Box Art Preview

The annual Box Art auction benefiting East End Hospice will take place on Sept. 12 at the Ross School Lower Campus Field House, but would-be bidders and the just plain curious can preview the more than 80 unique artworks at Hoie Hall at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, East Hampton, Wednesday and next Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

A free meet-the-artists reception will be held at that location on Wednesday from 5 to 7 p.m. The boxes can also be previewed, and more information obtained, at eeh.org.

Gordon Stevenson at Tripoli

“Never Say Goodbye,” an exhibition of new oil paintings by Gordon Stevenson, will open today at East Hampton’s Tripoli Gallery, with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. It will remain on view through Sept. 28.

The show continues Mr. Stevenson’s transformation of frames from cartoons that were important to him as a child, into large paintings. The shift in scale and medium and the freezing of specific moments refreshes familiar images. According to the artist, “If you look at a cartoon as an adult rather than as a child you have a very different viewpoint on it.”

New at Demato

The Richard Demato Gallery in Sag Harbor will open “Across a Rural Skyline,” a solo show of paintings by Andrea Kowch, with a reception Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition will continue through Sept. 28.

Ms. Kowch, who lives and works in Detroit, is a realist painter who has acknowledged the importance to her work of Renaissance painting and American masters such as Wyeth and Hopper. The beauty of her meticulously rendered interiors and landscapes, populated by women who never smile or make eye contact with each other, is offset by the mysterious, almost surreal isolation of the characters.

Cuba Photos at Tulla Booth

Also in Sag Harbor, the Tulla Booth Gallery is presenting, through Sept. 30, “Cuba 1959,” an exhibition of photographs by Burt Glinn. Mr. Glinn, then a young Magnum photographer, caught the last flight to Cuba from Miami on New Year’s Day 1959, and proceeded to capture in pictures the idealism, mayhem, and excitement of the first days of the Cuban revolution, including Fidel Castro’s entrance into Havana.

Midweek Show at Ashawagh

“To Each Her Own,” a show of paintings by Barbara Bilotta and Anna Franklin, will be on view at Ashawagh Hall in Springs from Wednesday through Friday, Sept. 4. The gallery will be open daily from noon to 7 p.m., with a reception Wednesday from 4 to 7.

Ms. Bilotta considers herself an Abstract Expressionist whose patterns and organic forms reflect her love of nature. Though her work is eclectic and occasionally abstract, Ms. Franklin is primarily a landscape painter.

Abstract Garden Photos

Lawrence Fine Art in East Hampton is showing photographs from Barbara Macklowe’s “Floreale” series through Sept. 15. Using her East Hampton garden as inspiration, Ms. Macklowe creates highly abstracted images of flora and flowers. Her garden was featured in Guild Hall’s Garden as Art tour last weekend.

Realism at Grenning

Recent works by Melissa Franklin Sanchez and Ramiro, who live and paint together in Florence, Italy, will open at the Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor with a reception Saturday from 6 to 7:30 p.m. and continue through Sept. 13.

Both artists are classically trained and draw from life. In his portraits, Ramiro aims for accuracy beyond the physical in order to convey the sitter’s psyche. The level of detail in Ms. Franklin Sanchez’s interiors brings to mind the domesticity of the 17th-century Dutch masters.

Pop-Up Watercolor Show

A pop-up watercolor art show and sale to benefit Peconic Land Trust will be on view at Bridge Gardens in Bridgehampton on Saturday, Sunday, and Sept. 5 and 6. The exhibition will include work by Lois Bender, the organization’s artist educator, and her students from the garden’s watercolor classes.

Garden florals, landscapes, and seascapes will be on view and for sale. Twenty percent of all proceeds will be donated to the trust. The gallery will be open from 1 to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sundays. Refreshments will be provided.

Peter Beard Poster

Peter Beard, the renowned artist and photographer perhaps best known for his photographs of Africa, has created a commemorative poster for Paddlers for Humanity’s 10th annual Block Island Challenge, which will happen Saturday.

The 18-mile paddle over open ocean is a fund-raiser for the organization, which is “dedicated to bettering children’s lives, with an emphasis on supporting innovative and comprehensive mental health programs for kids and youth,” according to its website.

Joss Parker in Bridgehampton

Paintings by Joss Parker are on view now through Friday, Sept. 4, at the Lucille Khornak Gallery in Bridgehampton. Mr. Parker’s work, with its celebration of contemporary culture and images from cartoons, advertising, and comics, reflects the influence of Andy Warhol, Kenny Scharf, and Keith Haring, among others.

“It’s getting very intense,” said Steph Paynes, guitarist and founder of Lez Zeppelin, “which is nice.”

