The bluesy harmonica of Job Potter has long been heard at local open mike events and jam sessions, like the Sunday afternoon ones outside the Springs General Store.

    In recent weeks, Mr. Potter’s music has reached a wider audience through the release of his second album, “All Good Things.” The folksy, acoustic-based album is available at the Apple iTunes Store and cdbaby.com as well as at the Springs General Store and Crossroads Music in Amagansett. The musicians Caroline Doctorow, Pete Kennedy, and Gary Oleyar join Mr. Potter, who also sings and plays rhythm guitar, on the album’s 13 tracks.

    It has been a long road to the present, and Mr. Potter’s varied experiences on the South Fork — he is a former East Hampton Town councilman and current member of the town’s planning board — and in New York City inform both “All Good Things” and his first, self-titled release in 2011. “The genesis of this was about 30 years ago,” he said. “I started playing guitar, jamming with friends on Sundays and stuff, and I love to write songs.” A realization, he said, came five years ago, upon turning 60. “I felt I better record these songs, or nobody will ever know I did it. I connected with Caroline Doctorow, who’s a wonderful songwriter, and she said, ‘I’ve got this studio and this great guy, Pete Kennedy, I work with.’ ”

    Mr. Kennedy, who records and performs with his wife, Maura, in the rock duo the Kennedys, produced “All Good Things” with Ms. Doctorow in her Narrow Lane Studios in Bridgehampton. He contributed much of the instrumentation, and Ms. Doctorow played guitar. Both contributed harmony vocals.

    “What they do in the studio is just wonderful,” Mr. Potter said. “They really feature the songwriter and the voice, and they don’t overload it with instruments. Pete is just a genius — he’s an amazing guitarist and just a gentleman, a really interesting guy. It was really fun.”

    Mr. Potter is also quick with praise for other South Fork musicians with whom he plays. Jim Turner, he said, was indispensable to his own musical development. “I was in a garage band and was playing rhythm guitar and harmonica,” he said. “I was really over my head in terms of the music, so I worked with Jim for about a year — he’s an amazing harmonica player. He’s the one who really got me started and steered me in the right direction.”

    Many of the songs on “All Good Things” — the title is a lyric from the last song, “Portrait of May” — are set on the South Fork, and listeners will hear both celebrations and lamentations of the land, the sea, and the people who have been sustained by both. The song “Storm Warning” most starkly portrays the land he loves, past and present: “The country life is gone now, city people run the show / The old small town’s a memory. . . .”

    The song, Mr. Potter said, is “based on one bayman who told me his life story, using some of those details. Because I was here in the 1950s as a kid, I’ve seen this change. It paints a pretty bleak picture, not just about the haulseiners but about the whole life of the baymen, how difficult that’s become.”

    “And the good old days, my good old friends, ain’t coming back,” Mr. Potter concludes in “Storm Warning.” “It’s not a happy song,” he observed.

    “I’m a self-described liberal,” Mr. Potter said. “I believe in human rights and environmentalism. I believe in government being honest with people.” But above all else, he said, “These songs are about relationships. They are stories. A lot of them are about love and the good and bad aspects of relationships.”    Mr. Potter’s life in the disparate worlds of New York and Amagansett influence his music. His father, Jeffrey Potter, who died in 2012, wrote books including “To a Violent Grave,” an oral biography of Jackson Pollock. “He was from the city, a summer kid. They were friends with a number of the painters, and socially part of that scene,” Mr. Potter said of his parents.

    In 1949, his parents bought Stony Hill Farm in Amagansett. “I grew up on the farm year-round until I was 7, then lived in the city. But we kept the farm so I came out here every vacation and summer.”

    “Evocation IRT (1961)” portrays Mr. Potter’s life in New York. “When my parents split up, my mom took the kids back to New York,” he said. “So in seventh and eighth grade, at least, I was riding the subway every day from the West Village up to Dalton [School] on 89th Street. I wrote that in 1978, so it has a slightly ‘punk’ feeling, which was the happening music at the time. It’s kind of the story of my misspent youth.”

    Never happy in the city, he longed to return to the South Fork. “This was home,” he said. “I think I have a bit of a romantic point of view about this place because I remember it from the ’50s, and have a respect for the local people. Those were the adults I knew when I was growing up, and my friends were local kids.” He returned as a year-round resident in 1978.

    He has worked on the water, as a real estate appraiser, a volunteer with the Nature Conservancy, and in government, where he was closely involved in East Hampton Town’s preservation purchases through the community preservation fund. “That was lucky timing for me,” he said.

