizewinner in each category will receive a package of goods and services valued at over $85,000 to be used toward the making of another film and a cash prize of $3,000.

The festival’s jury this year will be Michael H. Weber, who wrote “500 Days of Summer” and “The Fault in Our Stars”; Dan Guando, who is head of United States Production and Acquisitions at the Weinstein Co.; Josh Charles, star of “The Good Wife” and “Masters of Sex”; Marshall Fine, an author, journalist, and film critic, and Sarah Lash, an acquisitions consultant at Conde Nast Entertainment.

Last week, the festival also announced its Views From Long Island and Conflict and Resolution sections. The Views From Long Island films highlight work either filmed on Long Island, created by those from Long Island, or featuring Long Island subjects. Those films that have a majority of their principal photography shot in Suffolk County will be eligible for a $3,000 Suffolk County Next Exposure grant. 

This year’s films are Marc Levin’s “The Class Divide,” Ron Davis’s “Harry & Snowman,” Alexandra Shiva’s “How to Dance in Ohio,” Robert Edwards’s “When I Live My Life Over Again,” and Pippa Bianco’s short film “Picturing Barbara Kruger.”

The festival’s Conflict and Resolution program is a selection of films addressing the human drama of war and violence. This year’s films are Nick Louvel and Michele Mitchell’s “The Uncondemned,” Dalibor Matanic’s “The High Sun,” Davis Guggenheim’s “He Named Me Malala,” Camilla Nielsson’s “Democrats,” Abigail Disney’s “The Armor of Light,” Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman’s short film “Last Day of Freedom,” Yasir Kareem’s short film “Kingdom of Garbage,” Dress Code’s short film “Plamen,” and Enric Ribes and Oriol Martinez’s short film “Take Me to the Moon.”

The Brizzolara Family Foundation will award $5,000 to one of the films, which will be followed with a panel discussion after its screening. This year’s selection will be presented by the Tribeca Shortlist, a new video-on-demand service set to launch in October that is a partnership between Lionsgate and Tribeca Enterprises.

Festival passes are now on sale, and festival box offices will open for individual ticket sales on Sept. 26 in New York City, East Hampton, and South­ampton. Tickets to the opening night film and after party will be available for purchase this month.

In the early 1990s, when she was in working toward her M.F.A. at Rutgers, Christina Schlesinger was feeling lost. “I asked myself, ‘When did I feel great?’ and I decided it was when I was a tomboy. I had all this energy and spunk.” She embarked on a series of works she calls “Tomboys.” Each piece consists of a photo of her as an adolescent screened on pieces of her old clothing — jeans, flannel shirts, and T-shirts — that were then attached to canvas and painted.

Two other series, “Dildos” and “Lesbian Sex,” were painted at the same time. Much of the work was sexually explicit. “I had all this work, but people weren’t ready to show it. Fast forward to now, with all the changes toward gay people that have happened so rapidly.” About a year ago she went to a meeting at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City. She asked the museum’s director, Hunter O’Hanian, to look at her work.

The result was “All True Tomboys,” an exhibition organized by the museum at the Prince Street Project Space in January. Several of the “Tomboys” paintings had been shown at the Ross School in 2012, and “Hands on Hips, Pink,” one of the dildo paintings, appeared on the Ms. magazine blog to illustrate a series of poems by Mary Meriam titled “Subverting the ‘Girlie’ Calendar.” In 2016, works from the series will be shown in a group show at the Schwules Museum in Berlin.

The “Tomboys” paintings fit snugly within a body of work that draws on images from all aspects of Ms. Schlesinger’s life, much of it informed by a collage aesthetic that combines images with other materials. “Now that I’m at the other end of my life, I’m thinking of who can be my mentors as I’m getting older. And I thought of my grandmothers. Grandmother Schlesinger was a suffragette, and Grandmother Cannon wrote books and was a classmate of Gertrude Stein.”

She showed a visitor a series of new portraits in her Springs studio, including one of her paternal grandmother and several of friends. The images are painted on pieces of paper that are taped together and mounted on old cotton sheets. “I think of them as very light, like flags or banners.”

The scraps of paper are recycled pages from notebooks, lesson plans, and handouts from her 10 years of teaching eighth-grade cultural history at the Ross School. Ms. Schlesinger had never been to the East End until she received a call from Courtney Ross in 1995, while she was working on a mural on Los Angeles. “I flew from L.A. to East Hampton, stayed at the Pink House, and at the end of the day they offered me the job. The whole trip was 24 hours.”

