While Human Rights Watch is one of the best-known and most effective organizations dedicated to investigating and defending human rights around the world, its emergencies team is less familiar to the general public. “E-Team,” a new documentary by Ross Kauffman and Katy Chevigny, sheds light on the work of four members of the division that, in the words of the organization’s website, “deploys as crises and conflicts are underway to impact the situation in real time.” 

“E-Team,” winner of the Hamptons International Film Festival’s 2014 Brizzolara Family Foundation Award for Films of Conflict & Resolution, follows Fred Abrahams, Peter Bouckaert, Anna Neistat, and Ole Solvang from the domestic normality of their homes to war zones in Syria and Libya.

The film opens in Syria in 2013, where Anna and Ole are investigating a bombing that injured more than 200 people, many of them children. One of the Syrian men points to a pile of shrapnel from a cluster bomb and, holding a piece of metal, says, “This is what went inside my body.” In the middle of the conversation, an explosion rocks the apartment, and a woman screams, “This never stops!”

From Syria the film shifts to the apartment Ole and Anna share in Paris with her son, Danya, as they watch news footage of protesters marching amid bombed-out buildings in Damascus. The preparation for their upcoming mission to Syria is followed by footage of them driving at night toward the Turkish border, where, at daybreak, they carefully step across a barrier of barbed wire and into Syria.

Watching this scene, and those that follow, one can’t help but be amazed not only at the E-Team members and the people who help them and provide information, but also at the presence, though unseen, of the filmmakers.

Mr. Kauffman, who directed, produced, filmed, and co-edited the 2005 Academy Award-winning documentary “Born Into Brothels,” is a respected documentary cinematographer who has filmed in war zones around the world. Ms. Chevigny has directed or produced more than 20 documentaries that have been shown theatrically, on television, and at such festivals as Sundance, Tribeca, and Berlin.

“We’ve known each other for years,” said Ms. Chevigny, “I had produced some work Ross had done, and Ross had shot some things that I was doing. We were looking for a meaty project we could work on as partners, and ‘E-Team’ wound up being that project.”

The filmmakers were familiar with the work of Human Rights Watch, having shown films at its own film festival. While they were considering a project about the organization, they had dinner with the four E-Team members who are in the film. “At that dinner, Ross and I really got the feeling that there could be a film there. They were such great characters, we wanted to see them in a movie.”

“At our first meeting with the organization, we made it very clear that we would do the film only if we had total creative control,” Mr. Kauffman said. “We’re going to show your organization, warts and all. They very courageously said, ‘Okay, we trust you guys.’ ” Many film crews had approached Human Rights Watch over the years, “but we were the first they gave total access to.” Ms. Chevigny added that the organization only asked that the filmmakers not get in the way of the E-Team’s work and not endanger anybody by exposure.

Filming began in Libya in January 2011, and concluded in the fall of 2013 in Syria, where they investigated the bombing of 22 civilian houses in Azaz, not far from Aleppo. After talking with the Syrians there, Anna became convinced that the United Nations Security Council should approve a no-fly zone, but, at a meeting at H.R.W. headquarters in Manhattan, Carroll Bogert, its deputy executive director, rejected the idea.

In all, the team shot 350 hours of film. “We knew the success of the film was going to depend on the editor,” Ms. Chevigny said. “Thankfully, David Teague agreed to edit the film, even though he had many other offers. He wasn’t deterred by the amount of footage, and he really worked closely with us to craft a story from a lot of disparate material.”

Both Mr. Kauffman and Ms. Chevigny knew from the beginning that the story had to be shot in cinema verité. “We were very clear that we wanted to follow these great characters in their homes and with their families and to connect with them on that level,” Mr. Kauffman said.

The team has seen the finished film. “You make a film about somebody, and they have no idea of what you’re going to do,” said Mr. Kauffman. “It was very nerve-wracking for us as well as for them when we first showed them the film. Once they saw it, they said, ‘Wow, you guys did a really good job!’ ”

The E-Team is still working in the region. Mr. Abrahams recently went to northern Iraq to investigate ISIS abuses in that area. He was also looking into crimes committed by the Iraqi government in retaliation. “That’s one of H.R.W.’s claims to credibility,” said Ms. Chevigny. “They look at all sides to make sure abuses aren’t being committed, and if they are, they document them.”

