Classical piano, opera, and folk are the musical offerings this week at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton. On Sunday at 3 p.m., Misuzu Tanaka, a prizewinning concert pianist, will perform a program of works from the height of the Romantic period to the early 20th century, including Chopin’s Scherzo No. 4 in E major, Op. 54, Bartok’s Scherzo no. 4 in E major, and Schumann’s Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 14, originally titled “Concerto sans Orchestre.” A reception for the artist will follow.

    Opera of the Hamptons and the Friends of the Rogers Memorial Library will present their annual lunchtime opera program on Wednesday at noon. This year’s selection is “Porgy and Bess,” with Richard Hobson, baritone, Robert Wilson, music director, and Barbara Giancola, artistic director.

    Fans of folk music can attend a sing-along in memory of Pete and Toshi Seeger today at 6 p.m. All three programs are free.

    The Hampton Library in Bridgehampton has initiated a community outreach program that will offer free screenings of films from prior Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festivals on the third Wednesday of the month. The first offering, scheduled for Wednesday at 7 p.m., will be “Patriocracy.” Directed by Brian Malone, the 2012 film explores the extreme polarization in America, which, it posits, prevents the country from tackling its most serious problems.

    Insights into the problem are offered by politicians, journalists, and academics of all persuasions, among whom are Bob Schieffer, CBS News’ chief Washington correspondent; Pat Buchanan, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination; Senator Mark Warner, and Mickey Edwards, a former U.S. representative from Oklahoma who has taught at Harvard, Georgetown, and Princeton since leaving office.

    “Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself,” which will have its nationwide broadcast premiere tomorrow at 9 p.m. on PBS and locally on WNET, is a spellbinding film that chronicles the life of a singular man. George Plimpton grew up in a duplex apartment on upper Fifth Avenue, attended St. Bernard’s School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard -— where he was a classmate and close friend of Robert F. Kennedy — and Cambridge University. But even if you know nothing about his background, you have only to hear him speak to know he was a patrician. And one of the many pleasures of “Plimpton!” is that you get to hear him speak a great deal.

    But before Cambridge, before Harvard, there was Exeter, and we learn from Plimpton’s brother Oakes that the Plimpton family “was Exeter” and that George was kicked out of the prestigious private school. Plimpton’s son Taylor then reads “How Failing at Exeter Made a Success out of George Plimpton,” an essay his father wrote for the Phillips Exeter Academy Bulletin in 2002.

    In Plimpton’s own words, “I bring you greetings from the Daytona Beach High School,” from which he received his diploma before setting off for Harvard, which had already accepted him. “Thus I come to you as sort of an outsider, as if you were being addressed by Satan, once an archangel, but then tossed out of Heaven.”

    A recurring theme of the film is how Plimpton managed to be both a part of the privileged milieu into which he was born, and apart from it as well. His father was a prominent attorney and a founding partner of the white-shoe firm Debevoise and Plimpton. But George was reading English at Cambridge in 1953 when he received a phone call from Peter Matthiessen, who was starting a magazine in Paris and wanted Plimpton to edit it.

    Rather than list the writers published in The Paris Review over the next 60 years, suffice it to say that every writer of note was interviewed or otherwise published in the magazine — except for Plimpton.

    Where Plimpton was published was in Sports Illustrated, which arranged for him to pitch in 1958 in a postseason all-star baseball game with a roster including Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. The result was “Out of My League,” published in 1961 and the first of Plimpton’s forays into participatory journalism.

    He subsequently played basketball with the Boston Celtics, boxed with Archie Moore, played the triangle and gong with the New York Philharmonic, performed as a stand-up comedian in Las Vegas, played hockey with the Boston Bruins, and photographed wildlife in Africa, to name just a few of his endeavors. But it was “Paper Lion,” the story of his stint as a Detroit Lions quarterback, that made The New York Times’s best-seller list and him a celebrity.