Teaching comes naturally to Ms. Schlesinger, who taught at York Prep in Manhattan from 2005 to 2008, was an artist in residence at the East End Arts Council in Riverhead in June, and taught an encaustic class at the Art Barge in August.

While she finds encaustic “a fun medium that gives you a lot of options,” since she was diagnosed in 2008 with Stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, “it kind of scared me into using more water-based paint. I don’t work with oil anymore. I was sick for two years, after which I tried to teach full time, but found I didn’t have the energy.”

The teaching tradition goes back at least to her grandfather, Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., who taught history at Harvard, and passed through her father, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., an historian, social critic, and author of, among many other titles, the three-volume “The Age of Roosevelt” and “A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House.” He had been a speechwriter and adviser for President Kennedy and served as special assistant for Latin American affairs during his administration.

“My dad was charismatic and charming,” she said. “I had fantastic experiences because of him and met all kinds of people, from Marlene Dietrich to Fritz Lang to all the Kennedys and Adlai Stevenson. When we were growing up he wanted to make sure we came downstairs to meet everybody.”

“I think my lineage is something I’ve always struggled with. The thing about having really successful parents is that it’s hard to feel you can measure up. You get that reflected fame, but you have to figure out your own life, which is separate from theirs. It’s been a blessing and a blight. It looks easy, but it’s tricky.”

Ms. Schlesinger attended Radcliffe College, from which she graduated cum laude as an English and fine arts major. From 1971 to 1980 she lived in Venice, Calif., where she became involved with feminism and community art. She studied at Cal Arts with Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro, but left to co-found the Citywide Mural Project with Judy Baca and, subsequently, SPARC, the Social and Public Art Resource Center.

She spent the 1980s in New York City, where she participated in numerous group exhibitions and joined the Guerrilla Girls, the anonymous political activists who confronted sexism and racism in the art world. During the 1990s she created several public art projects, including “Chagall Comes to Venice Beach,” which has been declared an iconic mural of Los Angeles.

Ms. Schlesinger and her domestic partner, Nan Fried, who teaches visual art at the Fieldston School, have been together for more than 30 years. In 1999 they traveled to China to adopt their daughter, Chun, who was almost 2 years old at the time.

“Adopting Chun was the best and most meaningful thing I’ve done in my life. When we were there, they asked us to wait in our hotel until they brought her there. When she was 11, we decided to return to the village with Chun. I had imagined this bucolic place, but it turned out it was a mining town built in the Soviet style. It was grim, polluted, and the orphanage was a concrete building on the side of a highway.” The orphanage had no information about Chun’s background, as she had been left on its doorstep.

“Being a mom led to my ‘Dorothy’ series of large, mixed-media canvases based on a 1950s coloring book of ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ That was when I began the practice of adhering materials to canvas as part of the painting.”

Chun attended the Springs School from kindergarten through second grade and then transferred to Fieldston. She just left for her freshman year at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. “Her college application essay started off, ‘When people ask me if I have my mother’s face or my father’s eyes, I can’t answer that.’ ”

Ms. Schlesinger divides her time between a loft in TriBeCa and a house on Deep Six Drive in Springs that she purchased in 1999. She also spends several weeks each summer at a family house on Cape Cod. “I don’t really like TriBeCa anymore. I don’t know anybody on the streets, and all the old stores and restaurants are being replaced by banks and nail salons. Now that Chun is in college, things will be different. I used to have to go back to New York City every fall because she was going to Fieldston, but now I have more latitude.”

As a result of that freedom, she was able to accept a job as a leave replacement teacher at Ross for the fall semester. She also plans to go to Los Angeles during the winter to refurbish the Chagall mural and see some old friends from her years there. “I feel I’m beginning a new chapter in my life,” she said.

Cohen and Vega at Ashawagh

Ashawagh Hall in Springs will exhibit photographs by Zachary Cohen and paintings by Matt Vega tomorrow through Sunday, with an opening reception set for tomorrow from 5 to 8 p.m.

Mr. Cohen will show 54 black-and-white photographs he produced in Paris in 1988 of the gentrification of La Bastille neighborhood as well as work from an ongoing series, “In Transit,” that focuses on places people pass through en route to other destinations.