In one scene, the filmmakers travel to Mr. Bouckaert’s farm outside Geneva. The bucolic setting, where he is stacking firewood with his son’s help, is in stark contrast to footage of his investigation of weapons in Libya. His knowledge of weaponry has earned him the nickname of “bang-bang guy.” Mr. Bouckaert was unwittingly speaking for the rest of his team and the filmmakers when he said, “It’s nice to be on the right side, and it’s nice to fight back.”

“E-Team” will be shown Sunday at 1 p.m. at East Hampton UA3 and Monday at 11:45 a.m. at East Hampton UA4. After the Sunday screening, a panel including Mr. Kauffman and guests from the fields of human rights and journalism will compare and contrast the work of investigative reporters and the E-Team. The film will be released Oct. 24 in select theaters and on Netflix.

Guild Hall will present “The Red Orchestra,” a 2003 documentary about the resistance group that fought against the Third Reich within Germany from 1933 to 1942, on Saturday at 8 p.m. Harris Yulin, an actor with an extensive stage and screen resumé and a home in Bridgehampton, will introduce the film. A discussion will follow with Stefan Roloff, the film’s director and son of one of the group’s survivors.

The Red Orchestra is considered one of the most successful spy rings that operated during World War II. The Gestapo considered its members Communist spies — hence their designation as “red” — and eventually sentenced 58 of them to death and many more to long periods of incarceration. For many years after the war, members of the group were considered Communist traitors by the West, but that judgment changed after the Cold War ended. Tickets are $12, $10 for members.

The John Drew Theater will be a bit less solemn on Tuesday evening when a free staged reading of “Tongues Will Wag,” a new musical by Sarah Azzara, will take place at 7:30. The play follows the identity crisis of the newly engaged Stephanie when she falls for a male impersonator at a lesbian bar. Kate Mueth will direct.

The Bach & Forth Chamber Ensemble will launch its third season of performances on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church. Members of the group are Thomas Bohlert (organ), Terry Keevil (oboe), Linda Di Martino Wetherill (flute), Rebecca Perea (cello), and Trudy Craney (soprano).

Saturday’s concert will feature Ms. Wetherill playing Peteris Vask’s “Landscape With Birds” for solo flute; Mr. Keevil performing solo selections from Benjamin Britten’s “Six Metamorphoses for Oboe Solo”; Mr. Bohlert playing Mendelssohn’s “Organ Sonata” and Preston’s “Alleluyas” for solo organ; Ms. Perea improvising on cello and loop station, and Ms. Craney singing Margaret Garwood’s “Six Japanese Songs” and several Bach arias.

Tickets are $20 and $15.

The Southampton African American Museum will present Raise Your Voice, a four-day festival of films, jazz, and spoken word, beginning next Thursday at 6 p.m. with a screening of “Fruitvale Station” at the Southampton Arts Center.

A program of spoken word and jazz, including performances by Charles Certain and his Certain Moves Jazz Band and the Grammy Award-winning hip-hop artist J. Ivy, will take place Friday, Oct. 3, at 7 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center.

According to the festival organizers, Brenda Simmons, the museum’s executive director, and Nigel Noble, an Oscar-winning film director and museum board member, “The common thread linking the film offerings is a clarion call to the community to ‘Raise Your Voice.’ ”

“Fruitvale Station,” which won both the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic feature and the Audience Award for United States dramatic film at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, is based on a true incident — the shooting death of Oscar Grant, an unarmed 22-year-old African-American from the San Francisco Bay Area, by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer on New Year’s Day, 2009.

The Oct. 4 programs begin at 1 p.m. with “The Trials of Muhammad Ali,” which draws on archival footage and interviews with Ali, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Wilt Chamberlain, and others to show how the champion boxer risked his freedom and fortune to follow his conscience.

A second documentary, “Porgy and Bess: An American Voice,” will screen at 2:45. Directed by Mr. Noble, the film details the history of the George Gershwin opera and of DuBose Heyward’s original novel, “Porgy,” and their impact on African-American culture, illuminated in part by interviews with Maya Angelou, Ruby Dee, Diahann Carroll, and Billy Taylor.

In 1965, Frank De Felitta produced a documentary for NBC television that included an interview with Booker Wright, an African-American waiter at an all-white restaurant in Mississippi. Wright spoke frankly about racism and his treatment at the restaurant, with terrible consequences. Raymond De Felitta revisits his father’s film and the community where Wright lived. “Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story” will be shown on Oct. 4 at 4:30.

