Last summer, Sophie Chahinian successfully launched a Kickstarter campaign, ultimately raising $25,000 to help fund the Artist Profile Archive. It’s a website that houses short-form videos of contemporary artists discussing their own work.

Three of Ms. Chahinian’s videos are now on display at Guild Hall as part of its current exhibition of new additions to the permanent collection. A gallery talk and guided tour, led by with Christina Strassfield, Guild Hall’s chief curator, will take place on Saturday afternoon at 3 p.m.

As part of the exhibit, video profiles of Chuck Close, April Gornik, and Eric Fischl play on a continuous loop, each running between six and eight minutes. An additional profile of Joel Shapiro, whose work is also on display, is forthcoming. The exhibit runs through Jan. 4.

Ms. Chahinian wears many hats. In addition to working as a real estate agent in the East Hampton office of Douglas Elliman (a sponsor of the video exhibit), she recently served as interim associate curator at Guild Hall, filling in for an employee out on maternity leave.

“This is the thing I love to do,” she said of the video profiles, which she films and edits with a team of freelance filmmakers. “It’s my purpose.” Fund-raising, though, remains a perpetual challenge. She said the Kickstarter campaign was “too nail-biting” to undertake again.

The exhibition’s inclusion of works by Mr. Fischl (an oil on linen portrait), two recently acquired pieces by Mr. Close (including a self-portrait made of polished stainless steel and paper), and an oil-on-linen seascape by Ms. Gornik, was fortuitous, affording a perfect venue for Ms. Chahinian’s videos. Taken together, the profiles add a rich layer of context, providing not only biographical tidbits of each artist but insights into their individual techniques and creative processes.

Ms. Chahinian is constantly in search of new sponsors willing to underwrite production costs. Each video costs around $5,000 to make. LTV, where the videos have also been aired and where tax-deductible contributions can be made, is the Artist Profile Archive’s nonprofit sponsor.

The East Hampton Library will screen “Stuart Sutcliffe: The Lost Beatle” Saturday at 1 p.m. The 60-minute BBC documentary, directed in 2005 by Steve Cole, tells the story of Sutcliffe, who became friends with John Lennon in 1957 when both were students at the Liverpool School of Art, and joined the rock group, then known at the Quarrymen, in 1959.

As the group’s bass player, he traveled with them to Hamburg, where they performed in clubs and lived above a soft-core porn theater. He continued to paint in Hamburg, and in 1961 he left the group to concentrate on his career as an artist. When he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1962, he was enrolled in the Hamburg State School of Fine Art and living with Astrid Kirchherr, a photographer.

The screening of the film will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Pauline Sutcliffe, Stuart’s sister and a Wainscott resident, and Diane Vitale, who, along with Ms. Sutcliffe and Giles Cooper, wrote “In Conversation With Stuart Sutcliffe,” the 2012 book that commemorates his life and work and includes photographs of Sutcliffe taken by Ms. Kirchherr.

The group called Our Fabulous Variety Show will return to Guild Hall this weekend with four performances of “A Spectacular Christmas Carol,” its retelling of Dickens’ classic story. The show will present the tale of Scrooge, played by Tony D’Alessio, and the three ghosts through song and dance.

The production will include more than 50 cast members, among them the company dancers of dancehampton; Samantha Slithers, a performance artist, and Tyler Fischer, a New York City stand-up comedian. Performances will take place tomorrow at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday afternoon at 2. A V.I.P. wine tasting offered by Wainscott Main Wines and Spirits will precede the Saturday evening performance from 6 to 7.

Tickets range in price from $15 to $45 and can be purchased online at ourfabulousvarietyshow.org. The production will benefit HUGS, Inc., which provides East End high school students with drug and suicide prevention programs.

Paton Miller at Horowitz

“Paton Miller: The Edge of the World,” an exhibition of recent and older works that reflect the Southampton artist’s longstanding exploration of the interface between land and sea, will open Saturday at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in East Hampton and remain on view through Dec. 31. A reception will take place Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m.

Mr. Miller grew up in Hawaii, where he spent his childhood in the ocean and on the shore. After a trip through Asia in 1974, he arrived on the East End with a collection of travel-inspired artworks. His work is narrative, populated by peculiar, yet archetypal, subjects. He has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad.