Mr. Vega, who lives in Amagansett, will be showing a selection of small unstretched canvases chosen from 145 painted in August as well as larger stretched canvases, also from 2015. A photographer for two decades, his return to painting was marked by the use of letters as line and shape and as symbol. The newer paintings are concerned with the symbolic nature of marks.

The gallery will be open tomorrow from 5 to 8, Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday from 1 to 6 p.m.

Danish Design

The Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill will show “Danish Design Meets American Art” tomorrow through Sunday from noon to 7 p.m. each day. A reception will take place Saturday from 5 to 7. The exhibition will include home accessories and accent furniture imported in limited quantities from Denmark by Kontrast, a company founded by Louise Fisher, a Montauk resident, as well as contemporary art selected by Ms. Nightingale. Kontrast’s offerings can be seen at shopkontrast. com.

Portraits Come Home

“Remnant Animism,” a show of paintings by Aubrey Roemer, is now on view at the Atlantic Terrace Gallery in Montauk and will remain up through September. The work originated last summer as part of “Leviathan: The Montauk Portrait Project,” Ms. Roemer’s effort to paint the portraits of 10 percent of Montauk’s population. The paintings were executed on old household linens and hung in clothesline fashion at Edward V. Ecker Sr. County Park in Montauk.

Since then, the work has traveled to the Vermont Studio Center and to Somerset, England, before returning to Montauk for waxing and final touches. As a consequence of the travels and exhibitions, the exposure to the elements has become part of the work. Ms. Roemer cites process art and cave paintings as among her inspirations.

Christensen Retrospective

The Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea will open its fall season today with a retrospective exhibition of work by Dan Christensen, the renowned Color Field painter who lived in Springs until his death in 2007. A reception will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. today, and the show will continue through Oct. 17.

The exhibition involves more than 20 paintings from various periods of his career, including rare early spray paintings from the late 1960s, saturated stained canvases from the 1970s, spray ovals from the 1980s, pulsating orbs from the 1990s, and rhythmic calligraphic swirls from his last decade.

His work is in more than 30 museum collections, and a traveling exhibition, “Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting,” was organized by Kansas City’s Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 2009.

Strassfield Juries at S.C.C.

The Southampton Culture Center, on Pond Lane in Southampton Village, has a show on view of many regional artists whose work was selected by Christina Strassfield, the director and senior curator at Guild Hall’s museum. The show will feature work by Stephanie Reit, Ruth Nasca, Setha Low, Lance Corey, Linda Capello, Sara Douglas, Sarah Jaffe Turnbull, and Dan Sullivan, among many others.

The show is on view through Oct. 3. A reception will be held on Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m.

Our Fabulous Variety Show, an East End troupe of actors whose theatrical performances help raise money for nonprofits here, will present its 11th production, “Our Adventures in Wonderland,” at Guild Hall in East Hampton starting tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. and continuing with two programs on Saturday and three next weekend.

Inspired by the Lewis Carroll story, it features many styles of dance, including ballet, tap, contemporary, jazz, funk, and hip-hop, and several musical solos.

“It’s probably the most narrative we’ve ever had in a show,” said Kasia Klimiuk, who, along with Anita Boyer, founded the company in 2010. Both women, who live full time in Hampton Bays, are dancers and actresses.

The group’s first show was held in 2010 at the Southampton Cultural Center. “It was a one-off,” according to Ms. Klimiuk. “We did it to raise money for Crohn’s disease and colitis. Then we decided to do it again because it was very successful and we had a great time doing it. We only had seven or eight people in our first show. This one has about 35, not including crew.”

“The first show was really a cabaret,” Ms. Boyer said. “There was no real theme. It was just, here are our talented friends, watch them sing and dance and help raise money for a good cause. We still focus on donating what we can after each show to a different charitable organization in the community. Since then we’ve also started to grow the educational aspect of our group and the creative side, and we’ve moved toward creating more complete narratives.”

Last December they performed their own take on “A Christmas Carol” at Guild Hall. “We still had Scrooge and the ghosts and his life changing in the end. But for ‘Wonderland’ we went one step further and created our own original version of Wonderland and the story, and we tried to bring in some new, more modern themes,” Ms. Boyer said.

“Kasia and I are the ones who get each production started, but we do value the ‘our’ in Our Fabulous Variety Show. Once we’re in rehearsals we try to get everyone involved in molding it into what it eventually becomes.” The women hold auditions twice a year and will bring back “A Christmas Carol” in December.