“Belle,” a drama inspired by the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy admiral, will be shown that evening at 7. The film stars Tim Wilkinson, Emily Watson, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the young woman caught between two different cultures.

The Oct. 5 slate will start at 2 p.m. with a program of short films, followed at 3:15 by “We Still Live Here,” a documentary about the cultural revival of the Wampanoag tribe of southeastern Massachusetts, who have raised their voices to say in their native tongue, “As Nutayunean” (We still live here).

The festival will close with “Life’s Essentials With Ruby Dee,” which includes interviews with Dee, her husband, Ossie Davis, and Alan Alda, Harry Belafonte, and Danny Glover. Directed by the grandson of Dee and Davis, Muta’Ali Muhammad, the film shows how the filmmaker’s grandparents helped guide his quest for love, art, and activism.

Tickets to individual films are priced at $10. Donations of $25 are suggested for spoken word and jazz. A package of all films and spoken word and jazz is $100, while $150 includes an exclusive V.I.P. reception with the film producers.

Christian McBride and Friends will headline the fourth annual Sag Harbor American Music Festival with a concert and fund-raiser at the Old Whalers Church Friday at 8 p.m. The festival will continue with free performances by a plethora of bands and solo musicians throughout the day Saturday and conclude with an after-party at Bay Street Theater with Mamalee Rose and Friends that evening at 9.

A bassist, composer, arranger, educator, curator, and administrator, Mr. McBride moved to New York at the age of 17 to study at the Juilliard School but was soon conscripted into the New York jazz scene by Bobby Watson, a noted alto saxophonist. A three-time Grammy winner, Mr. McBride recorded the first of his 12 CDs, “Gettin’ to It,” in 1994.

As a jazz sideman he has played with Freddie Hubbard, Sonny Rollins, J.J. Johnson, Ray Brown, Milt Jackson, McCoy Tyner, Roy Haynes, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Pat Metheny. In the R&B world, he has performed with and arranged for Isaac Hayes, Chaka Khan, Natalie Cole, Lalah Hathaway, and James Brown.

Mr. McBride has collaborated with Sting, Carly Simon, Don Henley, and Bruce Hornsby in the pop/rock orbit and the Roots, D’Angelo, and Queen Latifah in the hip-hop world. He has also worked closely with the opera legend Kathleen Battle, the bass virtuoso Edgar Meyer, the Shanghai Quartet, and the Sonus Quartet.

Mr. McBride’s first foray into the world of big band composing and arranging dates back to 1995, when he was commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center to write “Bluesin’ in Alphabet City,” originally debuted by Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Since that time he has composed a number of pieces for larger ensembles, including “The Movement Revisited,” a four-movement suite dedicated to Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

For tomorrow’s concert, he will be accompanied by Ulysses Owens Jr., a Grammy Award-winning drummer, Emmet Cohen, a finalist in the 2011 Thelonious Monk International Piano Competition, and Marcus Strickland, a saxophonist with seven albums to his credit.

On Saturday, more than 30 other groups and individual performers can be heard at various village locations throughout the day, among them the HooDoo Loungers, the Richie Siegler Brazilian Jazz Quartet, Joe Delia and Thieves, Caroline Doctorow and the Steamrollers, Inda Eaton, and Black and Sparrow.

Among the many Saturday venues is the Off Main stage in the alley next to the Romany Kramoris Gallery. The Bridgehampton High School Marimba Ensemble will kick off the day with a 10 a.m. performance there. Escola De Samba BOOM, a 30-piece percussion group, will perform at 11 at Windmill Beach.

Each group will play for an hour, and performances will start every half hour. The regular performances will conclude with the Gene Casey Trio at La Superica at 8 p.m. A complete schedule is available at sagharbormusic.org.

“The first time out, we wanted to be sure to come out in the black, so we only booked bands as we collected sponsorship money,” said Kelly C. Dodds, who founded the festival in 2011. Every performer in the festival and three professional sound crews are paid. “When we applied for our permit from the village, we thought we’d have four bands or so. Well, we ended up having close to 20 different acts that year!”

“When I moved here permanently in 2009, I was blown away by the talent at the Jazz Jam Session at Bay Burger,” said Ms. Dodds, who is the festival’s president and co-artistic director. A survey of community leaders convinced her that a music festival would be well received and, encouraged by John Landes of Bay Burger, she formed a board, attained nonprofit status, and took on Kerry Farrell as co-artistic director.