Narrative Work at Marcelle

“In the Narrative Tradition,” a group exhibition, will open Saturday at Peter Marcelle Project in Southampton with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. and remain on view through Dec. 14. The artists in the show explore narrative methods through painting, photography, and sculpture. Participants are Bo Bartlett, Gary Beeber, David Gamble, Gina Gilmour, Anna Jurinich, Ivan Kustura, Mary McCormick, Louise Peabody, Joe Pintauro, Stephen Schaub, Marc Sijan, David Slater, and Jamie Wyeth.

European Arts Tour

The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs has announced a 12-day spring arts tour of Vienna, Prague, and Dresden, Germany. The trip, which will run from April 24 through May 6, will include sites related to the visual arts, theater, music, and architecture.

Marion Wolberg Weiss, an art and film critic from East Hampton, will lead the tour. More information is available from [email protected] or by calling 324-4914.

Holiday Show at Kramoris

The Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor will present its “Small Artworks Holiday Invitational” from Saturday through Jan. 18. The exhibition will include affordable fine art and craft objects by more than 40 local artists. Receptions will be held Nov. 30 and Dec. 13, from 3 to 5 p.m. both days.

Guild Hall is offering an eight-session Shakespeare workshop for actors and actors-in-training beginning today at 6 p.m. and continuing through Feb. 5. Students age 16 and up will work on sonnets, monologues, mask work, scene work, and more, culminating in a performance on the stage of the John Drew Theater on Feb. 11 at 7 p.m.

The class will be taught by Morgan and Tristan Vaughan, both of whom have M.F.A.s in classical acting from the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting at George Washington University. They have also studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London and the Circle in the Square Theatre School in New York City.

The cost of the workshop is $300, $290 for Guild Hall members. Classes will not be held on Nov. 27, Dec. 25, Jan. 1, or Jan. 15.

“A Cavalcade of Dolls and Toys” will open Saturday at Clinton Academy in East Hampton and remain on display on Saturdays and Sundays through December.

The exhibition features dolls and toys from years past, among them a whale boat pull toy, a red fire truck, Mr. and Mrs. Weasel, Noah’s Ark, sleds, a milk pickup truck, and many more. A special feature is a Christmas village nestled beneath a tall Douglas fir, lent by an East Hampton resident who wanted to share her childhood display with the community.

The exhibition will be on view Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from noon to 5. There is no admission charge, but contributions will be appreciated.

Michael Wolfe, director, writer, star, and co-producer of “Maybe Tomorrow,” an independent dramatic film that has just been released on DVD, began his film career with humble ambitions. As teenagers growing up on Long Island in the early 1990s, he and his friends made skits using his father’s video camera and showed them at parties.

“A number of years later, when ‘Jackass’ came out, everybody said, ‘Oh my God, that’s what you were doing.’ ” For those unfamiliar with the MTV series, “Jackass” featured young men performing dangerous, crude, and self-injuring stunts and pranks. The series eventually spawned eight films.

“I was a juvenile delinquent, heading the wrong way when I was younger,” Mr. Wolfe said. “We learned from those films that you can have fun without doing drugs or getting arrested.” Born and raised in Patchogue, after “bouncing around several private schools” he graduated from Patchogue-Medford High School.

From there he went to Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where he studied television and film production and was a member of the sketch comedy troupe, a weekly columnist for the newspaper, a writer and actor for the college TV station, and the host of a weekly radio show.

Since graduating, he has written seven screenplays, three teleplays, a novel, a memoir, and two novellas, but “Maybe Tomorrow” provided the opportunity to put all his skills together. The film is the story of three men who in one long night at a beach house on Meadow Lane in Southampton confront their present circumstances and revisit their shared past, which included an act of violence that has continued to have repercussions for all of them.

Completed in 2012, the film has been screened at more than a dozen film festivals and won prizes at six, including three best-picture awards. In addition to the beach house, scenes were shot at Seafield Treatment Center in Westhampton Beach and at the Omni in Southampton, among other East End locations. The filmmakers received a post-production grant from the Suffolk County Film Commission that enabled them to complete the project.