In addition to the five performances of “Our Adventures in Wonderland,” the group will present “Wonderland After Hours,” featuring Danny Ximo, a Sag Harbor actor and female impersonator, on Sept. 26 at 9 p.m. “Danny has been in our shows since the beginning, but he wasn’t available for all the dates of ‘Wonderland.’ So to get him involved we gave him his own show,” Ms. Boyer said.

“It will be more like the shows we used to do, kind of a vaudeville-style variety or cabaret show. He’ll open it with his character DEOX, who is a combination of masculinity and femininity, then we’ll throw in some of our musical friends who will dance and sing.”

In addition to tomorrow’s show, performances will take place Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Friday, Sept. 25, at 7:30, Sept. 26 at 7:30, and Sept. 27 at 2. The performances will benefit HUGS, Inc., an organization on the East End that provides educational and recreational programs for middle and high school youth, and the O.F.V.S. performing arts scholarship fund. Tickets, which start at $20 and top out at $55, can be purchased at ourfabulousvarietyshow.org.

The Choral Society of the Hamptons will celebrate its 70th anniversary season with a dramatic selection of works suitable for such an event, including a work commissioned from Victoria Bond to be performed early next summer.

The other scheduled concerts will take place during the December holiday season and the end of winter.

The society was founded in 1945 by Charlotte Rogers, a pianist, organist, and director of church choirs who became well known in the Hamptons during a long and fruitful career.

Ms. Bond’s piece will be based on the biblical story of Moses and will be a world premiere from the noted composer and conductor, who has a house in East Hampton. In a press release, Ms. Bond stated that she was fascinated by Moses, “because he reluctantly assumed the role of lawgiver and leader and had difficulty accepting the enormous challenge that was required of him. I want to explore the human side of him, not the icon he has become.” That program will also include Beethoven’s Mass in C.

The other programs, planned for the season and developed by Mark Mangini, the society’s musical director, include Ottorino Respighi’s “Laud to the Nativity,” a cantata. The piece by the melodist, known for his “Pines” and “Fountains” of Rome, will be presented in two back-to-back performances with other festive works at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church on Dec. 6.

On March 20, Gabriel Faure’s “Requiem” and Bach’s Cantata No. 4, “Christ Lay in Death’s Bonds” will provide moving melodies from different centuries at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church.

Mr. Mangini, who has led the society for 13 years, will conduct all three performances. The singers will be accompanied by players from the South Fork Chamber Orchestra and noted soloists from the New York metropolitan area.

Those interested in joining the society are welcome at the season’s first rehearsal on Sept. 21 at 7:30 p.m. in the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, and to schedule an audition for the following Monday.

The society also welcomes tax-deductible gifts and support from businesses of many kinds, as tickets only cover a portion of its expenses. Information on auditions, concerts, and donations is available at the society’s website.

Guild Hall will celebrate Labor Day weekend with George Bernard Shaw and rock ’n’ roll, though not on the same program. A concert staging of “Don Juan in Hell,” the third act dream sequence of Shaw’s play “Man and Superman,” will be presented tomorrow at 8 p.m. The performance will star Anna Bergman, Dick Cavett, Harris Yulin, and Stephen Lane. Mr. Yulin will direct.

Because of its 80 to 90-minute length, “Don Juan in Hell” is often cut from “Man and Superman” or performed separately. It consists of a philosophical debate among Don Juan, the Devil, Doña Ana, and the talkative Statue of Don Gonzalo, Ana’s father. The debate concerns the advantages of Hell, which the Devil equates with art, beauty, love, and pleasure, and Heaven, which Don Juan links with rational discourse and the life force.

Tickets range from $30, $28 for members, to $50 and $48.

Spin Doctors will bring its brand of pop, rock, and blues to Guild Hall on Saturday evening at 8. The band’s first studio album, “Pocket Full of Kryptonite,” released in 1991, sold 10 million copies worldwide, and one cut, “Two Princes,” was the most-played rock song in the world in 1993. Their most recent album, “If the River Was Whiskey,” reconnects the band with the deep-blues style that gave it its start. Tickets start at $40 and $38 and rise to $150 and $145 for premium seats.

The Hit Men will give two performances on Sunday at 7 and 9:30 p.m. Members of the group performed with some of the most popular acts of the 1960s and 1970s, including Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Tommy James and the Shondells, Carly Simon, Cat Stevens, Elton John, Barry Manilow, and others. Their look back at rock ’n’ roll history includes not only the music but also recollections of their days in studios and on the road. Tickets are $40, $38 for members; premium seats are $75 and $70. 