General admission tickets for Christian McBride and Friends are $25; limited, reserved seats can be had for $45. Admission to the after-party is $10. Festival income is used to support local school music programs and live music performances throughout the year.

In the event of rain, all Off Main performances will take place at Bay Street Theater, and Customs House lawn performances will move into Old Whalers Church.

The Museum of Modern Art will present a survey of Robert Gober’s career, spanning four decades, beginning on Saturday.

The artist, who has had a house in Peconic since 1990, is known for his enigmatic sculptures of everyday objects with a twist, large installations, and drawings and prints. The work is often minimal but charged with narrative and allusions to religion, politics, and sexuality.

“Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor” was organized with the artist by Ann Temkin and Paulina Pobocha and will have representations of all of these mediums and themes starting with mid-1970s paintings, including one of the Connecticut house he grew up in, which hangs at the entrance to the galleries.

The exhibition goes on to explore the artist’s sculptures of non-functioning sinks, which preoccupied him throughout the 1980s and during the AIDS epidemic, including “Two Partially Buried Sinks,” mounted on the museum’s exterior wall and visible through a gallery window.

His room-size installations, which began in 1989, are also represented in the show. Complete with their own artist-designed wallpaper, they act as site-specific settings for the sculptures contained within, be they bridal gowns or fabricated bags of cat litter. Here one finds the drains missing from the sinks of the prior decade, except they’re set into the walls.

The truncated legs that the artist started in 1989 also form a significant part of the show. Whether plainly clad in trousers and emerging from the wall from the shin down or complicated with candles, drains, or other appurtenances, these are surreal and highly craft-based works, which are, as in all of his works, made by hand by the artist or his collaborators.

Other less known series and rooms of work by other artists whose shows has curated over the years, are also presented in the show. A 1992 exhibition he placed in the Dia Center in New York City has been recreated with all three rooms constructed within the museum, including an antechamber, central gallery, and a dark cul-de-sac. The installation features a paint-by-number-style mural inspired by the North Fork, but is interrupted by barred windows revealing a blue sky. The objects include plaster-cast boxes of rat poison and stacks of newspapers with real and fictive content. His sinks also return in this piece, now with running water.

Even more is on view, including further installations, sculpture, and his drawings and prints. The exhibition will be up through Jan. 18.   

Crazy Monkey in Transit

    The Crazy Monkey Gallery, located in Amagansett for 14 years, is in the process of relocating to a larger space on Main Street in Bridgehampton.

New at Halsey Mckay

    Solo exhibitions of work by Augustus Nazzaro and Timothy Bergstrom are on view at the Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton through Oct. 20. Mr. Nazzaro layers and sands black acrylic on wood to blur the line between representation and abstraction. For his images, which slowly appear from the haze of the paintings, the artist sources “redacted documents from covert operations, spying by the N.S.A., September 11th, the rise in gun violence and school shootings.”

    Mr. Bergstrom’s exhibition, “Moon Milk: Part I,” takes its title from a reference in an Italo Calvino short story to a mythical muck fermenting on the moon. The paintings, which are meant to be explored up close, are filled with screws, brushes, bottle caps, pastry tips, sandpaper, tape, and tissue, all held in place by thousands of viscous threads of acrylic paint. Like the surface of the moon, which is unaffected by wind or weather, Mr. Bergstrom’s canvases are built up layer by layer but never erased.

Two at Grenning

    The Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor will present retrospective exhibitions of paintings by James Del Grosso and Dennis Ramsay from Saturday through Nov. 2. A reception will take place Saturday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.

    Mr. Del Grosso, who lived in Springs from 1986 until his death in 2013, focused in his paintings on the natural world, rendering objects with a delicate, classically trained hand. His ordinary subjects, among them a corkscrew, sparkplugs, Hershey Kisses, and lightbulbs, were painted at a scale and with a precision that lends them a surprising gravity.

    Mr. Ramsay is represented by six meticulous still-life paintings that reflect his classical training in the ancient tempera grassa technique, which he learned while studying in Florence in the 1950s. Born in England, he taught in London and painted portraits of such notables as King Faisal of Iraq, Sir Winston Churchill, and, more recently, Prince Philip. He moved in 1986 to Australia, where he lived until his death in 2009.

