A sing-along in memory of Pete Seeger and his wife, Toshi, will take place on Saturday afternoon at 3 at Christ Episcopal Church on East Union Street in Sag Harbor. The free program will be led by Terry Sullivan, Dan Koontz, and Bill and Ben Chaleff.

    Mr. Sullivan, who lives in Sag Harbor and is known as “the singing plumber,” performed with the great folk singer in more than 100 shows over the past 20 years, including Carnegie Hall’s 100th birthday, when he appeared with Seeger and Peter, Paul, and Mary.

    Daniel Koontz is a classically trained composer and musician from Sag Harbor, where he is the musical director and organist at Christ Episcopal Church. Bill and Ben Chaleff, father and son, are both architects as well as musicians, who grew up surrounded by folk music and old-time blues.

    The Montauk Library will host a free concert of Bulgarian folk music Saturday evening at 7:30. Vlada Tomova, an internationally acclaimed Bulgarian vocalist, will perform with Chris Rael, an American guitarist who plays sitar, guitarra Portuguesa, Turkish Zas, and the 12-string guitar. The program will include Ms. Tomova’s arrangements of authentic Bulgarian folk music as well as her English-language repertoire.

    Ms. Tomova has toured in North and South America and throughout Europe. She has performed at such New York venues as Symphony Space, the Public Theatre, Irving Plaza, and BAM Cafe. Mr. Rael’s group, Church of Betty, has performed around the world and on National Public Radio, and Mr. Rael has teamed with musicians ranging from David Byrne to Frank London of the Klezmatics to Curt Smith of Tears for Fears.

    Ms. Tomova and Mr. Rael live in Brooklyn with their son, Sasha.

    Akiko Kobayashi, a violinist, and Eric Siepkes, a pianist, will perform a program of works from Beethoven to Schumann Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton. Both musicians, who are based in New York, perform as solo artists and as a duo.

    Ms. Kobayashi has appeared as soloist with orchestras including the Yonkers Philharmonic, Tokyo Suginami Kokaido Chamber Orchestra, and the Berkshires International Festival Orchestra.

    Mr. Siepkes, who made his debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, has performed in master classes for Richard Goode, Angela Hewitt, Natalya Antonova, and in chamber music master classes for London Baroque, the Avalon String Quartet, and the Eroica Trio.

    A reception will follow the concert.

    After several years writing about art critically, it is often surprising what ends up being surprising. Is it just the setting that makes a group show of East End artists so striking in a Chelsea gallery or is it the art itself?

    Many, if not all, of the artists chosen by Beth McNeill for “Seeking Engagement, No Strings Attached” have shown in New York City before, but seeing them together in Lyons Wier’s cramped storefront gallery setting during a hectic opening night in the neighborhood gave the show a certain charge that may not have caught fire in the same way at a venue like Ashawagh Hall.

    In any event, the animated crowd and the colorful and, indeed, engaging art did issue sparks and made for an energetic presentation that has caught notice and attention on social media, including a picture of a Jeff Muhs portrait bust of Ol’ Dirty Bastard posted on Instagram by Swizz Beatz that has received 18,800 plus likes. The bust captures the half-smile, half-glower of his grillz and is a convincing enough evocation to seem more spiritually charged than a simple death mask.

    The theme of the show was initially hard to grasp from the press release, but in the setting itself, it made sense. The artists chosen, including Jack Ceglic, Tom Dash, Tapp Francke, Julia Greffenius, Nika Nesgoda, Darius Yektai, and Gavin Zeigler, have a way of drawing viewers into their work either overtly or with deliberate obfuscation.

    Mr. Zeigler’s mixed-media works play with this idea in his “Peep Show” series. The works are layered with Op Art-like designs in such a way to obscure the nude models underneath, but revealing enough so that viewers are quite aware of what they are looking at. The hint of arm or other body parts is just as mysterious as the glimpse of breast here and there. Once you recognize you are not supposed to be looking at something, it charges everything not just with a hint of voyeuristic naughtiness, but also a need to overcome bewilderment. The eyes come back for more to be sure the brain can make sense of what it is seeing, putting all the parts together to make a whole.