Florence Fabricant, food writer for The New York Times and author of 11 (soon to be 12) cookbooks, remembers having lunch with her father when she was 8 years old at Le Cafe Chambord at La Cote Basque, one of the most elegant restaurants in Manhattan until it closed in 1964.

“It was a storefront,” she recalled, “and in the window were champagne bottles of all the different sizes — there were 12, not including half bottles — and the ritual was that I had to name each of those sized bottles before I could go into the restaurant.”

Ms. Fabricant, who said that her parents were foodies “at a time when the term didn’t exist,” has many such food-related memories from her childhood. “When I was little, when we went to a Chinese restaurant, I was very careful about how much soy sauce I put in the egg drop soup because it had to have just the right amount of saltiness and color.”

As a teenager, watching Dione Lucas make a strudel on television, she took copious notes and within a week was stretching her own strudel dough. She went to France for her junior year of college and still recalls the monkfish with lobster sauce she ate on the Liberté during its crossing.

With such a background, it comes as a surprise to learn that it wasn’t until 1972, after graduating from college, working in advertising, getting married, and having two children, that she wrote her first food column — for The East Hampton Star.

“I was living in Wainscott that summer. I had a bunch of friends with kids the same ages as mine. I was the one they asked how to cook a piece of bluefish, or who had the best potato salad, or where to find good tomatoes. And I kind of had the answers. So I pitched the idea of a food column to Everett Rattray at The Star, and he said, ‘Well, do a sample, 400 words.’ It probably took me three weeks. Today I could do that in the shower. I began writing the column and within six months started to get assignments from The Times.”

In addition to her weekly Times columns Front Burner and Off the Menu, she joins Eric Asimov for his Wines of the Times features. She not only tastes each week’s wines but also devises recipes appropriate to them. Their book, “Wine With Food: Pairing Notes and Recipes From The New York Times,” was published in 2014.

Ms. Fabricant has been coming to the East End since she was 12, when she stayed in Southampton with a close friend’s family. “People complain about the traffic,” she said. “I remember when it took four hours, when there was no Long Island Expressway.”

Her parents took a place in Westhampton when she was in high school, and she and her husband, Richard, a lawyer, began renting there soon after they were married. “When we visited friends in Water Mill and East Hampton, we really liked those areas more. So we started renting in Wainscott for a couple of years, then we built a little house, and after selling that we built the house in East Hampton where we live now.”

Ms. Fabricant remembers when the culinary options were limited on the East End. “When we first started coming out here, if I wanted interesting produce, I could get strawberries from a truck on the road, tomatoes from a card table in somebody’s front yard, and corn on North Main Street at another card table. But if you really wanted fresh produce, you went to the Green Thumb. And to go from East Hampton to Water Mill on a Saturday morning took 10 minutes. You didn’t think twice about it. You don’t do that any more.”

While she applauds the farm-to-table movement and the profusion of farm stands and farmers markets, she wishes organic food was more prevalent. “I use almost no processed food,” she said. “I’ve been doing organic since the late 1970s when I read something about salmonella in chickens and eggs. I refused to stop making mayonnaise, so I began to buy organic eggs and moved on from there. It wasn’t that easy then. You had to go to health food stores, and they were really kind of grungy, Birkenstock-type places.”

For the past four summers, Ms. Fabricant has hosted “Stirring the Pot: Conversations With Culinary Celebrities,” a Sunday morning series at Guild Hall, where she is a trustee. Her guests have included Lidia Bastianich, Thomas Keller, Anthony Bourdain, Gregory Zacharian, and Tom Colicchio, among others.

“At the end of the day, the celebrity chefs are doing something good, because more people are aware of food. A lot of them are going to promote their own roducts, but at the same time they’re not promoting Doritos. They’re promoting cooking, and I think it’s a good thing.” She also cited the director Francis Ford Coppola and Fess Parker, who famously played Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone on television, as “very serious winery owners, extremely serious,” despite their celebrity.

While she has never worked in a restaurant, she has been in countless restaurant kitchens, working alongside chefs, interviewing them as they cooked, taking their recipes home “and wrestling them to the ground,” because chef’s recipes can be complicated. She cited one that called for crushing together five types of peppercorns. “If I use that recipe, I’ll reduce it to two.”

