“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.”

New at Ille Arts

    An exhibition of paintings and drawings by Virva Hinnemo will open Saturday at Ille Arts in Amagansett, with a 6 to 8 p.m. reception, and remain on view through June 2. Ms. Hinnemo, who was born in Helsinki, Finland, and now lives in Springs, has exhibited widely and was selected by David Salle for the Parrish Art Museum’s “Artists Choose Artists” show in 2013.

    Early in her career Ms. Hinnemo worked from life. Her work is now abstract, even if, as she has said, “I still feel that strong connection to all things real.” She starts a painting with a bright, colorful palette, but as she builds them up, with wide, flowing brushstrokes, “I find myself watching the entire surface go gray, brown, or mud.”

Early Youngerman

    The Washburn Gallery in New York City is showing paintings from the 1950s and 1960s by Jack Youngerman, today through June 27. Mr. Youngerman, who lives and works in Bridgehampton, has been one of the world’s leading abstract artists for six decades.

    His first solo exhibition in the city was in 1958, at the Betty Parsons Gallery. A year later he was included in the landmark Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Sixteen Americans.”

    The Washburn show concentrates on the early abstract paintings, which have lost none of their vitality. An opening reception will be held today from 6 to 8 p.m.

Photographs at Olko

    A retrospective exhibition of photographs by Victor Friedman will open today at Monika Olko Gallery in Sag Harbor and remain on view through June 5. A photographer for more than 50 years, Mr. Friedman is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York, and his work has been published and exhibited widely.

    His photographs range from documentary images of New York street scenes to figures portrayed through a Cubist lens to stark landscapes of Nova Scotia.

    A reception will take place May 24 from 5 to 8 p.m.

Water Mill Museum Opens

    The Water Mill Museum will open for the season next Thursday with its 22nd annual members’ art show and two new exhibits focused on Water Mill history. The hamlet’s post office is the subject of one of them, featuring posters, news clippings, stories, and postcards from the 1800s to the present.

    Another new initiative is a short video that documents the other installations on the museum’s second floor. Because that floor is not accessible to all, the video will be shown on the first floor, enabling everybody to have access to the exhibit’s content, which includes the agricultural history of the region, fishing and whaling, and the mills of Water Mill.

    An opening party and reception for artist members will be held on May 31 from 5 to 7 p.m.

A Duryea Returns

    Outeast Gallery in Montauk will host a show of work by Lynn Duryea from Saturday through June 3, including one large and 24 small sculptures, as well as photographs. Ms. Duryea, who grew up in Montauk, now divides her time between Boone, N.C., where she is a professor of art at Appalachian State University, and Deer Isle, Me.

    Her sculpture features elemental shapes and forms suggestive of large-scale industrial objects and architectural elements. According to the artist, “Through a vocabulary of form of softened geometry, I investigate subtlety and nuance, and the method and manner of connection.” Her photographs also focus on forms and surfaces that have interested her during her travels.

    An opening reception will take place Saturday from 6 to 10 p.m.

Musnicki in Brooklyn

    Jill Musnicki, an artist from Sag Harbor, will preview “Eothen: A Year at Warhol Preserve,” a work-in-progress, at Brooklynphoto One Night Only Art, a monthly series presenting emerging and established artists for a single evening, tomorrow from 6 to 9 p.m.

    In 2012, as part of the Parrish Art Museum’s “Road Show,” Ms. Musnicki presented a multi-channel video projection of images captured by remote cameras placed in various East End locations. For “Eothen,” she placed five cameras on the Warhol Preserve in Montauk, for which the Nature Conservancy is caretaker, in August 2013. She moves them around the property, collecting images from different perspectives.

    While the ultimate goal is four simultaneous projections — one for each season — Brooklynphoto, which had approached her to do a show, will present at least two. Another preview will take place at a Nature Conservancy event on June 28.

    Brooklynphoto is at 39 Ainslie Street in Williamsburg.

Rossa Cole Solo

    Dodds and Eder in Sag Harbor will host a solo show of work by Rossa Cole from today through June 23, with a reception scheduled for May 31 from 5 to 7 p.m. Mr. Cole, who lives in Sag Harbor and Brooklyn and was included in last year’s “Artists Choose Artists” exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum, creates art from discarded materials found in nature.