    Mr. Dash’s “Pin Ups” are more obvious in their straightforward depiction, but also share in a distancing device, this time repetition. It’s hard to engage when the images repeat like a wrapping paper design. Add language such as “Bright Like Neon Love” and suddenly the former assistant to Richard Prince seems to be taking on the mantle of that artist, putting some of his themes into his own black box to reshuffle and make them his own.

    Ms. Nesgoda reimagines classical Christian imagery as photography featuring modern models, using porn stars as the leads. The show has a selection of her work, including a nursing Madonna, a couple of Annunciation scenes, and the Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth. As radical as it may sound, it is hardly new to cast the outliers of society as some as the most revered Christian icons. But the same gambit that created scandal around Caravaggio in the 16th and 17th centuries seems tamer today given the prevalence of nudity and pornography on the Internet. Still, the long and lacquered nails, the barely sheathing sheaths the models wear, the topless presentations, and lascivious glances do give the searingly bright C-prints an erotic charge that succeeds in attracting rather than turning off audiences.

    The “Three Graces” of Mr. Yektai’s imagination marry many of the classical ideals of the subject to his own interpretation, abstract and surreal. Removed from a setting and cut and pasted on canvas, they look like entwined paper dolls, too ethereal to require much definition or individual detail. The faces appear to have a certain Eastern mystery that belies the idealization of the Renaissance and other neoclassical movements.

    In Julia Greffenius’s compositions, she begins with paint and ends with duct tape. It gives her work a sunny optimism that lingers past what might be a one-note expression in other hands. Mr. Ceglic’s portraits are individual meditations on appearance and personality and how one can affect the other. Ms. Francke’s neon and mirror piece, “Hello” may be the most obvious of the works, but does it engage the viewer? You bet.    The work is on view through Feb. 22.

    Don Christensen’s studio in Barnes Landing recalls the way New York City lofts looked before they became high-priced “loft-apartments.” Storage racks, worktables, tools and materials, and walls hung with paintings identify it as the domain of a working artist. At one end is a drum set, a clue to the other career — musician — that has figured as prominently in his life.

    At present, the balance is tipping toward painting. Mr. Christensen was selected for the recent “Artists Choose Artists” show at the Parrish Art Museum, where he exhibited painted wooden tables, step stools, benches, and other objects, deployed on the walls as both an installation and individual objects.

    Mr. Christensen’s work will be included next month in “Paper and Canvas,” a group show being organized by Denise Gale at Ille Arts in Amagansett. Switching roles, he himself will curate “Self-Taught Artists” at Ille Arts in September.

    His experience as a musician, composer, and audio engineer continues to seep into his art. Last year the East End curator Janet Goleas came to his studio to look at his paintings for possible inclusion in the Moby Project, the ambitious two-part exhibition she organized last summer at the Mulford Farm and Neoteric Fine Art.

    “I told Janet I had an idea for an audio piece,” Mr. Christensen recalled, “thinking it was something she should do. But she said, ‘You’re doing it.’ ” The result was his recorded reading of the last chapter of “Moby-Dick,” the sound emerging from a rundown shed.

    In August he will be creating an audio environment for a show in Berlin of paintings by Mary Heilmann and David Reed. “The Moby thing opened me up,” he said. “It made me realize I don’t have to be just a painter or just a musician. I can do a lot of different things.”

    There was nothing in his upbringing that encouraged a pursuit of the arts. Mr. Christensen was born in North Platte, Neb., where he lived on a farm until the age of 6. “All my aunts and uncles and grandparents were farmers. I worked on farms when I was a teenager, and my older sisters both married farmers. I really came from an agrarian society.”