    Plimpton had a house in Sagaponack and was part of what Vanity Fair magazine called “the Sagg Main set,” which also included Truman Capote, James Jones, and Kurt Vonnegut. One of the many fascinating aspects of the film is how friends and colleagues viewed Plimpton’s adventures in popular culture. James Salter thought he was “writing in a genre that didn’t permit greatness” and Rose Styron recalls that Plimpton didn’t feel he was up to the level of more “serious” novelists. Peter Matthiessen thought his friend was a dabbler who could have been taken more seriously if he hadn’t expressed himself through mass media. But Tom Wolfe praised “Paper Lion,” ranking Plimpton with Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson.

    Plimpton’s relationship with the Kennedys is an important part of the film. When he invited Freddy Espy, whom he later married, on their first date, it was to have “dinner with the president,” she tells us. He was particularly close to Bobby and Ethel Kennedy and was a frequent guest at Hickory Hill and Hyannis Port, according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who remembers that the adventurous Mr. P. “always launched his ship at high tide.”

    The Plimptons were with Bobby Kennedy when he decided to run for president and, tragically, when he was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The film includes a recording of Plimpton’s police deposition regarding the assassination, and we learn that he was not only in the hotel kitchen with Kennedy when he was shot but also helped restrain Sirhan Sirhan. He never spoke publicly or wrote about that night.

    Plimpton’s public life shielded a very private person. Sarah Dudley, who became his second wife in 1991, says, “He wasn’t really your mate, he was everybody’s mate.” His sister, Sarah, says he wasn’t somebody you could get really close to, and according to his daughter Medora, “He never let people in.”

    In 2003, Plimpton returned to Detroit for a 40th reunion of the Detroit Lions team he played with for “Paper Lion.” We see the handsome, white-haired Plimpton waving to the crowd, accepting the applause, and we hear him on the soundtrack reading from the book. It is a particularly poignant moment, all the more so because he died four days later.

    In a kind of coda, Taylor Plimpton reads his father’s list of things he would like to do before dying and breaks down, while onscreen we see footage of Plimpton typing, flying a kite with his children, and walking the streets of New York.

    According to Sarah Dudley, “He was a natural performer and he loved being onstage. And storytelling was his great gift — with himself, of course, as the subject of all his stories.”

    The film, like its subject, tells a fascinating story, with never-before-seen archival footage and photographs and the insights and recollections of friends, family, and public figures.

    “Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself” was produced, written, and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling and edited by Casey Brooks, who grew up in East Hampton. The film was shown at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2012.

    If you were to dismiss the floral studies of Linda Etcoff and the knitted pieces of Laurie Lambrecht as mere women’s work, you would not only be incorrect but would miss out on two worthy exhibitions at the Drawing Room gallery in East Hampton.

    It helps to have a little background on both, particularly the work of Ms. Lambrecht. A photographer by training, she has also had a distinguished career as a knitwear designer. These two metiers crossed paths when she found herself inspired by the tropical wilderness around Captiva, Fla., where she is the photographer for the archives of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s artists-in-residence program.

    Her abstracted photos of pure dark and light-infused color, collected from the Florida landscape, became the inspiration for a series of knitted work in cotton, wool, mohair, and silk yarns. Taking the concept one step further, she then photographed the results, bringing them back to their two-dimensional source.

    Her exhibition consists, first, of those first photographs, each called “Jungle Road.” They are light-filled and diffuse, some reminiscent of Tiffany windows. There is a strong sense of place, even while the details may not describe much, and they are intense in tone and hue.

    Then come the knitted pieces, rich in texture and begging to be touched. The easel-sized knits channel the blues, greens, and earth tones of their progenitors and are called “Compositions.”

    Finally, the last photographs, titled with months, capturing much of the texture of their models, even in a perfectly flat medium. The prints are overall larger than the knits but include a lot of white space, so that the image seems to preserve the same dimensions as the source.