    The exhibition includes sculptures, made from twigs gathered in his backyard, of Asian longhorn beetles, destructive tree insects accidentally introduced to Long Island in the 1990s. A flock of soaring seagulls, made of interwoven six-pack plastic rings and fishing wire, expresses man’s ability to do inadvertent harm. According to the gallery, Mr. Cole “explores conditions problematic to the environment and he threads a moral conscience establishing a message or metaphor.”

Five at Ashawagh

    Abstract universes are the theme of a group show that will be on view at Ashawagh Hall in Springs from tomorrow through Sunday. Curated by Elisabeth Hagen, the exhibition will include work by Josephine DeFrancis, Robert Rhee, Kate Sharkey, John Zuleta, and Ms. Hagen, all of whom live and work in New York City.

    Four of the artists are painters whose styles range from Abstract Expressionism to Surrealism to Color Field. Mr. Rhee, a sculptor, creates abstractly functional objects. All the works are inspired by everyday items and landscapes, with an occasional foray into fantasy.

    A reception will take place tomorrow from 6 to 9 p.m.

    The Watermill Center will open its doors Saturday afternoon from 2 to 6 for a variety of activities and programs. Blakeley White-McGuire, a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company, will lead a free movement workshop for all ages, titled “Cultivating Physical Presence,” at 2. Participants will explore performance through basic movements such as walking, standing, running, and skipping. Comfortable clothing and shoes have been recommended.

    At 3, Laura Rozenberg, a local artist originally from Argentina, will offer a workshop for ages 7 and up in creating a recycled material garden from plastic bottles. Participants should bring recyclable plastic bottles; other materials will be provided.

    Fanni Futterknecht and Marianne Vlaschits will present “Metamorphic,” a performance installation set in the center’s gardens, at 4. Prior to the work-in-progress performance, in which the artists will present a “sculptural painting,” films by Ms. Futterknecht and Ms. Vlaschits will be screened. A reception and Q&A will follow the presentation of “Metamorphic.”

    A walking tour of the building, gardens, and grounds will also be offered at 3. All programs are free, but reservations are required and may be secured at watermillcenter.org.

    “Dance Is Now,” a fund-raising performance by three East End dance companies, will be held Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center. The evening will support a new initiative of the cultural center to emphasize dance performance and education in its programming.

     The participating companies are Danse Arts and Studio 3 of Bridgehampton, and Hamptons Dance Authority of Southampton. The program will feature popular music and performances by several professional and amateur dancers.

     The program and S.C.C. dance initiative will be introduced by Benjamin Avram and Dawn Watson, and a reception with refreshments by Southampton Publick House and Deli Counter Fine Foods will follow the performance. Tickets are $45.

    Anthony W. Robins will discuss the history and significance of Grand Central Terminal at the Montauk Library on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. “Grand Central Terminal: 100 Years of a New York Landmark,” taken from the title of a 2013 book by Mr. Robins, will address the building’s Beaux-Arts design along with its function, use of technology, and role in urban planning.

    The author is an expert on New York City architecture and history and is a New York Council for the Humanities speaker. The illustrated lecture is free.

Outdoor Furnishings

    “Exteriors: The Explosion of Outdoor Furnishings” will open at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton on May 17 and remain on view through Oct. 11. The largest exhibition in the foundation’s history, it will include outdoor furnishings, including shelters, fabrics, lighting, and materials, from designers and manufacturers from France, Italy, Colombia, Sweden, and the United States.

    With nine distinctive “rooms,” the show demonstrates how outdoor spaces can be transformed to expand indoor living. A sensuous, fortune cookie-shaped lounge made by Johnny Swing entirely from welded quarters, and a Lips loveseat, designed by Colin Selig and fabricated from repurposed propane tanks, are two of the many creations on view.

    Wendy Van Deusen, Jack Lenor Larsen, Sherri Donghia, and Elizabeth Lear have organized the exhibition.

