The Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival will present a screening of “Anita: Speaking Truth to Power” on Saturday at 4 p.m. at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor.

The subject of the 77-minute documentary, directed by Freida Lee Mock, is Anita Hill, an attorney and law professor who in 1991 was thrust onto the world stage when she testified before the Senate during its confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Ms. Hill, who had been an assistant and counsel to Mr. Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, recounted, with graphic clarity, repeated acts of sexual harassment she claimed to have endured while working for him. Though she was vilified by many and Mr. Thomas was confirmed, her testimony opened a window on sexual misconduct in the workplace.

The film also offers a glimpse into her private life with friends and family. She speaks openly and intimately for the first time about the experiences that led her to testify before the Senate and the obstacles she faced in telling the truth. She also discusses her life and work in the 23 years since.

 The screening will be followed by a panel discussion including Betty Schlein, past president of Long Island NOW; Gini Booth, executive director of Literacy Suffolk; Wini Freund, former board president of Womens Fund of Long Island, and Deborah Kooperstein, an attorney and Southampton Town justice.

Tickets are $15 at the door.

Solow at Whaling Museum

The Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum will open “City Square/Piazza,” an installation by Peter Solow, with a reception Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view through Oct. 13.

Mr. Solow, who lives in Sag Harbor, had his first solo show in New York City at the age of 29. In a review, John Russell, art critic of The New York Times, called him “someone to watch.”

While he has concentrated on large-scale oil paintings throughout his career, the Whaling Museum show is, in the artist’s words, “a reflection on how to make art, as much as about content.” He will show a series of composites in which his own drawings, paintings, and photographs are scanned, manipulated digitally, and printed as layered images on canvas, on which he then paints.

Many of the images are of piazzas, a recurring subject in his paintings and works on paper and a result of his many visits to Italy.

Call for Entries

Artists have been invited to submit work for the 2014 Hamptons Juried Art Show, a benefit for the Retreat, by Sept. 26. The jurors will be Janet Goleas, curator at the Islip Art Museum, and Christina Strassfield, chief curator and museum director of Guild Hall.

The top 25 entries will be exhibited at the Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery in Sag Harbor in 2014. The three judged Best in Show will have their own exhibition at the gallery in 2015.

The entry fee is $50, and all fees benefit the Retreat, an East End agency serving victims of domestic violence. For guidelines, submissions, and payment, artists can visit hamptonsjuriedartshow.com.

Arts Sites Exhibition

“Out of Time,” an exhibition exploring the divergent approaches to art-making of Andrea and Pierre Cote, will open at Art Sites Gallery in Riverhead Saturday with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. It will remain on view through Oct. 26.

Ms. Cote will exhibit photographs created from images and negatives originally taken in 1998. The reassembled works bring the past into a dialogue with the present, with rust and decayed pictorial elements serving as markings of the passage of time.

Mr. Cote creates sculptures from found objects showing wear and use from the 19th century to the present. By combining dissimilar materials and parts into new and often witty constructions, he, too, establishes a conversation between past and present.

Ms. Cote will also show a video, “Double Face,” in “Narcissism and the Self-Portrait,” a group exhibition at Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh, N.Y., from Sept. 27 through Nov. 22, and will exhibit a new hair-painting on silk tapestry at the Islip Art Museum as part of a group show, “It’s Getting Hairy,” from Oct. 1 through Nov. 1.

Ted Davies at Kramoris

“American Icons: New York City,” an exhibition of woodblock prints created between 1959 and 1969 by Ted Davies, will open today at Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor and remain on view through Oct. 9. An opening reception will take place on Saturday from 4:30 to 6 p.m.

The artist, who died in 1993, lived in Sag Harbor and New York City. The works to be exhibited depict the people and places of the city in an era of Chinese laundries, neighborhood bars, shoeshine stands, men wearing hats, and the el, the Third Avenue/Bronx elevated railway. Pedestrians in the prints interact with each other rather than with their cellphones.

Also on view will be his “Cards of Life, Cards of Death,” whose social criticism and satire place him in the tradition of Hogarth and Daumier. According to Christina Schlesinger, an artist and cultural historian, “His vision of the city is intimate and amused, catching the quirky details and human touches, the city’s hard edges softened into tilts, curves, and loops.”

“Living Color” in Bridge

“Living Color,” an exhibition of 50 works on canvas and paper by J. Steven Manolis, will open Saturday with a reception from 5 to 9 p.m. at Chase Edwards Contemporary Fine Art in Bridgehampton, where it will remain on view through Oct. 20.

Mr. Manolis, who lives in Water Mill and Palm Beach, Fla., was a student of Wolf Kahn and a trustee of the Vermont Studio Center. His abstract paintings use the dynamics and beauty of color combinations to “evoke human emotions,” in the artist’s words.

Open Studio in Springs

Ruth Nasca, a Springs artist, will open her studio on Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Small drawings and paintings will be on view at 11 Karlsruhe, off Three Mile Harbor Road. A call to 324-2650 will provide more information.