    Mr. Potter plans a mass mailing of “All Good Things” to radio stations, and continues to perform at open mike events. “In a way,” he said, recording one’s music “is worth doing simply because it gives you some credibility, and your friends and people in the community can see what you’re doing. For me, it’s so satisfying to complete it. It’s something I always wanted to do.”

Plein Air at Ashawagh

    The Wednesday Group, an association of artists who meet on Wednesdays to paint en plein air at various East End locations, will show new work at Ashawagh Hall in Springs on Saturday and Sunday, with a reception Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. Titled “Town and Country,” the exhibition will include New York cityscapes as well as local landscapes.

    The Wednesday Group was founded five years ago by Gene Samuelson and Frank Sofo, who will be represented in the exhibition along with Anna Franklin, Peter Gumple, Jean Mahoney, Deb Palmer, Alyce Peifer, Joyce Silver, Christine Chew Smith, and Pam Vossen.

New Arts Council to Meet

    Ashawagh Hall will be the site of a public meeting of the newly formed East Hampton Arts Council on Wednesday at 6 p.m. The council was founded to advise and assist the Town of East Hampton on issues regarding the performing, literary, and visual arts and to make the arts a more integral part of the community.

    Jane Martin and Kate Mueth, co-chairwomen of the group, will explain the organization’s mission and discuss its future plans. Artists from all disciplines have been invited to attend and contribute their ideas for programs, workshops, exhibitions, possible venues here for artists’ use, and other ways the group can benefit the community at large and individual artists.

    In addition to Ms. Martin and Ms. Mueth, the council members are Beth Meredith, Coleen McGowan, Janet Jennings, Loring Bolger, Carol Steinberg, Ralph Carpentier, and Scott Bluedorn. Sylvia Overby is the liaison to the town board.

Crazy Monkey Winners

    The Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett has announced the winners of its ninth annual art competition. Mark E. Zimmerman was named best in show, for which he will be given a solo exhibition at the gallery later this year. Andrea McCafferty was voted most original, while Lance Corey was deemed most thought-provoking. Runners-up included Barbara Bilotta, Lance Corey, Jim Hayden, and Daniel Schoenheimer.

    As a composer, Antonio Vivaldi rather owns spring through the popular co-opting of his violin concerto “La primavera.” So it is appropriate that the Choral Society of the Hamptons welcomes spring with “Viva Vivaldi!” — opting not to offer a cliched response to the arrival of the equinox, but to give a varied program of joyous music by the composer and others to awaken senses dulled and dormant from the long winter.

    The concert, to be held on March 30 at 5 p.m. at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church, will include Vivaldi’s “Gloria,” Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cantata 71, “Gott is mien Konig,” and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Five Mystical Songs.” Walter Klauss will guest conduct. The soloists will be Mary Hubbell, a soprano; Barbara Fusco, a mezzo-soprano; Nathan Siler, a tenor, and Michael Maliakel, a baritone. The South Fork Chamber Ensemble will accompany the singers.

    The society described “Gloria” as triumphant and tuneful, festive and glorious. It features unusual instrumentation — strings and a single oboe and trumpet — with two female soloists and chorus. Bach’s Cantata 71 “explores themes of aging and renewal with strong tempos and vibrant counterpoint.”

    The Vaughan Williams selection uses the verse of George Herbert as the text for his “Five Mystical Songs,” in which musical imagery, mysticism, and sensuality weave a spellbinding effect.”

    Mr. Klauss is a part-time resident of East Hampton and founder and conductor of New York City’s Musica Viva concert series as well as minister of music at All Souls Unitarian Church in the city. The soloists have performed regularly with Musica Viva and groups throughout the U.S. and abroad.

    Tickets cost $30 in advance and $35 at the door, with youth tickets available for $10 and $15. Preferred-seating tickets cost $75. Tickets can be purchased online at choralsocietyofthehamptons. org or at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor.

    Following the concert, a benefit dinner will be held at the Living Room restaurant at c/o the Maidstone in East Hampton. Tickets for the dinner are available from the society for $300 per person, and reservations are being accepted until Wednesday through the society’s website.

    The society’s summer concert will take place June 28 in Bridgehampton and will celebrate Leonard Bernstein with music from “Chichester Psalms,” “Mass,” “West Side Story,” “Wonderful Town,” and “Candide.” Singers will be invited to audition for the Choral Society in April.   