    Mr. Christensen’s father left the family when he was 8 years old. His mother went to work, and his sisters had families of their own. “So my brother Dan, who was a teenager, became my caretaker. Our relationship was strained then. From an early age I was the artistic one, the kid who drew and painted. Dan was the athlete. Then he went away to college and after a while changed his major to art. It pissed me off! That was my scene.”

    Dan not only majored in art but also, after graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute, moved to New York in 1965 and soon established himself as an important abstract painter. His younger brother, meanwhile, was getting involved with music and playing in bands, having been inspired by the Beatles, Motown, and the rock ’n’ roll explosion of the mid-1960s.

    “I was a junior or senior, and the guys in the bands I was playing with were all a few years older than I was. There were five of us, and the other four got drafted.” His mother enrolled him at the University of Nebraska so he would receive a student deferment. While there he took some art classes, and eventually submitted some drawings to the Kansas City Art Institute and got a scholarship there.

    The institute offered traditional Beaux Arts training. By that time, Mr. Christensen was traveling back and forth between Kansas City and New York, where he would stay at his brother’s loft. “Dan went away a jock, but now he had long hair, the same records as I did, and was this hip guy. We became friends, and he was very good to me.”

    In the summer of 1971 Mr. Christensen sublet a loft on the Bowery and never returned to the Art Institute. Through his brother, he met Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Larry Zox, and other color-field painters whose work was ascendant in the art world at that time. “They were at the top of their game and making a lot of money and had a lot of people working in their studios, including me. I had a real close-up view of the art world, and the time I spent in the studios with those big painters helped me understand the handling of art materials.”

    From the late 1970s into the early 1980s, lower Manhattan was the site of cross-fertilization among young artists, musicians, and dancers. CBGB, the Mudd Club, and the Kitchen were among the venues where everything from punk to avant-garde music and performance could be found.

    “I found myself drawn to the music scene,” Mr. Christensen said. “I was going to CBGB and meeting other musicians and playing music, and it seemed more fun than the art world.” He became part of the No Wave scene, and played with the Loose Screws, James Chance and the Contortions, the Bush Tetras, and, from 1979 to 1984, the Raybeats, who recorded three albums and toured extensively.

    “That world was as creative as being a painter in the studio,” he said, “and I started having some success, which is another thing that pushes you along. I got to make records with some good people and while I didn’t get rich, I made a living doing it.”

    At the same time, life on the road was increasingly difficult. “I was approaching 40 and running around the country with the Raybeats in vans, playing the same songs over and over to 20-year-olds in clubs. I had friends who died of drug overdoses. It was unhealthy.” The group disbanded while still on speaking terms.

    Music continued to play a role in Mr. Christensen’s life. He was a partner, along with Philip Glass and others, in the Looking Glass Studios, whose client roster included Lou Reed, Beck, David Bowie, John Legend, Sheryl Crow, and Patti Smith. He also wrote 15 film scores for Faith Hubley, an acclaimed maker of experimental animated films and a three-time Oscar winner.

    He resumed painting in the early 1990s, while continuing to be involved in music. “I had just finished a soundtrack for Faith and I was kicking back at my brother’s place in East Hampton. I was collecting pieces of wood from Dumpsters and construction sites without really knowing why. There was plenty of paint around at Dan’s studio, so I began fooling around with these pieces of found wood. When I got back to the city, I wanted to keep doing them, so I started taking it seriously, and I was lucky. I got grants from [the New York Foundation for the Arts] and the N.E.A., and I’ve been painting ever since.”

    In the late 1980s Mr. Christensen added the role of collector-conservator to his resumé. In 1975, Dan Dryden, an old friend, was running his family’s pharmacy in North Platte when a farmer named Emery Blagdon walked into the store and asked for some “elements.” Mr. Dryden subsequently went to the Blagdon farm and discovered the farmer’s “healing machine,” a shed-sized installation of paintings on wood, boxes full of found materials, and intricate wire hangings.