Shields and Shiflett in New York

“Thread Lines,” an exhibition opening today at the Drawing Center in SoHo with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m., will include work by Drew Shiflett of East Hampton and New York City and Alan Shields, who lived on Shelter Island until his death in 2005.

The show, which will run through Dec. 14, features artists who engage in sewing, knitting, and weaving to create works that show the affinities between the mediums of textile and drawing.

From the late 1960s on, Shields, whose grandmother taught him to sew, used a variety of materials and processes in the creation of works that took painting off the stretcher and extended the boundaries of the medium. “Alan Shields: In Motion” will open at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Oct. 14.

Ms. Shiflett has had solo exhibitions on the East End at Guild Hall, the Islip Art Museum, and the Drawing Room, and in New York City at Lesley Heller Gallery, White Columns, and Fashion Moda. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

The publication of “Soft Targets,” Joseph Giannini’s collection of nonfiction stories about surfing, war, and fate, will be celebrated at LTV Studios in Wainscott with a book signing and reception tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. Mr. Giannini, an attorney who lives in East Hampton, served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968 with the First Battalion, Third Marines.

Susan Schrott, a textile artist, psychotherapist, and actress, will present a free exhibition-performance at the Amagansett Library on Saturday at 6 p.m. Ms. Schrott’s artwork, much of which celebrates women and individuality, will be on view, while the artist will present “Triple Threat,” a narrative of her path from Brooklyn to the New York stage to the artist’s studio to her private practice. The audience has been advised to expect comedic flair and a song or two.

A small composition of perennials in saturated reds and purple-blue with a dash of yellow drew my attention throughout August and into September.

My experiment used three plants that I observed a year ago while studying the perennial plantings at Bressingham Gardens in England with Amy Halsey of Amy’s Flowers in Water Mill. The herbaceous clematis, C. heracleifolia Cassandra, contributes the deep purple/blue; the aptly named Sedum Red Cauli becomes progressively brighter as its buds open, and the classic cultivar Helenium Moerheim Beauty has performed a multicolored show for more than six weeks with blooms opening deep red and turning burnt orange to dark yellow as they age.

The perennial challenge in perennial gardens is how to keep the show going after July. Often gardens begin looking tired after the first flush of summer, or they are filled with gold and yellow daisy-like flowers to the exclusion of most other colors.

The gardens at Bressingham have inspired me to seek ways to extend our garden season with lots of color into September and beyond.

Helenium, sneezeweed or Helen’s Flower, comes in many colors and tones in the red-to-mahogany range, yellow, gold, and orange. It is a native-plant gift to the late summer garden, long-blooming and robust, and it ought to be used more often.

The clear yellow cultivar Butterpat has been flowering for the past month in the Mimi Meehan Native Plant Garden in East Hampton. It’s beautiful, but oh so safe. Why was I so cautious and conservative when I selected it, I’ve been asking myself. Next season, if I can’t locate a local source, my Moerheim Beauty will be transplanted to the native plant garden to join Butterpat and give the area some verve.

Sedums are stalwarts of the late-season garden and Red Cauli deserves to become popular. Its blue-gray succulent leaves are flushed with burgundy, and its stems are burgundy, reminding me of the popular S. Matrona. However, its flowers are about the clearest red of any sedum. Hopefully it will be propagated locally, but in the meantime my very satisfactory plant came from the mail-order nursery Bluestone Perennials.

Crocosmia and Kaffir lilies were important elements in the September beds at Bressingham Gardens. Unfortunately, in my past experience they had not been hardy for me. Their vivid, spikey flowers and sword-like leaves add visual interest that our perennial gardens generally lack.

The most familiar of the crocosmia is the scene-stealer Lucifer, generally grown as an annual corm. Anyone stopping at Breadzilla in Wainscott in July and August knows that when Lucifer is flowering you are blind to all else.

Help is on the way. The wholesale grower Glover Perennials on the North Fork has been trialing a slowly expanding list of hardy cultivars of both crocosmia and Kaffir lilies.    

Bright orange Crocosmia Distant Planet is gorgeous and would mix well with other late-summer plants without dominating the garden. There is a second, more subdued cultivar, as well. Let’s put our toes in the water and test them for ourselves. In England and Europe there are dozens of varieties opening from midsummer throughout the remainder of the season and in many colors. Distant Planet could be the beginning of something new.

The various cultivars of the Kaffir lily, Schizostylis coccinea, are among the last perennials to flower, from August into November. Forms hardy in our gardens are to be prized. It’s a member of the iris family and is from South Africa, where it has warm summers and cold winters. This season Glover is offering four cultivars, in colors ranging from light pink to salmon pink and coral red. They say it has performed well in their gardens.

This summer the English garden press has given great exposure to a new red cardinal flower that had me lusting and drooling. I was thrilled to see it available from Glover and one has been planted already in my garden. More to come on its performance next season.

Flowering in August, the red cardinal flower, Lobelia cardinalis, is native to wet woods and damp spaces in our region but is adaptable to the garden. Doug Dayton grew it brilliantly in heavy loam in his astonishing garden behind Wittendale’s Nursery. Adding purple-black foliage to the intense red flower is an irresistible combination, and with a name like Black Truffle, who can resist?