    “Beautiful Tree, Severed Roots,” a documentary by Kenny Mann, will be screened tonight at 7 at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. The film premiered at the Hamptons Take 2 documentary film festival in December.

    Ms. Mann’s parents were Jewish refugees who fled from Romania to Kenya in 1942. Born four years later, the filmmaker grew up in Kenya and lived there until she graduated from the University of Nairobi in 1968.

    Set against the background of the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s and Kenya’s independence in 1963, the film examines her parents’ adaptation to Africa, her own coming of age as the country was approaching independence, and issues of personal and national identity.

    Ms. Mann, who lives in Sag Harbor, recently returned to Kenya, where she taught documentary film development and production. “Beautiful Tree, Severed Roots” will have its African premiere in Nairobi in September.

    Tickets are $10, cash only, at the door. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to Bay Street Theatre.

    The Southampton Historical Museum will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Pyrrhus Concer on Saturday at the Rogers Mansion with an afternoon of free programs devoted to the man who was born a slave in Southampton in 1814 and died a philanthropist in 1897.

    Concer was a boat-steerer on whaling expeditions and the first African-American to visit Japan. His estate benefited distressed sailors and local schoolchildren. One of Southampton’s most highly regarded citizens in the 19th century, he has been all but forgotten today, according to the museum.

    The celebration will begin at 2 p.m. with the proclamation by Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. of March 17 as Pyrrhus Concer Day in New York State. A lecture by Sally Spanburgh on “Pyrrhus Concer the Man” will follow at 2:10.

    Brenda Simmons, director of the African-American Museum of the East End, Georgette Grier-Key, director of the Eastville Historical Society, and Lucius Ware of the N.A.A.C.P. will join Ms. Spanburgh for a panel discussion at 3.

    A party with live jazz, poetry readings, and refreshments will begin at 4.

    The National Theatre Live series at Guild Hall will present the Donmar Warehouse’s production of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” on Saturday at 7 p.m. Tom Hiddleston and Mark Gatiss star in the tragedy of political manipulation and revenge, set in Rome.

    The Donmar Warehouse is a theater in London’s West End, where the production was filmed live on Jan. 30. Tickets are $18, $16 for members.

    Guild Hall’s Table Talk series resumes Sunday morning at 11 with a talk about the detection, prevention, and treatment of tick-borne diseases by Dr. George Dempsey of East Hampton Urgent Care. Coffee and light refreshments will be available.

    Nevada is coming to Southampton on March 15 when the annual Viva Las Vegas! benefit takes place from 7 to 11 p.m. at Seasons of Southampton. The evening will include music, dancing, an open bar, and an hors d’oeuvres buffet. For those feeling lucky, there will be a Texas hold ’em poker tournament, a Chinese auction, a silent auction, and a 50-50 raffle.

    Tickets are $60 in advance, $70 at the door, and entitle a guest to $100 in casino chips. Tax-deductible donations support the Paul Koster Memorial Benefit and the Have a Heart Community Trust, both of which provide assistance to local individuals and families through social service programs and charitable organizations. Information and advance reservations are available at 283-6681

Many otherwise plugged-in cultural cog­noscenti of the South Fork might be surprised to learn that Philippe de Montebello is this year’s recipient of the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. It is not that the former and longtime Metropolitan Museum of Art director does not deserve it, but rather that few, if any, know he actually spends time here. He would like to keep it that way.

He comes here to escape the social obligations of his city life and relax, and only in the winter. A grueling weekend might mean that he played tennis five times or did some reading for work in an armchair while enjoying the view.

There were dozens of interviews and assessments of his tenure at the Met upon his leaving in 2008, but very few since he took up in the same year his current position as New York University’s Fiske Kimball professor in the history and culture of museums at the Institute of Fine Arts, where he gave an interview last Thursday in a grand receiving room in a mansion once owned by Doris Duke on Fifth Avenue and 78th Street.

This semester, he is teaching a course on whether the art museum as traditionally envisioned is still valid in a “post-colonial, multicultural, and global age.” While he is known for a certain conservatism as a museum director, he said that he enters such discussions with few preconceived notions. “As an intellectual, I pose questions. It can be debated one way or another.” Running a museum required action primarily, even when guided by thought. “I’ve gone from being a man of action to a man of reflection.”