    The entire exercise is an illustrated reflection on artistic inspiration and how one idea or image can morph and change as an art object through the prisms of a creative vision. There is something so satisfying in seeing the progression through to the end.

    Ms. Etcoff is an accomplished painter of interiors and still-life elements, but her work really comes alive in her pastel, charcoal, and crayon drawings. Functioning more as studies, these drawings of sunflowers, amaryllis, paperwhites, hyacinth, and cornflowers tend to be serial snapshots not tied to any setting or defined space.

    As such, they seem to be pure flights of personal whim and fancy, as if she is racing to capture a certain element of the flower’s being before the light changes or her brain channels it differently. The drawings have a brisk pace and can be busy with images or very, very spare. But they never scrimp on detail or saturated color.

    There are yellows in “Siena Sunflowers” that are so pure and beautiful they seem improbable, yet completely naturalistic within her composition. The reds of her amaryllis are equally distinct and striking. But the works with very little color have a similar transcendence. On the surface, these works may seem minor in the great scheme of artistic endeavor, but in some ways they say everything about why one sets about to create or recreate a world visually.

    Ms. Etcoff’s purity of purpose and its outcome testify to a creative mind at work, channeling information and using it to make drawings that redefine the object depicted into a preternatural subject elevated beyond its highest form. While doing nature one better, she then smudges these images, erasing or even sanding the surface, giving them an ethereal air, again all her own.

    These two shows will be at the gallery through Sunday.

    The exploration of the relationship between artist, viewer, and art itself is at the core of “Red,” the 2010 Tony Award-winning play by John Logan, being revived in a black-box setting on the stage of Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater starting Wednesday.

    The two-character play is set in the studio of the painter Mark Rothko in New York beginning in 1958 as he creates the legendary murals for the Four Seasons restaurant. Steve Hamilton, the director of this production, Victor Slezak, who plays Rothko, and Christian Scheider, who plays Rothko’s young assistant, Ken, spoke about the play last week.

    When the idea of reviving “Red” at the John Drew Theater first came up, Mr. Slezak was Mr. Hamilton’s first and only choice to play the revolutionary painter.

    “I responded to the play and the argument about art, about what it means to be human,” Mr. Hamilton said last Thursday. “I immediately thought of Victor. He’s got the chops to play the part.” The “chops” Mr. Hamilton was referring to are both physical (Rothko is onstage throughout) and mental. “Red” is a play about ideas. Rothko’s artistic philosophy, Mr. Hamilton said, was heavily influenced by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, and Sigmund Freud.

    The choice of Mr. Scheider for the part of Ken, who spars with Rothko on art and philosophy, was a “no-brainer,” Mr. Hamilton said. He and his wife, Emma Walton Hamilton, were good friends with Christian Scheider’s parents, the actors Roy Scheider and Brenda King. “I knew Chris when he was growing up. He has a super intellect and a deep interest in philosophy,” Mr. Hamilton said.

    The actual rehearsal period for the production is less than three weeks, only 18 days in all. Such a short period of time requires total immersion in the material.

    “The first thing we did was read the bible, the James Breslin biography,” Mr. Hamilton said. “Mark Rothko: A Biography,” by James E.B. Breslin was first published in 1993. The book, Mr. Hamilton said, provides “a wonderful sort of trail of the New York School through 1930s right up to Rothko’s death.”

    One tool not available to Mr. Slezak in building his Rothko was a recording of the man in life. Yet the absence of that tool in and of itself proved to be a revelation for Mr. Slezak as he explored the inner soul of the character. “He died in 1970,” Mr. Slezak said last Thursday, “and I know that somebody out there has footage or a record of Rothko’s voice. But, try to find it. That gave me a key — how important it was for Rothko to control the image.” He then compared his own art form to that of Rothko’s. “It’s like the quintessential method actor,” Mr. Slezak said. “You can’t track him down. It is as if when he died, he took a broom and whisked all those footsteps away. All we are left with is the work.”