Ms. Paynes, a Long Island native, was speaking of her 11-year-old band’s inexorable march to greater heights. The four-piece, all-female group, devoted to the music of the English hard rock band Led Zeppelin, has long been a favorite of the summer crowd at Amagansett’s Stephen Talkhouse. They performed to a packed and frenzied audience on May 23 and will return tomorrow for another 8 p.m. show.

In between, Ms. Paynes said last week, the band played to thousands at a festival in Singapore. In October, they will tour France, Belgium, and Switzerland and will celebrate Halloween with shows at the Alyeska Resort in Girdwood, Alaska.

In no small part, the band’s popularity is testament to its forerunner. When Led Zeppelin emerged in the late 1960s, Jimmy Page, the band’s visionary guitarist and producer, was already a seasoned session musician and performer. The quartet he assembled took the blues form and ran with it, producing some of rock ’n’ roll’s most powerful, creative, and lasting music.

“It sounds just as relevant in 2015, I would argue, as it did in 1975,” Ms. Paynes said.

But in equally large measure, Lez Zeppelin’s success is owed to its own virtuosity, its mastery of some very challenging music. Leesa Harrington-Squyres, the band’s drummer, is note-perfect in recreating the thundering drive of the late John Bonham, widely acknowledged as rock ’n’ roll’s finest and most powerful drummer. Onstage, Ms. Paynes replicates not only the testosterone-driven riffs and overdriven electric-guitar tones of Mr. Page (a fan of the band), but also his mannerisms, down to the guitarist’s slinky moves and sidelong glances.

The music is bracing, sexy, and overtly suggestive. The fact that it is being performed by four young women, as novel a device as that may be, is almost, at this point, an afterthought. Among today’s mass of bands that pay tribute to a specific group—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd are among the most popular in this niche — Lez Zeppelin, like Led Zeppelin, stands virtually alone.

“There’s something about the music,” Ms. Paynes said. “It’s so good, and so dynamic, that here we are.” Here, there, and everywhere, in fact. “India, Japan, all over Europe — Poland, where the language is completely unintelligible for Americans,” she said. “But they love it; they know the words. You’re playing a show in Mumbai” — in 2009 — “and they’re pumping their fists in the air. It’s so interesting, this job. You find Zeppelin freaks everywhere. They’re under every rock, so to speak. They pop up in the craziest places.”

Such is their devotion that Lez Zeppelin has added the complete performance of specific Led Zeppelin concerts to their repertoire. “The Song Remains the Same,” a film and recording documenting a 1973 concert at Madison Square Garden, is one. The band’s 1970 concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall and a 1979 concert before 200,000 people at the Knebworth Festival in England are also performed.

“We don’t just play the songs,” Ms. Paynes said. “We try to play it the way they played it, so there is all sorts of nuance. Talk about a challenge,” she said of the Royal Albert Hall show. “The playing is furious; everyone sounds unbelievable.”

Lez Zeppelin’s “latest mission,” Ms. Paynes said, is a performance of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 concerts at Earls Court Arena in London, a series that many consider to be the band’s best performances. They will play the Earls Court concert on Nov. 16 at the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan.

But just as technical proficiency on a musical instrument serves the higher goal of allowing self-expression, “the key to it,” Ms. Paynes said of her single-minded focus on the music of Led Zeppelin, “is the absolute exuberance, passion, and skill. They played this music with complete abandon, spontaneity, and passion. For a so-called cover band to do that — I’ve always taken that as our challenge. Most cover bands are hoping they can get the notes right and dress the right way, but there’s a whole other layer. That layer is what’s interesting to me as a musician. That, I think, is what the band aims to do: unleash the magic, the power. It’s not even intentional anymore. It’s just who we are and what we dig about it.”

“I deeply believe,” Ms. Paynes continued, “that the only way to get into that magical place between you and the audience, you and the band, is to let it go and truly improvise. That also means you can fall on your face. And I have fallen on my face — often — but when you hit it, there is nothing like it. Nothing! I play things I never thought I’d play, and I can tell because the audience loses its mind. That, for me, is where it’s at.”

Tickets to Lez Zeppelin, tomorrow night at 8 at the Stephen Talkhouse, are $65.

Bill Boggs, a four-time Emmy Award-winning television host, will share stories about his encounters with Frank Sinatra and screen highlights from his televised interview with the singer — the longest of Sinatra’s career — tonight at 8 at Guild Hall.

“Memories of Sinatra” will also include clips of the “Chairman of the Board” performing at the peak of his powers and a special appearance by Brian Johnston, a freelance trombone player born and raised in East Hampton and now studying at the Hartt School of Music in Connecticut. Tickets range in price from $20 to $40, $18 to $38 for members.