Mr. Wolfe is familiar with the East End. “I got kicked out of a Catholic school in Riverhead,” he said, “and my summer job when I was in college was servicing swimming pools out in the Hamptons.” He cast the film from his Rolodex, auditioning only three roles; the rest of the actors he knew and had worked with.

“I like having my fingers in every single step of the filmmaking process,” he said. “As a director, that obviously gives you the most involvement. As a producer, which I don’t particularly enjoy, there are a lot of decisions made that I want to be a part of. And I like writing good roles for myself. If you surround yourself with enough people, making a film is not as overwhelming a task as it seems.”

Mr. Wolfe acknowledged that getting theatrical distribution for an independent film can be difficult. “It’s very hard to get, without name actors.” His next project, a road-trip drama titled “I Love You I’ll Miss You Goodbye,” is in pre-production. He feels it will lend itself well to an art-house audience, and he hopes to engage some high-profile actors.

In “Maybe Tomorrow,” Mr. Wolfe elicits strong performances from his cast, but his own turn as Russ Mahler, a career criminal with a history of drug problems, is as nuanced as it is powerful. “People always assume Russ is the most autobiographical character, but there’s a part of me in all the characters.”

Mr. Wolfe lives in Queens. While he visits Los Angeles if there is work there, the casting director and producing partner of his current project are both based in New York. “I like L.A.,” he said, “but I’m a New York guy. I need the energy of New York.”

During a two-day auction held last week in Easton, Md., in conjunction with the annual Maryland Waterfowl Festival, six shorebird decoys carved by Eugene Cuffee, a Shinnecock Indian who has been dead for 73 years, sold for a total of $12,550. At the same venue the year before, two Cuffee wood ducks with “relief wing carving and carved eyes and crests” — a “rigmate,” as a male and female pair are called — went for $8,250 against an estimate of $4,000 to $6,000, despite “several small dents, a small crack in one side of the hen, and two small rough areas in wood from when the decoy was made, in drake’s breast.”

Decoys, once the humble tools of wildfowl hunters (the rigmates were branded “W.D. Halsey”), have become big business over the last three decades. Now classed with great American folk art, they sell at specialized auctions for sums that would have stunned their creators, often in the high six figures. And the market has exploded, thanks in part to digital services like invaluable.com or liveauctioneers.com that make online bidding a snap.

Guyette and Deeter of St. Michael’s, Md., which calls itself “the world’s leading decoy auction firm” and is acknowledged as such by the collectors’ bible Decoy Magazine, has embraced Internet bidding in a big way. For last week’s auction the firm posted all 593 items on eBay a couple of weeks in advance to drum up yet more interest. In addition to the audience on site, bids were submitted beforehand, and a dozen people manned phone lines. (Jon Deeter, a partner, said it was the firm’s “first eBay live.” Sotheby’s, too, recently formed a partnership with eBay.)

Guyette and Deeter has a long track record of selling Cuffee carvings, at least a couple of times a year. “He was pretty prolific,” Mr. Deeter said. His decoys have “interesting paint and patterns” and, often, “applied wings,” he said, as opposed to conventional one-piece birds. In July 2010, at a G&D auction in Portsmouth, N.H. (there are four a year in four locations), one of Cuffee’s full-size great gray herons, 38 inches tall with “carved and dropped wings and a removable head,” sold for $10,750, even though, as the catalog scrupulously noted, it showed “moderate wear, crack on the back, chip on one side of the tail, a couple of thin cracks in the neck.”

Eugene Cuffee (1866-1941), who is also said to have created decoys as bookends, paperweights, and decorations for lamps, was 10 years old when his father, Warren, was lost from the ship Circassian, bound from Liverpool to New York and wrecked off the Bridgehampton sandbar on Dec. 30, 1876, in a furious snowstorm. All 10 Shinnecock men who answered the call for volunteers to help right the stricken ship died trying. Three were Cuffees, cousins, two of whom had three or four children each. Some of the bodies were found as far off as Montauk, encased in ice.

No photograph of Eugene Cuffee has come to light and little is known of his life. The East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection has a memo stating that he was “one of the Shinnecocks who unsuccessfully tried to oust Negroes from the Shinnecock reservation in 1936 and who tried vainly to discourage inter-marriage between the two races,” but that note is attributed to Chief Red Thunder Cloud, whose assertions are sometimes questionable.