    In 1986, while both were in North Platte for a high school reunion, Mr. Dryden took Mr. Christensen to the Blagdon place. The shed was locked and the farm was deserted. Mr. Blagdon’s nephew stopped by when he saw them snooping around and told them his uncle had died two weeks before. He opened the shed and, Mr. Christensen recalled, “My mind was blown. That was one of the major experiences of my life.”

    When they learned the work was going to be auctioned off bit by bit, along with the rest of the Blagdon estate, Mr. Christensen and Mr. Dryden determined to buy it. “The piece caused a sense of wonder,” Mr. Christensen said. “It looked sci-fi and weird, and yet sweet and charming. The gavel went down, and suddenly we were the stewards of this man’s life work.” They warehoused it, cataloged it, photographed it, insured it, and placed it in 15 different outsider art exhibitions over the next 20 years. In 2004 the work was purchased by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis.

    Pointing to some of his own paintings on wood from the early 1990s, Mr. Christensen said, “I wasn’t trying to use his geometry in my work, though I thought about it a lot. He was a great influence in the sense of confirming that you have to listen to yourself and follow your desires.”

    Speaking of his longstanding attraction to technology, he said, “Early on, I had an eight-track recorder in my studio and decided to record a jazz band called the Microscopic Septet. It was really fun, and I thought it was like painting. Both are about making things balance, and layering things up and then stripping away layers. With a painting, you look at it and work on it, look at it some more and work on it, look at it some more, and then ruin it.” He laughed. “It was the same with recording. For me, there are a lot of similarities between the two.”

    The Wolffer Estate in Sagaponack is throwing its annual Mardi Gras celebration on Saturday from 8 to 11 p.m. The party will feature live music by the HooDoo Loungers, a New Orleans party band; an open wine bar, artisanal cheeses and charcuterie, and king’s cupcakes, a nod to the traditional Mardi Gras comestible, the king cake.

    Prizes will be awarded for the best mask and for the king or queen who finds the charm in the king’s cupcakes. Tickets are $75 plus tax and may be purchased at wolffer.com.

    Live on the Vine, a six-week music festival held in tasting rooms, hotels, and restaurants from Riverhead to Southold, offers an escape from winter’s chill now through March 16. Jazz, rock, blues, country, and bluegrass are on the menu, along with wines from 19 wineries.

    The best way to find detailed information about the more than 100 programs is to visit liwinterfest.com.

    The Russian Trio, an award-winning chamber ensemble from the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, will perform on Saturday at 4 p.m. at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton as part of the Music at St. Luke’s concert series.

    Featuring Nikita Borisevich on violin, Dmitry Volkov on cello, and Katherine Rick on piano, the group will perform works by Haydn, Ravel, Saint-Saens, Paganini, and Shostakovich. The Russian Trio has won prizes at several chamber music competitions and recently performed at the Kennedy Center.

    Tickets are $20, free for those under 18.

    Kate Mueth and the Neo-Political Cowgirls are partnering with the Retreat and Bay Street Theatre to participate in “V-Day, One Billion Rising” this evening at 7. V-Day is a global activist movement, founded by Eve Ensler, to end violence against women and girls.

    One Billion Rising is an annual event during which women around the world and the men who support them are invited to tell their stories, speak out, and dance as an expression of their demand for justice.

    Prospective participants in the Bay Street event have been invited to meet in the theater at 5 p.m. for an hourlong dance rehearsal. Non-dancers are invited to join the audience at 7. A donation of $20, which will benefit the Retreat, is suggested.

    Not every artist manages to continue refreshing his work into his 70s, but Keith Sonnier, through the aid of a new studio space in Bridgehampton, has managed to do just that. The evidence is on view at Pace Gallery in Chelsea through Feb. 22.

    The artist chose his most regular medium quite early in his career. Graduating from Rutgers University with an M.F.A. in 1966, it was only two years later that he began working in the neon gas lighting that has defined his sculpture ever since.