Her next book, “City Harvest: 100 Recipes From New York’s Best Restaurants,” will be published in October. A fund-raiser for City Harvest, it will contain recipes from the restaurants that support the food rescue organization, which has been dedicated since 1982 to helping feed more than 1.4 million New Yorkers facing hunger every year. Among the chefs contributing recipes are Daniel Humm, Marcus Samuelson, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and David Chang.

Ms. Fabricant has also written “Park Avenue Potluck” and “Park Avenue Potluck Celebrations,” both of which were projects for the benefit of the Society of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

She spends a lot of time with her husband on the South Fork. “Besides cooking we like to play tennis, go to the beach off-season, and we take a lot of long walks. The network of hiking trails out here is amazing, and so few people realize they exist. We keep cross-country skis and snowshoes here, and we go to Cedar Point and tromp around in the snow.”

Her daughter is a book designer who has designed five of her books. Her son and daughter-in-law are not in the culinary field, but they love to cook. “It’s fun to work with them on food, particularly out here.”

While she knows so many chefs both in New York City and on the East End, she doesn’t socialize with them too often. “I get invited to a lot of stuff, but if you want to hang with chefs you have to do it at 11 at night or later and go out drinking someplace in Brooklyn or downtown. I’m afraid that’s not my style.” She refuses to divulge the names of her favorite restaurants.

“Cooking is often a discovery,” she said. “What keeps me going is that I’m always learning something.”

Asis and Nivola

At Drawing Room

The Drawing Room in East Hampton will present concurrent solo exhibitions of work by Antonio Asis and Costantino Nivola from Saturday through Oct. 26.

“Cercles Concentriques” will illuminate Mr. Asis’s lifelong study of the relationships between light, color, movement, and sensory illusion. Born in Buenos Aires in 1932, he moved to Paris in 1956 and became part of the international community of kinetic and optical artists. The exhibition focuses on his small gouache compositions of concentric rings of dilating electric colors, made between 1961 and 2011, which reflect his scientific mind and precise hand.

“Early Concretes” will present rare sculptures and wall reliefs by Nivola that highlight his distinctive vision. Made between 1950 and 1982, the sculptures on view include 11 faceted abstract figures and two unique bas-reliefs, as well as a maquette related to the large mural commissioned by the Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis in 1963. The immediacy of his gestural sculpting in plaster or wet concrete is reflected in the work in this exhibition.

Gornik at Pace Prints

An exhibition of prints and monoprints by the North Haven artist April Gornik will open today at Pace Prints in Manhattan and continue through Oct. 10.

The show will feature her newest edition, “Desert Light,” inspired by her travels in Namibia, which she created with the Pace Editions Workshop using soft ground etching, aquatint, and spit bite aquatint to capture the light of a desert landscape.

Art Talks in Amagansett

“Art/History/Amagansett,” a new programming initiative of the Amagansett Library, will present free hourlong conversations focused on the art and artists of Amagansett and Springs in September and early October.

The series will launch Saturday at 6 p.m. with “Gossip Girls: Pollock and Krasner’s Biographers Tell All,” a conversation between Gail Levin, author of “Lee Krasner,” and Helen Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, whose monograph “Jackson Pollock” was published in 2014.

On successive Saturdays at 6, gallery directors Sara De Luca of Ille Arts in Amagansett and Eric Brown of Manhattan’s Tibor de Nagy will discuss emerging artists and the art markets (Sept. 19); Christopher Kohan, president of the Art Barge, and Nicole Bigar and Michael Rosch, artists and trustees, will examine the development of that institution (Sept. 26), and John Alexander, a world-renowned painter who lives in Amagansett, will discuss how the East End has inspired his art (Oct. 3).

“The Business of Art: 10 Things You Should Know,” a talk by Carol Steinberg, a New York attorney who represents artists, will take place on Sept. 27, a Sunday, at 6.

At the Whaling Museum

“Our Town,” an exhibition of paintings by Barbara Hadden and Michael Butler, both self-taught artists, will open tomorrow at the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum and remain on view through Oct. 15. A reception will be held Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

A Sag Harbor resident, Ms. Hadden began painting in acrylic and ink in the late 1970s and has since moved to watercolor and oils. Many of her images are of the villages and landscapes of the East End.

Mr. Butler, a summer resident of Sag Harbor, works in acrylic on canvas in a style that has been described as naive or primitive. He prefers the terms “intuitive” or “narrative.”