    Next was a visit to the New York City home of former Ambassador Donald Blinken. Mr. Blinken was a friend of Mr. Rothko’s, Mr. Hamilton said, and bought his collection of work directly from the artist. Mr. Scheider described the experience Friday.

    “I had seen Rothkos, but I had never been that close to one. Not one that size from that period,” Mr. Scheider said. “The way the room was laid out, I came around a corner. I looked at the painting. It was the size of the wall. I felt myself grow dizzy, falling into the painting. It is something to do with the painting and how the room was lit, all those things together allowed me to sink into the painting. That was a vital experience for me.”

    Mr. Slezak was particularly struck by a work that preceeded the Four Seasons mural time period. “It was from 1945, 1946, and it had a figure on it. I realized as I was viewing the painting that I was the figure. It took me back to Nietzsche and his description of the early Greek theater. There was no difference between the actor and the chorus, they were all the same. That was one of Rothko’s major goals, that there would be no difference between the viewer and the experience.”

    There will be no Rothkos on display during performances. Rather, the paintings will be in the mind’s eye in the very intimate playing space Mr. Hamilton explores for the third consecutive season. The audience is seated around the actors on the stage in a square. With only 75 seats, the theatrical setting is very intimate, and the connection between actor and audience is visceral, “sometimes a little too much for the audience,” Mr. Hamilton joked. “But most people enjoy it.”

    The theatricality of Rothko’s work has made a deep mpression on all three men. As in theater, where lighting is designed to advance and enhance a work, so to is the lighting of a Rothko painting.

    “There is a moment in the play where I say, ‘That’s why you keep the light so low on your paintings,’ ” Mr. Scheider said. “ ‘You need to help the illusion. You are like a magician. When the lights are low, it is like a bare stage, mysterious. It lets the pictures pulsate.’ ” Mr. Scheider described a key moment in the play for his character, who has been philosophically sparring with Rothko throughout. “I have this revelation when I really begin to see the work pulse, and I realize that I am making it pulse as a viewer. That’s why people are brought to tears when they look at a Rothko.”

    For Mr. Slezak, Rothko’s New York was not so far removed from the one he found himself in a generation later. Mr. Slezak and Mr. Hamilton were young fledgling actors when they met in New York in the late 1970s. “Life was so different. You could see Andy Warhol walking down the street. You would bump into Julian Schnabel, Mick Jagger, John Lennon. There was a freedom then. You didn’t have so much on the line.”

    “We were often auditioning for the same roles,” Mr. Hamilton recalled. “Very frustrating for me, here was Victor. Somehow I forgave him for that, and we got to be pals.”

    “Starving was a little easier,” Mr. Slezak said. He then reflected on the broad array of acting teachers in New York at that time. “Emma [Mr. Hamilton’s future wife] studied with Uta Hagen, who was my teacher.” He then repeated a line in the play. “ ‘The last of a dying breed.’ That period of time you had Geraldine Page, Kim Stanley, Uta Hagen, Stella Adler, Lee Strasburg, they were all alive. Sandy Meisner. I benefited. I used to sneak into Stella Adler’s class. Nobody ever stopped you, you know. I didn’t work with her, but I listened and I listened and I listened.”

    “I was lucky, to have people like Uta and Kim Stanley in my corner just before they were gone. To push and push and push and instill the ideal, not to settle,” Mr. Slezak said. “Just get to the point where we are real human beings instead of the corporate idea of what humanity is really like.”

    The relationship between Rothko and Ken is similar, in at least one respect, to that between Mr. Slezak and Mr. Scheider, the younger man explained. “I am a supporting part; this is his play. I am very inspired by what he is doing. I hope I can support him, maybe the same way as Ken is hoping he can support Rothko.”