His immersion in a more theoretical world with students of varied backgrounds, has not, “oddly enough,” changed his viewpoint on such issues. “I may think about things more slightly diffusely, but I would say over all my current thinking about things is not all that different from where my intuition once led me.” Some of this he credits to his continuing involvement in the museum world’s curatorial affairs, where “there are physical, legal, and other constraints that scholars don’t have to face” while considering more utopian views.

In addition to his teaching duties, he still serves on several non-voting committees at the Met and is on the board of the Prado Museum in Madrid, from where he had just flown back the preceding day, and recently finished a four-year term on the board at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. With Paula Zahn, he hosts a weekly show on WNET-Channel 13 about the arts in New York City.

“I have plenty to do and no time to look back. I walked out the door, closed it behind me,” he said. “I had the good fortune that when I became director in 1977 Tom Hoving never stepped back, never called me. It’s very good for one, and I respect my successor’s need to be his own person.”

Thomas P. Campbell, who has been director since Mr. de Montebello left, has, by all accounts, kept the Met on a steady course since he took over but has yet to become as synonymous with the institution as his predecessor. If he has a similar tenure, he still has decades to do so. The former colleagues do still have lunch.

“If he wants to chat with me, which he does occasionally, he does. Otherwise, once you leave, you leave,” Mr. de Montebello said.

Upon his leaving the Met, its curators feted him with an exhibition honoring his achievements, primarily the expansion of the physical structure and the individual galleries of the museum and his encouragement of a vigorous and engaged acquisitions program across all departments. The effort belied a public perception that he favored some areas of the museum over others because of his background as a curator in European paintings.

“There was never a favorite work for 31 years and there isn’t one now,” not even a shortlist when he visits now for pleasure or brings classes. “I move around. I’m not tied only to paintings, either. I go to the Islamic galleries, the Egyptian galleries. I am eager to see what the new curator will do with the European decorative arts and sculpture galleries. I’m watching it. I’m only one block away.”

While the museum did acquire significant historical European works under his tenure, including Caravaggio’s “The Denial of Saint Peter,” one of very few works by the artist in America (or anywhere else for that matter), there were many similar acquisitions in each department, including contemporary art, which grew steadily in the past two decades.

One of the prominent works acquired during his directorship came from the estate of Robert David Lion Gardiner, the descendant of the first English settler of East Hampton, and was purchased at Christie’s auction house. The Chippendale chest on chest, made by a relatively unknown member of the Townsend cabinet-making family of Newport, R.I., was acquired for $750,000 by Morrison H. Heckscher, the chairman of the American Wing of the Met. At the time, Mr. Heckscher was hesitant to identify himself, because he said his bosses did not know he was at the auction or planning to buy anything.

Mr. de Montebello said it was not likely that Mr. Heckscher or any one of his fellow department heads would have been censured for such a purchase. They have price limits to which they can bid without receiving prior approval. “The trustees and director recognize that, within reason, a certain amount of discretion and flexibility is necessary, and if not exercised, we may scold a curator for not being enterprising enough.”

Despite the prevalence of the idea that the actual object is losing ground to academic theories and increased digitization, he said such notions were overwrought. With better displays, lighting, and labels, he said, there is much more to engage the viewer. “I think the role of the museum is to make things accessible, make it as attractive as possible, make engagement with the work as comfortable as possible, and as rewarding as possible, both intellectually and visually. Once you’ve established lighting, text, the conversations among the works, the way you place them side by side and the distance, then it’s up to the visitor. I don’t think curators should go around with bludgeons and compel people to do anything.”

He said museums are still filled with people looking at objects. “Too many do it through the lens of their camera, but those are not the people, in my view, who would have looked at objects that long anyway.”

The role of money in the museum world and the stress to act like a business are real, he acknowledged, but never held much sway at the Met. “There are no hedge-funders trying to wield influence.” He added that given the Met’s size, with 2,500 full-time employees and 110 curatorial titles, “it would be very difficult for any single person to tip the balance one way or the other. It’s a much bigger problem in contemporary museums, which are by design smaller, and smaller institutions have smaller ratios” of professional staff to trustees.

He said the number of museums being compelled to run like businesses is troubling. In the case of the Met, “the curators are the museum and the museum is about art. How well it is run from a purely administrative point of view is a very incidental thing.” Visitors are not coming to the Met because of a particular department’s bottom line. They are interested, he said, in the variety and quality of the exhibitions, the intellectual life of the place. “Obviously you need to balance the budget if you can and be run efficiently. Yet, there is a major difference between being run in a business-like manner and being run like a business.”