“Our Town” is the second exhibition of a two-part series that is part of the 375th Anniversary of Southampton Town.

New at Peter Marcelle

“Michael Viera: New Paintings” will open at Peter Marcelle Project in Southampton on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. and continue through Sept. 20.

Mr. Viera paints unpopulated landscapes that seem still and pristine while at the same time suggesting something less benign lurking behind that serenity. His figures, too, seem to be part of a narrative withheld from the viewer and to provoke curiosity without satisfying it.

Meola Chases Rough Weather

“Storm Chaser,” an exhibition of photographs by Eric Meola, is on view now through Sept. 26 at the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery in Manhattan.

Three years ago, in order to “see if there was another visual side to the gray, rain-wrapped funnels that wreak havoc,” Mr. Meola, who lives in Sagapon­ack, joined a group of storm chasers who travel the Great Plains during tornado season. His large-scale photographs capture both the fury and the ephemeral beauty of tornadoes, storms, and slow-moving supercells that erupt each spring.

Hamada Paintings in Chelsea

Hiroyuki Hamada, who lives and works in East Hampton, will have a solo exhibition of paintings from today through Oct. 17 at Lori Bookstein Fine Art in Chelsea. A reception will be held this evening from 6 to 8.

Well known for his sculpture, Mr. Hamada has done preliminary drawings for years but only recently returned to painting. Marked by the same level of craftsmanship as his sculpture, the paintings are executed, with one exception, in a gray-scale that uses a mixture of acrylic, charcoal, enamel, graphite, and oil similar to that employed to polychrome his sculpture.

Photographic Self Portraits

“Me: Photographic Self Portraits,” a group exhibition at Ricco Maresca Gallery in Chelsea that will open next Thursday and run through Oct. 31, will include work by the East End artists Sara Salaway and Bastienne Schmidt.

The show will include both contemporary and vintage works by Vito Acconci, Weegee, Berenice Abbott, Imogen Cunningham, and Constantin Brancusi, among many others, as well as 144 Photomatics, or photo booth snapshots. A reception will take place next Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Four at Ashawagh

“No Common Denominator,” a show of four East End artists working in a variety of mediums, will be on view at Ashawagh Hall in Springs Saturday and Sunday. A reception will happen Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m., and the gallery will open at 10 a.m. both days.

The exhibition will include flower paintings by Adrienne Mim, soft sculpture by Gary Schatmeyer, mosaic sculpture by Marcie Honerkamp, and watercolors by K. Ivy.

Uniphi Good, an East Hampton and Manhattan management, marketing, and media company that emphasizes selfless action and universally beneficial outcomes, will present its second annual East End Music and Arts Festival from next Thursday through Sept. 19. The three-day festival will benefit the Springs Food Pantry, the Wounded Warrior Project, and Higher Orbits, the latter a nonprofit organization that promotes science, technology, engineering, and math along with leadership, teamwork, and communication through spaceflight.

A highlight of the festival will be a Sept. 19 concert at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett featuring Darryl (DMC) McDaniels of the pioneering rap group Run-DMC, the Grammy-nominated band Tonic, and the singer-songwriters Glen Phillips, of Toad the Wet Sprocket, and Toby Lightman.

The festival will also feature a three-day art show at the 69 Main Street Gallery in Southampton, at which hand-signed artwork by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Bob Dylan will be exhibited for the first time. The show will open with a V.I.P. reception on Friday, Sept. 18, at 7 p.m.

For children, Art and Astronauts happens on Sept. 19 from 10 a.m. to noon at the Springs Presbyterian Church community center. Art educators will lead children in projects related to space and the Abstract Expressionist movement. Capt. Frank Culbertson, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronaut, will be on hand, as will the Vanderbilt Museum’s Discovering the Universe mobile classroom.

Mr. McDaniels will sign copies of his comic books, from his Darryl Makes Comics publishing house, on Sept. 19 at 2 p.m. at BookHampton in East Hampton. At 5 p.m. on the same day, Tonic, Mr. Phillips, and Ms. Lightman will perform and sign their recordings at Innersleeve Records in Amagansett.

The festival’s timing, two weeks after Labor Day weekend, was intentional, said Annie Balliro, Uniphi Good’s president and chief executive. “We wanted to do something slightly after the really crazy season, but also, I think fall is perfect here,” she said. “We wanted to create a multi-event festival to not only speak to visitors, but for our local folks and community.”