    Mr. Scheider believes that despite the sparring between the two characters, the future would hold a revelation for Ken. “If you picked up this story in 10 years, Ken would attribute any good work he did to Rothko,” Mr. Scheider said.

    Mr. Slezak reflected on past and present, as presented by the Rothko of “Red.” “That is a huge part of this play. You are at the height of your powers and you realize, ‘Oh shit, I don’t have much time left. Even if I have 20 years, I don’t have much time. But, I’m here, it is working, I’ve got to get going!’ ”

    Katherine C.H.E., a local singer, songwriter, and mother, will host some two dozen local musicians on Wednesday at 230 Elm in Southampton for “Sing the Peace,” a concert in which artists will perform a song about peace as they define it. Performers in the concert, which begins at 7 p.m., will be invited back to the stage for a grand finale jam. There will also be giveaways of peace and music-related items. There is no cover charge and no minimum drink requirement.

    “In this time of so much international turmoil, when it is so easy to get caught up in focusing on all the things we don’t want, we can begin to reclaim our power when we focus, instead, on what we do want. That’s why I’m putting this night together,” Ms. C.H.E. wrote in a statement. “With that said and with the wise words of Gandhi in mind, ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world,’ I decided one way I could be the peace I want to see in the world is to focus a night of music on that topic. Hence ‘Sing the Peace.’ ”

    Artists scheduled to participate include Glenn Feit, Mick Hargreaves, Inda Eaton, Michael Weiskopf, Terry Sullivan, Cynthia Daniels, Dick Johannson, Matty Liot, and Charles Notturno.

    “Stand-up at the Bridge,” a program of the Hamptons Independent Theatre Festival, will take place at the Bridgehampton Community House on Saturday at 8 p.m. The evening will be hosted by the comedian Joe Mylonas and friends.

    A Long Island native, Mr. Mylonas served 10 years in the Army, including two tours in Iraq, before returning home and starting his career in comedy. A father of two who performs regularly in New York City and on Long Island, he deals with the lighter side of sports, marriage, and raising kids.

    Admission is $20, a portion of which will benefit a nonprofit veterans organization. A second comedy program is scheduled for May 17 at 8 p.m. Tickets are available at hitfest-standup. eventbrite.com.

    There are readings — any number of them around here, given the out-of-scale density of scribblers on the South Fork — and then there are readings for which the usually unacknowledged organizer has gone to considerable pains to bring in someone of distinction from somewhere else.

    Such is the case with Poetry Pairs at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater, put on for 10 years running by Fran Castan, who, dubbed Long Island Poet of the Year last year by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, is herself a poet of stature enough to shoulder aside any lectern-bound reader of her choosing, should she choose to, which of course she doesn’t.

    On Saturday at 7:30 p.m., then, adjusting the mike to appropriate height and clearing their throats will be two important poets, from here and “away,” Grace Schulman of Springs and Baruch College, and Toi Derricotte, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

    Ms. Schulman was the director of the poetry center at the 92nd Street Y and the poetry editor at The Nation — for decades in both cases. Ms. Derricotte co-founded the Cave Canem Foundation of Brooklyn, a national organization devoted to fostering African-American poets as artists and professionals.

    A book signing and reception with wine and dessert will follow the reading, which is free. New this year, poems by East Hampton students will receive honorable mentions.

    As for the items to be signed, Ms. Schulman’s new collection is “Without a Claim,” published last year by Mariner Books. For Ms. Derricotte, her latest is “The Undertaker’s Daughter,” out from the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2011. Her literary memoir, “The Black Notebooks,” from W.W. Norton, won the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for nonfiction.

    Anthropologists and archaeologists often say that much can be learned about a culture by its trash. That may be less true today with recycling, or perhaps even more so.

    Alice Hope, an East Hampton artist, has found both meaning and aesthetic pleasure in metal tabs, the fulcrums that give access to the soda, beer, and energy drinks in aluminum cans. She made this discovery not in her own bins but in a tour of a recycling center, where a 700-pound box of tabs captured her imagination. While the sheer ordinariness of the object was an initial turnoff, she came to embrace its universality and the compact perfection in its “balance of positive and negative space.”