Deep blues and purples are essential companions to anchor these bright perennials. Most of us, unfortunately, are not able to grow and perennialize agapanthus, which accomplishes this brilliantly in English gardens. Aconitum and tender salvias are about as close as we come now.

But my low-growing herbaceous clematis Cassandra should not be forgotten. It is compelling and keeps showing up in the photos I took throughout my stay at Bressingham. I found it at the mail-order Joy Creek Nursery, a must-go-to nursery for any plant lover.

Why don’t we plant for a long, extended season of flowering? There certainly are lots of choices. The answer, I suspect, is that most planting is done in the spring, and people buy plants with curb appeal, meaning when they are in flower. By late July most people have stopped visiting garden centers, so the garden centers stop bringing in fresh plants. It’s a vicious circle. Break it.

Emily Cheng at Ille

Ille Arts in Amagansett will present an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Emily Cheng from Saturday through Sept. 30, with an opening reception Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. Ms. Cheng draws upon the world’s cultural history for images and emblems, sometimes only fragments, which are transformed and recombined, in the artist’s words, “to service an entirely different purpose and context.”

She has exhibited regularly in galleries in New York City and has had solo shows in Taipei, Hong Kong, Manila, Beijing, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Santa Fe, N.M. Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and a fellowship from Yaddo are among her honors.

Krasner at Jewish Museum

“From the Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, 1945-1952” will open tomorrow at the Jewish Museum in New York City and remain on view through Feb. 1.

Lewis, who was born in 1908, is generally regarded as the first African-American Abstract Expressionist painter. Krasner was born a year later and became one of the few women in the mostly male-dominated movement. Both artists worked in the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Krasner and Lewis reached their mature styles during the 1940s and ’50s. Both developed many of the elements central to Abstract Expressionism — a rejection of realism, gestural brushwork, all-over compositions, and use of non-natural color.

According to Norman Kleeblatt, the museum’s chief curator, “Both artists drew upon sources with personal meanings: ancient and nonwestern art, contemporary music, forms of writing, references to urban life.”

Four at Ashawagh

“4@Ashawagh,” a group exhibition, will take place at Ashawagh Hall in Springs on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. A reception will be held Saturday from 5 until closing.

Fred Fickera is a sculptor who lived in East Hampton for 35 years and ran a carpentry business. His forms use wood elements to explore the juxtaposition of nature and technology. Marcie Honerkamp, a Springs artist who has been working with mosaics for 15 years, will show new work based on her study of houndstooth patterns.

Ellen McDermott is a widely published New York City commercial photographer whose personal work includes still-life studies, nature, and images from Iceland. Bridget Sciales worked in advertising, publishing, and the restaurant business before returning to her original passion, works on paper.

Scrimshaw in Montauk

“Scrimshaw Alley,” an exhibition of work by Peter Spacek, an artist, illustrator, cartoonist for The Star, and surfer who lives in Springs, is on view at Outeast Gallery in Montauk through Sept. 30.

Scrimshaw is an art form traditionally practiced on whalebone or tusk ivory. Mr. Spacek had already established an illustration studio in Montauk when he was tasked, in 2005, with drawing one of his illustrations on a surfboard for a charity event. After some trial and error, he found that by using a nail and ink on fiberglass he could achieve the effect of scrimshaw.

The exhibition will include images on surfboards, resin, paper, and cotton.

Drew Petersen, an award-winning classical pianist, will perform a free concert at the Montauk Library on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. The program will include works by Schumann and Brahms.

Mr. Petersen, 20, was presented at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall at the age of 5 and gave a solo recital at Steinway Hall when he was 10. He has performed in the United States and Europe, including music festivals in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. He won his first competition at age 14, the same age at which he enrolled in Harvard University’s Extension School, and has collected many prizes and scholarships since then.

Teri Dunn Chace, a writer, editor, and blogger whose work has appeared in major gardening and outdoor living publications, will deliver an illustrated lecture for the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons, “Seeing Flowers: Discover the Hidden Life of Flowers,” on Sunday at 2 p.m.

Ms. Chace’s book of the same name, published last year, includes lyrical and illuminating essays, observations, and horticultural lore from the author, and 343 photographs by Robert Llewellyn, a noted macro-photographer.

Admission to the talk, which will take place at the Bridgehampton Community House, is $10, free for members. Refreshments will be served.

Speaking of horticulture, the Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack will close its garden season with a party on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. The opportunity to enjoy a glass of wine and a stroll around the garden will be free for members, $40 for nonmembers. Guests can R.S.V.P. to info@madoo.org.

The John Drew Theater Lab will present a free staged reading of “Viva Los Bastarditos,” a new musical by Jake Oliver, Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. The production will be directed by Ethan McSweeny, a Tony Award nominee, and will star Blake DeLong and Alex Morf.

Set in a fictional land known as West Massachusetts, the play pits two villainous landlords against Los Bastarditos, three rock stars who unite to fight the would-be dictators and their army of rent collectors. The play draws upon and repurposes golden-age musicals, vaudeville, bedroom farce, and B-movie westerns.