Dominique Ansel of the eponymous New York City bakery will not be giving out his Cronut recipe, but Cronut holes will be on the menu Sunday morning at 11 at Guild Hall when the creator of the doughnut-croissant hybrid will be the guest of “Stirring the Pot: Conversations With Culinary Celebrities.” Florence Fabricant, a food writer for The New York Times, will interview Mr. Ansel about his pre-Cronut career, including six years as pastry chef at Daniel, and his various other culinary inventions. Tickets are $15, $13 for members, and $75 and $50 for a pre-talk reception.

Also on Sunday, at 3 p.m., Clare Bell, the exhibition support manager of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, will lead a free gallery tour of the current show, “Roy Lichtenstein: Between Sea and Sky.” In addition to managing the exhibition, Ms. Bell wrote the essay “Beautiful Kitsch: Lichtenstein’s Seascapes, 1964-1970” for the show’s catalog.

A week that began with memories of Frank Sinatra will end Wednesday evening at 8 with “Bob Hope: One Night With the Entertainer of the Century,” a program hosted by Dick Cavett, the writer, former talk show host, and Montauk resident, and Richard Zoglin, the author of “Hope: Entertainer of the Century,” which was published to great acclaim in November. Tickets range from $20, or $18 for members, to $40 and $38.

Two other Guild Hall programs, the SummerDocs screening of “Peace Officer” and “Joy Behar: Me, My Mouth & I,” are covered elsewhere in this section.

Scott Christopherson and Brad Barber were editing their film “Peace Officer,” a documentary about the militarization of America’s police forces, when, on Aug. 9, 2014, Michael Brown was killed by a policeman in Ferguson, Mo.

“We thought we were finished filming,” Mr. Barber recalled, “but Ferguson caused us to add one more shoot to the schedule. We thought it was important to talk to some experts to contextualize the problem, particularly to acknowledge how much more this happens in communities of color.”

“Peace Officer,” which will be shown at Guild Hall tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. as part of the Hamptons International Film Festival’s SummerDocs series, opens with rough, black-and-white footage of a SWAT team in action. The film cuts to William (Dub) Lawrence, a former marine, police officer, county commissioner, and sheriff who now makes his living repairing water and sewer pumps. Mr. Lawrence presents the details of the shooting we have just seen and his subsequent independent investigation.

Brian Wood, a fireman in Farmington, Utah — and Mr. Lawrence’s son-in-law — was killed outside his house in 2008 by a SWAT team from the Davis County Sheriff’s Office after a long standoff during which the only person Wood aimed a gun at was himself. It turns out Mr. Lawrence, who witnessed the incident, founded the local SWAT team in the 1970s after being elected Davis County sheriff at the age of 29.

The film follows his obsessive quest to bring to light the truth, not only behind his son-in-law’s shooting but also behind several other police raids in neighboring communities. Mr. Lawrence is a compelling, ingratiating figure whose determination to illuminate the militarization of America’s police forces is matched by the meticulousness of his investigations and the clarity of his explanations. The filmmakers discovered him and his story almost by chance.

“I knew Dub’s son,” said Mr. Christopherson. “I didn’t really know Dub, but he knew I was a documentary film professor, and he approached me to see if I would teach him how to edit. He showed me his own two-hour edit of his son-in-law’s shooting death with police footage and photographs, and I was blown away by the story, which I knew about but hadn’t followed too closely when it happened.”

While a law officer, Mr. Lawrence investigated 125 major felony cases and helped break the Ted Bundy case. His intention, in forming the Davis County SWAT team, was to use it to neutralize violent situations. At that time there were approximately 50 SWAT raids per year in the United States. By 2005 there were 50,000 such raids annually. The reason for the increase was not more crime, but increased police access to military weapons.

The 1033 program, created by the National Defense Authorization Act of fiscal year 1997, authorized the military to give equipment to police departments. While several spokespeople from law enforcement argue that SWAT teams aim to prevent violence, the film makes it clear that most of the no-knock raids, which are usually conducted at night, target nonviolent and consensual crimes such as taking or dealing drugs and give rise to the violence they are supposed to prevent.

One especially brutal incident, which led to an intense gun battle, targeted Matthew Stewart, whose crime was growing marijuana in his basement. Stewart was accused of killing a policeman during the raid, which was conducted at night by officers in plain clothes, but Mr. Lawrence’s detailed reconstruction of the incident casts doubt on the police version. Stewart hung himself in jail before his case could go to trial.