“Cut Worlds” in Southampton

    “Béatrice Coron: Cut Worlds,” an exhibition of the artist’s intricate papercuts, will be on view at the Southampton Arts Center through Nov. 2. The artist was born and raised in France, lived in Taiwan, Mexico, and Egypt, and has lived and worked in New York since 1984.

    Ms. Coron stages narrative allegories in silhouette in her papercuts, books, and public art. She sees herself as a teller of “archetypal stories that transcend time and space.” While some of the works are intimate in scale, others are large, including one nine-foot-long piece of cut Tyvek. Her work is in the collections of museums, libraries, and educational institutions throughout the United States and abroad.

People and Animals

    “People and Other Four-Legged Friends,” an exhibition of paintings by Dinah Maxwell Smith, will open Saturday at the Rogers Mansion of the Southampton Historic Museum with a reception at 3 p.m. and remain on view through Dec. 31.

    Ms. Smith, who lives in Southampton, is inspired by both historic photographs and her own observations of people and animals that have frequented the East End over the years. Through a feel for gesture, stance, and happenstance, and a loose, painterly style, the artist captures fleeting moments of life by the sea.

On William Glackens

    The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will present an illustrated lecture by Judith Dolkart about the lifelong friendship between William Glackens, the subject of the museum’s eponymous exhibition, and Albert C. Barnes, the noted collector, on Saturday at 11 a.m.

    Glackens and Barnes met while attending high school in Philadelphia and reconnected in 1912 when Barnes, flush with a fortune, sent the artist to Paris with $20,000 to purchase works by Renoir and Sisley. Glackens returned with paintings by those artists, as well as by Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso, among others. The result of their collaboration is the collection of the Barnes Foundation, housed in Philadelphia.

    Now the director of the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass., Ms. Dolkart previously served as chief curator and deputy director of art and archival collection at the Barnes Foundation. Tickets are $10, free for members, students, and children.

Denise Gale at Ille

    Ille Arts in Amagansett will open a solo show of paintings by Denise Gale, a Springs artist, with a reception Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view through Oct. 27.

    Ms. Gale constructs her paintings with large swaths of color, drips, splashes, and aggressive lines. In her words, “I am always excited to create a painting that has discord. That is arrived at with gesture and color. All the things in life that cannot be explained, the abstract and the ephemeral, are what interest me.”

    She lived and worked in Southern California before moving in 1980 to New York, where she had solo shows at the Painting Center and 55 Mercer. Since moving to Springs, she has exhibited regularly on the East End.

The John Drew Theater Lab will present a free reading of “Eastern Standard,” a play by Richard Greenberg, on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. Peter Connolly will direct the production, with a cast of Chloe Dirksen, Joanna Howard, Kate Mueth, Christian Scheider, Tristan Vaughan, and Mr. Connolly.

“Eastern Standard,” set in 1987, premiered in 1988 in Seattle before moving to New York City Center in Manhattan and subsequently to the John Golden Theatre. Four Manhattan yuppies strike up a friendship in a chic restaurant after an altercation with a homeless woman. Six months later they are in the Hamptons, where they attempt to rehabilitate her.

In his review in The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote, “What gives this play its unexpected weight and subversive punch is its author’s ability to fold the traumas of his own time into vintage comedy without sacrificing the integrity of either his troubling content or his effervescent theatrical form.”

It is difficult to believe that we observe the centennial of Saul Steinberg’s birth this year. Born at the very start of World War I, he is an artist who has transcended his era in quieter and yet more influential ways than many of his peers whose centenaries we have also recently marked.

Steinberg’s singular takes on the absurd and the surreal, his interplay between mediums, and his sharp wit and use of language all anticipate the work of generations to come, particularly in a well-edited celebratory exhibition of his works on view at the Pace Gallery on East 57th Street in Manhattan.

Like many creative types of his era, Steinberg emigrated to the United States in the 1940s, a refugee from the fascism gripping Italy, where at the time he was a student. Editors of American publications that had already begun including his drawings in their pages interceded to help him enter the country.

Although married to Hedda Sterne, one of the New York School artists captured in the famous photograph of “The Irascibles” in Life magazine in 1951, his playful art, with inflections of Surrealism, was not of that strictly formalist and nonobjective world. Still, it derived from the same influences, and he was friends with many of them.