     There are eight works from the past year in the front two rooms of the gallery, along with a few pieces from his earliest series in the back for context. The juxtaposition shows an artist who has gained lyricism and grace in his later years. It also shows a return to some of the earliest visual explorations of his career for a re-evaluation and reinvigoration of those themes.

    The earliest sculptures were no doubt breakthroughs in their time and still look fresh, if a little stilted and even crude. That is really only a byproduct of their relation to the newer works.

    The two “Neon Wrapping Neon” works from 1969 play with both the light and geometry of the bent tubing to create illusions of perception as they draw in space with the colored gas, both in three dimensions and suggestive of it. They imply depth where none exists in bold primary colors that may also include green.

    “Neon Wrapping Incandescent,” also from 1969, offers early evidence of a more joyful and playful side of the artist and a willingness to explore his ability to bend the glass tubes into curvaceous as well as hard angular shapes. The prettier colors, a pale pink and blue, are reminiscent of a baby shower decoration, offered as a description not to diminish the work’s appeal as an art object, but more to highlight its happy optimism.

    “Ba-O-Ba V” from 1970 is representative of the series that arguably begins the artist’s maturity. This is the work that epitomizes his breakthrough years and a way of organizing light, wire, and glass that he would return to regularly. It also has the most to say in comparison to his contemporary work.

    As long as critics and art historians have written about Mr. Sonnier, they have been defining “Ba-O-Ba.” In Sabine Vogel’s 2004 catalogue essay for a show in Germany, she concisely stated that the expression, derived from the French Creole dialect in Mamou, La., where he grew up, means an effect of light on skin and the body that exercises a physical and suggestive power of attraction. It can come from both natural and artificial light.

    Here, three straight lines of neon lights are offset by two large glass disks, one with a green tube bisecting it, the other with a red tube spanning a shorter distance. A smaller blue tube acts like a lifeline between the two, joining them up like train cars or a rudimentary biological form. There is no overt resemblance to actual physical objects. As Donald Kuspit noted in a 1989 essay, these are examples of absolute art, non-objective, yet still with “ghosts of language and the figure.” With their curves, undulation, and colorful light, they breathe with a theatricality and expressiveness that draws one in the way a flower’s bright colors invite bees to pollinate.

    The shift to a more complex examination of similar compositions in his 2013 works belies decades of the artist’s work in more complex forms. These involved expressive sculpting of the neon tubing, additions of steel, mirrors, and found detritus such as old detergent bottles. Although discussed in the catalogue, none of it appears to matter to the aims of the current exhibition, which is a wise decision. The newer works are so much more related to these earlier defining moments than what has come between the years, even as they borrow some of the maximalism of that interim creative period.

    “Mirrored Slant” and “Lunar Slice,” which are hard-edged in their primary hues and more industrial in configuration, seem to stand apart in the shared space of the front gallery rooms. Their more Euclidian purity begins to blow up quickly in the wake of “Lobbed Shape,” an amoeba-like form that breaks apart the neon into smaller discrete pieces of softer-hued blends of purple, green, and salmon.

    On and on the pieces go in their dissolution, creating odd and almost anthropomorphic shapes and drawing on the expressiveness not only of the tubes but more than ever before of the electrical wire that unites them, providing a solid connective tissue and structure for the swathes of gaseous color, much the way a pounced cartoon would have done for a fresco in the Renaissance.

    The installation is so pure in its dialogue between past and present, it is almost too much to see works that do not completely fit into this model. These include the earlier sculptures that provide context for “Ba-O-Ba V” as well as last year’s “Zig Zig Square” that, while engaging because of its difference, breaks the spell of the more amorphous compositions on display.

    In the essay for this exhibition, Richard Shiff pointed out that the play of neon on the initially glass but now acrylic pieces that Mr. Sonnier uses alludes to the definition of that initial title. He calls them skins and describes their function as mediating the refraction and perception of the light that is placed behind or outside them, which, in turn, creates beautiful effects on that skin. The effect is mesmerizing and just as described.