    Visitors can also avail themselves of a sale of textiles and objects from Mr. Larsen’s collection. With prices starting at $100, the sale, which benefits LongHouse, includes art fabrics by famous designers, fine modern quilts, batiks, baskets, and a diverse selection of textiles.

    LongHouse Reserve is open Wednesdays and Saturdays from 2 to 5 p.m. except in July and August, when it is open Wednesdays through Saturdays.

Landscapes at Ashawagh

    “Open Spaces IV,” an exhibition of photographs and paintings by members of Plein Air Peconic, will be on view tomorrow through Sunday at Ashawagh Hall in Springs. The artists of Plein Air Peconic aim not only to capture the beauty of the East End landscape but also to encourage the preservation of the open spaces so important to their work.

    The show includes work by Casey Chalem Anderson, Susan D’Alessio, Aubrey Grainger, Keith Mantell, Michele Margit, Gordon Matheson, Tom Steele, and Kathryn Szoka. An artists’ reception will take place Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m., and a Mother’s Day reception with coffee and muffins will be held Sunday from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

    A portion of all sales will benefit the Peconic Land Trust.

Animal Shelter Benefit

    “Paws and Reflect,” a show of artwork to benefit the Southampton Animal Shelter, will open Saturday at Richard J. Demato Fine Arts in Sag Harbor with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. According to the gallery, “This heart-warming compilation of artwork reveals our appreciation and fascination with animals. From the whimsical to the unusual and elegant, these works depict our favorite creatures and raise awareness and needed funds for the S.H.A.S.”

    The artists, who will donate a portion of their sales to the shelter, include Katie O’Hagan, Margo Selski, Mary Chiarmonte, Gail Potocki, Andrea Kowch, Yana Movchan, Haley Hasler, Harriet Sawyer, and Steve Kenny. The gallery will donate 50 percent of its share of the proceeds from sales to the shelter.

    The exhibition will run through June 29.

    “Southampton Blue Book, 1930 to 1960: Photographs by Bert Morgan,” an exhibition chronicling the recreational pursuits of the town’s wealthy summer residents, will open at the Southampton Historical Museum Saturday and remain on view through Oct. 18.

    Born in England in 1904, Bert Morgan immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of 7. He began his career at 15, syndicating photographs for the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News. He started freelancing in 1930 with a camera he purchased for a quarter at a pawnshop. For the next 50 years Morgan moved freely in the inner circles of high society in Southampton, Newport, Palm Beach, New York City, and wherever else the “social set” gathered, gaining access, in part, by promising never to publish an unflattering picture.

    According to Mary Cummings, manager of the museum’s research center, “Patrick Montgomery, who purchased the Bert Morgan archives, worked with us in choosing the approximately 30 photographs most relevant to South­ampton. A highlight for many people will be photographs in the section devoted to the Southampton Riding and Hunt Club, where a young Jacqueline Bouvier was perfecting her horsemanship.” Photographs of the future first lady competing in a local horse show were selected from more than 500 images taken by Morgan of the Bouvier family.

    Morgan also photographed people arriving in casual dress at the Southampton Bathing Corporation, and in more formal attire at the Meadow Club, where they socialized during the evenings. Among his celebrity subjects were Gary Cooper, C.Z. Guest, Diana Vreeland, and members of the Gabor, Duke, and Ford families. His work was published in The Social Spectator, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Town and Country.

    Photographs of the wedding of Henry Ford II and Anne McDonnell in 1940 are included in the exhibition, as are images from several of the most talked-about debutante parties. Some of the more unusual images were captured at twist parties thrown by Frank Hunter, a tennis professional and business executive. When Hunter purchased his Southampton home during the Cuban missile crisis, he spent $140,000 on a bomb shelter that was a replica of El Morocco, the New York nightclub he patronized for 50 years.

    The Bert Morgan Archive consists of more than 800,000 negatives taken by Morgan and his son Richard at parties, openings, fund-raisers, sporting events, home sittings, weddings, and other functions attended by the rich and famous, including several generations of America’s most prominent families as well as European royalty.

    An opening reception will take place at the museum June 7 from 4 to 6 p.m.