His postwar work included renderings of fanciful documents and certificates with elaborate cursive signifying absolutely nothing, the curved lines just that. The fake certificates appear to mock the papers required by the totalitarian governments that artists were fleeing. As he was skewering the self-importance and ridiculousness inherent in those items, he was also tackling modern art in post-modern terms.

The Pace show is on two floors. Upstairs, photographs from 1949, of painted drawings of women on or in bathtubs, are both witty and intellectually engaging, a cracked mirror reflecting back half a century of Modernist art movements and tendencies. Steinberg used the camera to reproduce his art in a way that made it part of it. His embrace of the photograph to portray a doodle was anathema to the artists who rejected as art the images it recreated so faithfully. His implied irony and the classical figure it employed, the bather, came not from the sensibilities of the era, but from the Dadaists he cut his teeth on while growing up in Bucharest.

This kind of irreverence and blurring of lines between mediums correlated  more fully with the later neo-Dadaism of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and the conceptual art of the decades to follow. It was not surprising to learn in the essay for the catalog that two of his favorite artists were Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol.

Steinberg took his work with the photograph to further absurdist ends: drawing figures on stairs, walls, the floor, and on the street, using props like boxes, paper, brooms, and bathmats to stand in for themselves or other objects. When he transforms footstools by drawing cartoon cat heads and tails on the walls and floor beside them, it is both amusing and transgressive, but not in any way cute. The faces look more like the masks of businessmen than animals, even the one drawn on the floor with the feet of the stool in the air as if ready for a belly rub.

It was in these years that Steinberg started applying things to photographs, including his own drawings, whiteout, and rubber stamps. To an image of a crumpled paper mountain, he applied an increasing number of stamped figures of his own design, titling each work, such as “Three Figures in a Landscape,” for the number of stamped images. It was another way of subverting a classic academy genre.

These relatively simple works were very complicated in their rejection of formalism and the privileged sanctity of the art object’s uniqueness (or, in the words of Walter Benjamin, its “aura”), in their serial nature as well as their co-option of the readymade and a foreshadowing of later installation art. For someone who spent his life in the one-liner world of mass-market print and cartoons, this was denser stuff, even when it was delivered via the photographic image of a challah bread on wheels.

Downstairs, the gallery exhibits a wider range of the artist’s work, including a series of drawings and sculptures inspired by his drawing tables, urban streetscapes, original artwork for published cartoons, and a westward-facing view from his apartment, similar to the one that became the iconic New Yorker cover and poster from 1976, still popular today.

In the catalog essay, Joel Smith notes that “a stint with the United States intelligence service in World War II turned him (after his own fashion) American, and got him comfortable in the role of a cultural spy.” Steinberg revels in the modern American city, yet finds something amiss and alienating about it and its consumer culture. The surreal nature of some midcentury architecture was also a recurrent subject, whether a skyscraper envisioned as a chest of drawers or‚ closer to his East Hampton home‚ the much-photographed Big Duck, set by the highway near Riverhead to advertise a local farm.

His generic landscapes, pretty backgrounds of green and blue horizons in oil on paper, became a series of backdrops for nothing as well as the most fanciful of inhabitants and buildings. It is worth noting that he was both an early avid reader and a student of architecture in his college years in Milan.

Steinberg lived well into his 80s. Like Duchamp, Rauschenberg, and Johns, who is, of course, still alive, his longevity surpassed many of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, who barely made it to their 60s. It is tempting to wonder if the quartet’s irreverence for the heroic art that most artists of their era held dear gave them longer and happier existences, particularly when the Steinberg show is such fun to behold.

The exhibition will remain on view through Oct. 18.

Listen, you can sit in your dull Long Island home afraid of the next terrorist strike, or you can get out and engage the world. How about Florence?

Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature is back at it with another writers workshop in Italy, this one from Jan. 13 to 24. The focus in Florence will be on fiction with Susan Scarf Merrell. The author of a new novel, “Shirley,” about that master of the macabre Shirley Jackson, Ms. Merrell is also the fiction editor of The Southampton Review.

Beyond classes in contemporary Italian fiction, Michelangelo and the Medici family, and Italian style and design, the workshop involves outings to explore the city, the opera, the Bargello Museum, a winery, and the Italian countryside. To say nothing of the time you’ll have to play tourist on your own.

The deadline is Wednesday, and applications are free and open to all. The cost starts at $2,066.50 for the non-credit option, which does not include accommodations and airfare. The website to visit is stonybrook.edu/mfa/winter.