Alec Baldwin, the series host, will lead a post-screening discussion with the filmmakers. “Peace Officer” will have its theatrical release in New York City on Sept. 16, in Los Angeles on Sept. 18, and will be broadcast next May as part of the PBS series “Independent Lens.”

The Montauk Library will present a musical change of pace on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., with a free performance by the Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O’s Celtic band.

From traditional Celtic fiddle music to contemporary Irish folk to the Pogues, a Celtic punk band, the group performs a wide range of Irish music as well as American folk, bluegrass, and country music. Made up of four veteran musicians from New York City, the band features soaring vocal harmonies and virtuoso instrument playing.

As a child in Santa Barbara, the first thing Celeste Gainey wanted to be when she grew up was a poet. That ambition was fully realized in March with the publication by Red Hen Press of her first book, “The Gaffer,” from which she will read selections at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton on Tuesday. However, the trip from there to here was a circuitous one, involving two careers on two coasts and almost 40 years during which she wrote “a lot of faxes and contracts, but no poetry and nothing creative.” 

While taking college-level classes at the same time as earning her high school degree, she took a course in mass media and became, unexpectedly for someone who had never handled even a Brownie camera, enamored of filmmaking. That led her to the B.F.A. program in film and television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

“When I entered the school I thought I wanted to be a director — like everybody else there,” she recalled. She gravitated instead toward lighting, and after taking a summer course taught by Ross Lowell, a cinematographer and founder of a theatrical lighting company, the other students asked her to light their films.

In 1974, after earning her degree, she became, not without a struggle, the first female gaffer — the chief electrician in a film or television production unit — to be admitted to the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (I.A.T.S.E.). “I think a lot of those guys finally realized, ‘Hey, my daughter could get in,’ and many more women were let in after that.”

While feature film production was on the wane in New York City after she graduated, Ms. Gainey found work first with WNBC News as a vacation relief employee and subsequently on news crews for all three networks. “None of those guys wanted me there. Once I went out with the two supposedly most gentlemanly men at NBC News, and neither of them spoke to me, unless I asked a question.”

She then worked on such documentary programs as “60 Minutes” and “20/20,” as well as on “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Taxi Driver,” and “The Wiz,” among other features, but by the end of the 1970s, “I wasn’t really interested in becoming a cinematographer, and being on a feature was no longer glamorous for me.”

When a friend asked her to light a restaurant he was opening in Manhattan, she jumped at the chance. What followed was a new career in architectural lighting, which she pursued in the 1980s and 1990s, eventually moving to Los Angeles and opening Gotham Light and Power, a boutique lighting design studio. She created lighting for restaurants, offices, schools, and department stores through­out the country.

Ms. Gainey first came to the East End in the early 1980s. Her partner at that time, Amanda Pope, was making a film about Jackson Pollock for “Strokes of Genius,” a mini-series produced by Courtney Sale Ross. Ms. Gainey did the lighting for the film, and the project brought her into contact with Lee Krasner, Conrad Marca-Relli, Mercedes Matter, and Jimmy Ernst, among other luminaries of the art scene here.

She moved back to Los Angeles in 1988, and within a few years, after the relationship with Ms. Pope ended, she met Elise D’Haene, a novelist and screenwriter. The two have been together ever since. They purchased a house in East Hampton in 1997 and moved here full time in 2000. Ms. Gainey opened a lighting fabrication studio with Mark Figueredo here while Ms. D’Haene was writing for television and The Star, where she became arts editor.

Several years into the new millennium, Ms. Gainey “just felt done with lighting. And that’s when I began to write. What I was writing appeared to be poetry, but I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.” In search of a context in which she could learn what she needed to and be held accountable, she entered a low-residency M.F.A. program at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, where Jan Beatty, a poet whose work she admired, became a mentor.

“Poor Jan. I didn’t know anything. I was a complete blank slate as far as poetry was concerned. As with lighting, I attacked it.” After graduating, a chapbook sent to an artisanal press in Pennsylvania brought her to the attention of Eloise Klein Healy, who had an imprint at Red Hen Press.

Ms. Gainey and Ms. D’Haene moved to Pittsburgh in 2012. “Because it was an industrial hub for so long, it has the museums, the culture, and because of Frick and Heinz and Mellon and Carnegie, it has all these amazing public institutions and foundations. I was taken with the people there when I was in school. It had a great writing community, and that’s how we ended up moving.”

“It’s poetry, so it’s not like I’m burning up Twitter,” she said, “but the reception for ‘The Gaffer’ has been great.” She came east from Pittsburgh not just for the reading at the Hampton Library but for several readings in New York City. The book weaves her work in the film industry with her personal life, past and present, in language both direct and evocative. As Aaron Smith, a poet, put it, “ ‘The Gaffer’ is a book about light: how it finds us, changes us, and shapes who we are and how we see.”