According to Cuffee’s Feb. 28, 1941, obituary in the old Bridgehampton News, he died at the Central Islip State Hospital, which is disconcerting. That facility, which was shut down in 1996, was the largest psychiatric institution in New York State at the time.

In catalogs and online, the carver is sometimes called “Chief” Eugene Cuffee, sometimes just Eugene Cuffee, and is said to have hailed from Southampton, East Hampton or Easthampton, Shinnecock, the Shinnecock Reservation, or simply Long Island. His actual place of residence was in all likelihood the reservation, but as Mr. Deeter pointed out, “A lot of information was lost at some point. These guys were making objects to be used.”

A Mastic Beach man, Jamie Reason, a respected folk art collector and decoy specialist, believes that Cuffee was not in fact the maker of the works attributed to him, many of which are in museums. In several articles published in recent years in Decoy Magazine, Mr. Reason contends that William H. Bennett of East Hampton, who died in 1954, was the true creator of the decoys credited to Cuffee, based on Bennett family lore and other evidence, including a marked resemblance in style. In light of Mr. Reason’s research, the magazine has reportedly agreed that later Cuffees are indeed Bennetts, but still considers earlier pieces, from the first quarter of the 20th century and before, to be the work of the “Chief.”

Eugene Cuffee and his wife, the former Ida Beaman, a Montaukett, left a number of descendants, among them the craftsman Lyle Smith of the Shinnecock Reservation, who carves not only collectible shorebirds but also his own gunning decoys. According to Raven’s Way Antiques of North Kingston, R.I. (“the home of antique duck and shorebird decoys”), which sells Mr. Smith’s work online, “much of his carving shows the influence of those decoys that have been historically attributed to Chief Cuffee.” Raven’s Way offers Cuffee decoys as well; one sold recently is described as having “an early whalebone bill, typical of Cuffee’s work.” Mr. Smith’s often have deer-antler bills. 

Unlike most antique decoys, Mr. Smith’s are both signed and dated. He carves a Native American symbol on the bottom, along with “Lyle G. Smith/ Shinnecock” and the year he made them.

Two at Halsey Mckay

Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton is presenting concurrent solo exhibitions of work by Arielle Falk and Ted Gahl through Dec. 14.

Ms. Falk, a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist, is represented by “Wrecked,” an installation based on her 60-day tenancy in a rooftop cabana in Bushwick last summer. Isolated and exposed to the weather, she became a castaway on her own “roof island.” The exhibition consists of what she calls “tattered flags” or “remnants of sails from a shipwreck.”

Mr. Gahl, whose exhibition is titled “Norfolk Road,” is primarily interested in painting itself, both its history and its possibilities. His eclectic body of work ranges from abstract to figurative and includes everything in between. He lives and works in Connecticut.

Tripoli Has Attitude

Tripoli Gallery in Southampton will present its 10th annual Thanksgiving Collective from Saturday through Jan. 8. An opening reception will be held Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m.

Titled “Attitudes,” the exhibition will include work by 14 artists who are linked not by style or medium but by the attitude behind their work, specifically the desire to push contemporary art in new directions.

Participating artists are Michael Avedon, Isaac Brest, Eric Freeman, Mary Heilmann, Judith Hudson, Yung Jake, Dylan Lynch, Ryan McGinley, Richard Prince, Julian Schnabel, Nathalie Shepherd, Keith Sonnier, Ira Svobodova, and Darius Yektai.

“Home Spun” at Marder

“Home Spun,” a group exhibition of work by artists who use traditional craft-based materials to communicate contemporary ideas, will he held at Silas Marder Gallery in Bridgehampton from Saturday through Dec. 21. A reception for the artists will take place Saturday from 4 to 8 p.m., with live music by the Peter Watrous Trio from 5 to 7.

Aaron McIntosh, Susie Brandt, and Elizabeth Duffy use traditional quilting methods. Saskia Friedrich pins or drapes strips of fabric into geometric compositions. Field Kallop’s canvases are stitched, dyed, and bleached before being stretched.