    Struck by both the good-citizen impulse that led to such a massive collection as well as the consumption that produced it, she devised works and objects that either collected the forms as they were, blew them up to heroic proportions, or subverted them entirely. Her current exhibition, at the Ricco/ Maresca Gallery in Chelsea through May 24, includes a 3-D printed facsimile of a tab and two-foot-high anodized aluminum engraved sculptures of tabs with a golden cast that say “Drink Me.”

    Then there are the tabs themselves, collected in clear bins, piled on the floor, embedded in resin, or utterly transformed as part of an LED-backlit sculpture, structured by turtle nets, or attached to ball chain to resemble cords of fiber or wavy hair. In another piece, the artist has taken an old metal box spring and nickel-plated it, draping the long strands of ball chain with red anodized tabs. It is reminiscent of those beaded curtains hung in harems or fortune-telling parlors, with a vaguely Islamic feeling in its elaborate patterning.

    The installation makes the most of these different explorations, moving toward and away from the found object to something else that transcends it. What might appear most off-topic of all in the room are actually pieces that tie Ms. Hope’s current work to her prior explorations. Lined up as airplane windows, as she puts it, she has framed magnetic-field viewing film activated by the ferrite magnets that often populate her other works. The frames mimic the shape of the windows and also the outline of the aluminum tabs. She said the pop of the cans that comes from the in-flight drinks cart was another thing she was thinking about in these pieces.

    The work in this show is fascinating, playing off the artist’s characteristic obsessiveness and channeling it toward new materials and conclusions. In recent years, there had been a certain comfort level in knowing what to expect from Ms. Hope’s installations. That she can find new avenues to explore her interests and imbue them with meaning — from the loss of turtles, to commodification of art, obsolescence, and consumption — demonstrates an imaginative and curious mind constantly attuned to the visual and cultural cues around her. She is a tour guide for unique journeys one doesn’t mind taking again and again.

    The collections are smaller now, mostly donated or sold. But the stories and experiences cannot be diminished, and George and Beth Meredith have a surplus of all of the above.

    A visit to the Merediths’ house, in Springs, is akin to stepping through more than a century’s worth of culture: Art, photography, books, ceramics, and sculpture are on display both inside and out. A wealth of South Fork artists is represented, as are, in rare, exquisitely rendered portrait photography, demigods of literature, music, sports, and more.

    Mr. Meredith was co-founder, president, and creative director of Gianettino and Meredith, for many years the largest independently owned advertising agency in New Jersey. Unhappy at the agency they had worked for, he and Ron Gianettino established their own firm with “$3,000 and no accounts.” Mr. Meredith did, however, know Mel Karmazin, the broadcasting executive who was then head of the New York rock ’n’ roll radio station WNEW. “I went in and said, ‘I’d like your business.’ He said, ‘You’re welcome to it. I don’t advertise.’ ”

    Just a week later, however, Mr. Karmazin called Mr. Meredith with an urgent request. WNEW had a trade deal with The Village Voice and needed an advertisement on very short notice. Gianettino and Meredith commissioned an illustration, added a pithy tag line, and a memorable ad for an upcoming broadcast of a Grateful Dead concert was born. “It changed my life in a lot of ways,” Mr. Meredith said, “because that made Mel decide he wanted to spend money on advertising. It led to a lot of other business. A lot of our ads won awards, and we got a lot of publicity for them.”