Tuesday’s reading and book signing at the Hampton Library will take place at 7 p.m. All proceeds from book sales will support the library.

The stars will be shining at Guild Hall this week, beginning tonight at 8 with a staged reading of “Sharpies,” a new comedy by Eugene Pack, an Emmy Award-nominated writer. The play, which follows a group of iconic celebrities at an autograph-signing convention weekend in Milwaukee, will feature Matthew Broderick, Blythe Danner, Carol Kane, Marsha Mason, Dayle Reyfel, Sawyer Spielberg, Vanessa Williams, and other luminaries to be announced.

Tickets are $30, $28 for members, or $75 and $70 with a post-show V.I.P. reception. A portion of the evening’s proceeds will benefit the Felix Organization, whose mission is to enrich the lives of children growing up in the foster care system.

Mr. Pack will take the stage tomorrow evening along with Christie Brinkley, Debbie Harry, Susan Lucci, Ralph Macchio, Brooke Shields (9:30 only), Alan Zweibel, and Mr. Reyfel in “Celebrity Autobiography,” in which actual celebrity memoirs are acted out live by the cast.

Created and developed by Mr. Pack and Mr. Reyfel, the show has been aired on Bravo TV, performed at venues around the country, and enjoyed a three-year run off Broadway, for which it won a Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience. Tickets range from $40, $38 for members, to $75 and $70.

Comedy will be king again on Saturday evening, when J.B. Smoove will perform at 8. An actor, writer, and comedian, he began his career on “Def Comedy Jam” in the early 1990s, spent three years as a writer and performer on “Saturday Night Live,” and went on to a recurring role in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” among many other television and film credits. Tickets start at $45, $43 for members, and rise to $100 and $95.

Laughter of a different kind will fill the house Sunday at 5 p.m. when the Big Apple Circus’s “Red Nose Review” brings a cavalcade of hospital “clown doctors” to the theater. Mayhem and merrymaking will share the stage with acts of astonishing skill, all directed by Karen McCarthy, creative director of the Clown Care program. Tickets are $50, $48 for members. A V.I.P. reception at a Main Street residence will boost the cost to $125 and $120.

On a more serious note, a National Theatre Live telecast of “Everyman,” the late-15th-century morality play, will take place Wednesday evening at 8. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Academy Award-nominee for “12 Years a Slave,” plays Everyman in this new adaptation by Carol Ann Duffy, which transforms the original into an indictment of the materialism of the modern world, with Everyman a wealthy hedonist who is confronted by a shopping bag-bearing Death. Tickets are $18, $16 for members.

Next Thursday at 8 p.m., Bill Boggs will host “Memories of Sinatra,” which will include stories, film clips, and highlights from Mr. Boggs’s television interview with Ol’ Blue Eyes.

“You Made Me Love You: Celebrating 100 Years of the Great American Songbook,” starring Jennifer Sheehan, will take place at the Southampton Arts Center on Saturday at 8 p.m. as part of Guild Hall’s Songbook Salon Series.

Ms. Sheehan, who has performed at concert halls, festivals, and nightclubs throughout the country, has won many awards, including the Julie Wilson Award for outstanding interpretation of the Great American Songbook and the National Glenn Miller Vocal Competition.

“You Made Me Love You” includes songs by Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Barry Manilow, Johnny Mercer, the Gershwin brothers, and many more. The concert is produced by Patricia Watt; James Followell is the musical director. Tickets are $60, $58 for Guild Hall members, and $85 with a post-show V.I.P. reception.

A benefit concert by Maxfield and Leo Panish for the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork will be held Sunday at 1:30 p.m. at the congregation’s home, 977 Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike.

Maxfield, who attends the Manhattan School of Music, has performed with the school’s Philharmonia and Symphony Orchestra and in recitals throughout the metropolitan area. Leo, his brother, was the concertmaster of the Symphony Orchestra at the school’s Precollege. The Panish brothers are from East Hampton.

The concert will include works by Bach, Prokofiev, Viotti, Ysaye, and an original work by Maxfield Panish. A $20 donation, 10 percent of which will benefit local food pantries, has been suggested.

The Montauk Library will present “Man of Fire: José Clemente Orozco,” a free, illustrated lecture by Jane Weissman, on Wednesday evening at 7. Orozco’s murals are filled with vivid images that reflect Mexico’s complex history and culture.

Ms. Weissman is a longtime member of the Brooklyn-based Artmakers Inc., a community mural organization that creates high-quality public art relevant to the lives and concerns of people in their neighborhoods.