All of the company’s events benefit charity organizations. “It’s really important to us to give back,” she said. “I think there is a big disconnect between this glamorized version of the Hamptons and an awareness of how many people are in need. The reality is that the Hamptons are like any other place in the world. There is need out here. Our company wanted to support the community and raise money for these organizations.”

Fortunately, all those participating in the festival are part of the Uniphi Good family, Ms. Balliro said. “We always say, ‘Good friends, good times, good vibes.’ That’s where this comes from. This is an invitation for the whole community to join this wonderful group of friends and come together to support wonderful music, great art, and a kids event with astronauts — a unique multiplatform event that everyone can come celebrate with us.”

As a management agency, Uniphi Good represents over 20 astronauts. Last year, Ms. Balliro said, the firm began an effort to promote an extension of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education that adds art to the mix. “It’s important to figure out a way to create an event where we could have STEAM education activities.” In Springs, she said, “there is an incredible force for artistic expression,” referencing artists, including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who lived and created there.

“We do a very cool, borderline-nuts art project,” Ms. Balliro said, “where we compare a lot of Abstract Expressionist art to what space looks like. When you ask, ‘Is this space, or a picture by Pollock?’ it’s hard to tell! They’re getting an education about the area and local art history. From there, we segue into a real treat, meeting real, live astronauts.”

General admission tickets to the Sept. 19 concert at the Stephen Talkhouse cost $75. A limited number of V.I.P. packages that include a preshow meet-and-greet with the artists and a limited edition festival poster that can be signed by them cost $100. They are available at uniphigood.com/tix and stephentalkhouse.com. Doors open at 6 p.m. for V.I.P.s and at 7 for general admission ticketholders.

The 15th annual Box Art Auction benefiting East End Hospice will be held Sept. 12 from 4:30 to 7 p.m. at the Ross School Lower Campus Field House in Bridgehampton. For those who wish a sneak peek, the boxes are on view today from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Hoie Hall at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton.

Three of the artists offered an early look at their boxes at various stages of development. James DeMartis, who works in metal, has taken part in 13 of the events. “Every year I do something different,” he said. He decided on a jewelry box with a bronze base for this year’s auction, and several months ago he showed a visitor a mock-up before beginning work on the actual piece.

Over the course of fabrication he cut shapes out of the bronze, enriched the surface with chemicals, and welded the pieces of the base from the inside with sheet metal. The box was oiled and waxed and partitioned to define jewelry space. Mr. DeMartis, who admitted to a history of finishing his pieces at the last minute, had to sneak into Hoie Hall after dark the night before last year’s preview to deposit his box.

Since April Gornik usually paints on such a large scale, she has to rethink how to approach something as small as a standard cigar box. “This year I’m doing a reflection of a pond,” she said several months ago. She had an image picked out and began working on it over the summer. Ms. Gornik, too, has participated in many of the box art auctions. “Working on such a different scale can be a challenge,” she said, “but the important thing is that I really believe in the hospice and supporting its work.”

Michelle Stuart’s body of work includes earthworks, installations, encaustic paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs. She has cited as influences on her practice history, botany, travel, and astronomy, the latter reflected in her choice of a starry night sky from which, somewhat mysteriously, a hand emerges. The photographs of her work in progress make clear how she is able to synthesize disparate objects and materials into a coherent whole.

The first box art auction took place 15 years ago, when more than 100 East End artists were asked to transform small, unadorned boxes into unique works of art to be put up for bids at an auction to benefit the hospice, which provides care for terminally ill patients, their families, and loved ones.

Arlene Bujese, the benefit’s chairwoman, has organized the art for this year’s exhibition, as she has for the past 13 years. Michael Cinque will serve as master of ceremonies, and Lucas Hunt will conduct the auction. Leif Hope will receive the Spirit of Community Award at the auction for his contributions to the area for more than 50 years.

Among the more than 80 artists participating this year are Jennifer Cross, Mr. DeMartis, Connie Fox, Ms. Gornik, Carol Hunt, Dennis Leri, Christa Maiwald, Fulvio Massi, Randall Rosenthal, Ms. Stuart, Hans Van de Bovenkamp, and Frank Wimberley.

Admission to the auction is $75, which includes wine and hors d’oeuvres. Photographs of the boxes will be available for viewing at eeh.org.