Louise Eastman’s large weavings are inspired by the potholder, while Josh Blackwell embroiders wool, silk, and paper onto cast-off bags. Sheila Pepe will create a three-dimensional drawing using colored yarn. Sydney Albertini will exhibit dyed and stitched quilts.

John Messinger in Chelsea

“We Dream Alone,” a solo exhibition of work by John Messinger, is on view at UNIX Gallery in Chelsea through Jan. 8. Mr. Messinger, who lives in East Hampton and Brooklyn, uses individual 3.25-by-4.25-inch Polaroid prints to create large-scale, three-dimensional art works. These photographic “tapestries” transform hundreds of varying images into a single experience.

Mr. Messinger takes his images from large computer monitors using a Polaroid Land camera and Fuji instant film. He arranges and rearranges the images until he is satisfied with the result, then tapes them together to create a grid that fuses the real and the abstract.

Retreat Juried Show

The Retreat’s sixth annual juried art show will open at Richard J. Demato Fine Arts in Sag Harbor with a reception Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. It will remain open through Dec. 22.

Christina Strassfield, Guild Hall’s chief curator, and Janet Goleas, an independent curator, critic, and artist, selected 25 artists for the exhibition from more than 180 submissions. The three artists named best-in-show at the opening reception will have an exhibition at the gallery in 2015.

The Retreat, which provides domestic violence services and education to families and communities, received 100 percent of the entry fees. Sales will be split 50-50 between the artists and the Retreat.

Holiday ArtWalk

The third annual Thanksgiving “ArtWalk in the Hamptons” will take place Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. Organized by Kathy Zeiger, the event is a self-guided tour of 25 galleries, from Montauk to Southampton. Details about participating galleries and maps are available at artwalkhamptons.com.

Rudy Burckhardt in New York

The Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Manhattan will present a survey of photographs, paintings, and films by Rudy Burckhardt from Saturday through Jan. 10.

Burckhardt was an influential presence on the New York cultural scene,  numbering among his friends Willem de Kooning, Alex Katz, Red Grooms, Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, and Frank O’Hara. He was a frequent visitor to Southampton.

He is known for his photographs of the city as well as for photographs of artists, made for ArtNews magazine during the 1950s and early ’60s. His paintings, like his films and photographs, depicted cityscapes, the Maine landscape, and details of everyday life.

The exhibition is the first at Tibor de Nagy to pair Burckhardt’s paintings and photographs.

Awkward Family Photos

It’s the rare art show whose title says it all. “Awkward Family Photos,” which will open tomorrow at the Southampton Arts Center and remain on view through Jan. 4, is just such an exhibition.

In 2009, Mike Bender and Doug Chernack, two Los Angeles screenwriters, founded awkwardfamilyphotos. com, a website where people can post their own photographs of odd or clumsy family moments.

Mr. Bender and Mr. Chernack have selected the photographs and designed the exhibition, which will include a “selfie spot,” packed with costumes and props, where visitors may take their own awkward snapshots.

The center will hold a reception to celebrate the holiday season and the exhibition on Dec. 13 from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Wine, cider, and cookies will be served at the free event.

A Thanksgiving weekend tradition, along with turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce and stuffing, the East Hampton Historical Society’s annual house and garden tour will return on Saturday from 1 to 4:30 p.m.

This year, the society is saluting the shingle, the South Fork construction staple from its earliest days. Houses from those earlier times, as well as more recent construction that plays with the vernacular, will be featured.

A cocktail party at the Maidstone Club tomorrow will serve as the kick-off event for the tour and as a benefit for the society’s programs. It takes place from 6 to 8:30 p.m. The cocktail party and tour tickets are $200 each. Tickets for just the tour cost $65 in advance and $75 the day of the tour.

The tour is centered in East Hampton Village, with houses decorated in classic style to midcentury modern. The Osborne house on Buell Lane has been renovated and expanded over the years and has modern interiors. One house highlights the vision of Celerie Kemble, a celebrity designer who channels Palm Beach sophistication in much of her decor. A 1921 residence has the stamp of the architects Polhemus and Coffin.

There are five houses in all, on familiar lanes such as Buell, Egypt, and Hither. Tickets are available at Clinton Academy tomorrow and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.