Despite an aristocratic title, which he does not use (his birth name is Count Guy Philippe Henri Lannes de Montebello), and his descent from two people who inspired main characters in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” Mr. de Montebello said he has little use for such distinctions. “It’s of archival interest, a footnote. We live in a meritocracy. My background never hurt. Some level of privilege is helpful. But I couldn’t flub an exhibition and say ‘but I’m a descendant of so-and-so.’ ” He added that he was also descended from the Marquis de Sade. “My family likes to point that out whenever I get nasty with them.”

An American citizen, he chose to remain in this country when his family decided to return to France after moving here in his youth. Comfortable in both cultures, he said, “I am the most French of everyone in my family.” Fluent in several languages, he said he enjoys reading, writing, and speaking to his family in French.

He is at work on several writing projects, but do not expect a “tell-all” account of his years at the Met. It is not of interest, he said, and even if it were, he noted he did not have his agendas from those early years, and it would be difficult to reconstruct his tenure there without them.

Group Show at Drawing Room

    A group exhibition of paintings, drawings, sculpture, and printed editions will open tomorrow at the Drawing Room in East Hampton and remain on view through April 6.

    Work by Caio Fonseca, Christine Hiebert, Sharon Horvath, Robert Jakob, Mel Kendrick, Diane Mayo, Adrian Nivola, Alan Shields, and Donald Sultan will “highlight the rich potential each artist has mined for his or her inventive use of materials,” according to the gallery.

Five at Ashawagh

    “Under the Influence,” a group exhibition featuring Sara Coe, Pam Collins Focarino, Ruby Jackson, Tracy Jamar, and Rose Zelenetz will be on view Saturday and Sunday at Ashawagh Hall in Springs, with a reception Saturday from 5 to 7:30 p.m.

    The group first exhibited together last March, when all were docents at the Pollock-Krasner house. Allan Kronzek, Ms. Jackson’s husband, suggested the exhibition title as a playful reference to Pollock’s drinking as well as to artistic inspiration. According to Ms. Jamar, a fiber artist, “Though not directly motivated by Jackson and Lee, how could we not find ourselves under their influence on some level?”

Photo Exhibit at John Jermain

    Elaine McKay, a Sag Harbor artist who creates photographs with handmade pinhole cameras, will have a solo exhibition at John Jermain Memorial Library from Tuesday through April 30. A pinhole camera consists of a lightproof chamber with a hole in one wall. Light passes through the aperture and projects an inverted image onto photographic film.

    Ms. McKay constructs her cameras from cardboard and tape and uses long exposures to create photographs that have a dreamy quality. Each of her images incorporates text written by the artist.

    A reception will be held March 22 from 3 to 5 p.m. The artist will discuss her work on April 2 at 5:30 p.m.  

SCC Winner’s Circle

    “Winner’s Circle,” featuring work by the three artists selected from the Southampton Cultural Center’s September 2013 juried exhibition, will be on view from Tuesday through April 14 at the Levitas Center for the Arts.

    Helen Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, chose Susan Newmark, Christina Stow, and Charles Yoder from among the 40 she originally selected for the exhibition last fall.

    Ms. Newmark, who lives in Brooklyn, makes imaginary landscapes integrated with abstract elements, building up layers of collaged papers from comics, wallpaper photographs, and paint.

    Ms. Snow is a photographer inspired by objects such as eggshells, dolls, and bulbs, which provide her compositions with a sense of graphic design. She lives in Shinnecock Hills.

    Mr. Yoder’s large paintings depict details of unpopulated landscapes, where light, shadow, and shade create meditative compositions. He lives in New York.

    A reception will he held March 22 from 5 to 7 p.m.

    “August: Osage County,” Tracy Letts’s Pulit­zer Prize-winning drama, will have its Long Island premiere at the South­ampton Cultural Center next Thursday at 7:30 p.m. The Center Stage presentation will continue through April 6.

    The play, which won five Tony Awards and was made into an Oscar-nominated film, is set in Oklahoma, where a seriously dysfunctional family gathers in the wake of the disappearance of its patriarch, a once-famous poet.

    Directed by Michael Disher, the production features Paul Consiglio, Bonnie Grice, Samantha Honig, John Leonard, Joan Lyons, Joseph Marshall, Linda McKnight, Philip Reichert, Stephan Scheck, Emily Selyukova, Mark Strecker, Josephine Wallace, and Edna Winston.

    General admission is $22, $20 for senior citizens on Fridays only, and $12 for students under 21. Show times are Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sunday afternoons at 2:30.