    Of an estimated million words written, the adman said he was famous for exactly two. “In 1979, one of the stations, WKTU, converted to disco. For the next 13 weeks, they blew the ratings through the roof, and WNEW’s ratings were cut in half, I would say. Mel got into a panic.” Mr. Karmazin, with the late, legendary D.J. Scott Muni also on the line, summoned Mr. Meredith to their offices. “After we hung up, Scott called me back: ‘Get here. Mel’s talking about changing formats.’ ”

    Before the calls had ended Mr. Meredith was at work. “When Charlie Parker died, a couple of poets in the Village went all over town spray-painting ‘Bird Lives.’ And I literally wrote ‘Rock Lives’ at that moment. I got there and had a big piece of cardboard that said, ‘Disco sucks.’ I said, ‘You can’t say this, but you can say this.’ I turned it over and it said ‘Rock Lives.’ They bought that, and that was their theme for some 15 years.”

    His long experience in advertising, with its essential qualities of aesthetics, graphic design, and succinct messages, clearly played a part in the appreciation he brings to his and his wife’s extensive collections.

    In 2012, part of Mr. Meredith’s immense LP collection was featured in “Table Turners: Album Covers by Artists Who Hardly Ever Did Album Covers” at Innersleeve Records in Amagansett. The exhibition had been staged a decade earlier, however, at what was then the largest gallery in Los Angeles, Track 16, owned by a friend, the comedy writer Tom Patchett. “I did it in New York, too,” Mr. Meredith said of an exhibition at John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller on East 64th Street.

    Track 16 also staged Mr. Meredith’s “When What to My Wondering Eyes . . . ,” an exhibition of secular Christmas-themed art and literature from a collection he believes is the world’s largest. “That was a huge show and got lots of publicity,” he said. “The show was beautiful. It was a unique opportunity when you own something like that — you’d like people to see it.”

    The collection was later sold and donated, in stages, to Penn State University.    A show featuring portraits of authors was exhibited at Manhattan’s Grolier Club, the society for bibliophiles and graphic arts enthusiasts, where he is a member. Mr. Meredith’s collection of portraits numbers, by his estimate, 1,000 — many acquired through chance encounters and opportunities. The oversized prints offer rare depictions of the likes of Thomas Wolfe, James Agee, Isak Dinesen, Allen Ginsberg, James Joyce, Henry Miller, George Bernard Shaw, Tennessee Williams, and a young J.D. Salinger. “That’s really rare,” Mr. Meredith said of the Salinger, “because he didn’t let his picture be taken after this.”

    Jazz musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Sara Vaughn, and Mr. Parker, then 19, are pictured, along with baseball legends including Sandy Koufax, Jackie Robinson, Don Drysdale, and Duke Snider. Also depicted is a youthful Senator John F. Kennedy on the campaign trail and a portrait, by the late Bert Stern, of Natalie Wood. “Of all the photographs, it’s my favorite,” Mr. Meredith said. “Natalie Wood, as beautiful as could be.”

    The Merediths’ house is a veritable museum of visual art, with an emphasis on local artists. Elaine de Kooning, Eric Ernst, Dan Christensen, Audrey Flack, Donald Kennedy, David Gilhooly, Joe Zucker, Hans Van de Bovenkamp, and Randall Rosenthal are but a fraction of the names represented. Even the late Zero Mostel is here: “He was a painter before he was ever an actor,” Mr. Meredith said.

    A rare Andy Warhol print is prominent. “This is a printed proof, and there were 30 others printed. Every one of them, the colors are different. I lucked into this piece at an auction.”

    One striking portrait is a photograph of Picasso by Gjon Mili, a pioneering photographer who used stroboscopic light to capture multiple actions in a single image. “He spent three days and shot over 300 pictures of Picasso,” Mr. Meredith said. “But this is the best one, I think.”

    The Merediths’ appreciation of culture extends to popular music, and on summer nights they might be found at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett, rubbing shoulders with fellow patrons like Mick Jagger and Jon Bon Jovi. “I don’t know if we’d live here if it wasn’t for the Talkhouse,” Mr. Meredith said. “We’d have to go to Manhattan every time we wanted to see and hear the people we love.”