“All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert,” a documentary directed by Vivian Ducat, won the 2013 Brown Harris Stevens Audience Award at the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival, which was held at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor earlier this month. The film is the story of a self-taught African-American artist who spent seven years on a chain gang in a Georgia prison, where he learned how to tool and dye brightly colored leather canvases.

    The Hudson River Museum in Yonkers devoted an exhibition to Mr. Rembert’s work, which is now traveling around the United States.

    St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton will present a concert of festive songs and arias on Saturday at 4 p.m. in Hoie Hall. Guest artists are Sofia Dimitrova, a soprano soloist, and Daria Rabotkina and William McNally, award-winning classical pianists.

    The program will include works by Mozart, Bach, Mendelssohn, Strauss, and Handel, among others. Admission is $20, free for those under 18.

    This year has been a busy one for Joan Semmel. She had a solo exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in the spring, solo shows at both Alexander Gray Associates, her New York dealer, and Art Basel, exhibited at Frieze New York, and now has two paintings at the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen, Germany, in the group exhibition “Sie. Selbst. Nackt.” The title, which translates as “She. Herself. Naked,” could be applied to much of Ms. Semmel’s career as a painter.

    For more than 40 years, Ms. Semmel has chosen as her subject the “normal,” rather than idealized, human body, and offered a radical departure from the traditional self-portrait as a complete image of the person painting it. Her paintings also posit an alternative to what Laura Mulvey, a feminist critic, called the “male gaze.”

    John Berger, an art critic and novelist, wrote in his influential 1972 book “Ways of Seeing”: “According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned . . . men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. . . . Women are depicted in a different way to men, because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male.”

    As if in direct response, Ms. Semmel has written, “I have tried to find a contemporary language in which I could retain my delight in the sensuality and pleasure of painting, and still confront the particulars of my own personal experience as a woman. My intention has been to subvert the tradition of the passive female nude. The issues of the body from desire to aging, as well as those of identity and cultural imprinting, have been at the core of my concerns.”

    “I feel as if I’ve had several lives,” Ms. Semmel said during a recent conversation at her SoHo loft. She was born and raised in the Bronx in a working-class household where art and culture played no role. “The turning point was when one of my public school art teachers told my mother I was talented and that she should encourage that. So my parents sent me to the High School of Music and Art. For the first time I was exposed to people of all races and backgrounds, and it was there I first began to think seriously about being an artist.”

    After high school she went to Cooper Union, where she met her husband. “We lived for a short time in Queens. We really didn’t like suburban life, but Manhattan was prohibitively expensive. So to get out of the suburbs we went to Madrid,” where her husband had secured a job. Their plan was to stay for a year, but they remained for eight.

    “Madrid was a completely different experience — a rebirth,” Ms. Semmel recalled. “I became friends with many Spanish artists. The art community was smaller than in New York, and easier to enter. I was an abstract painter at the time, and I developed an entire career in Spain.” She had many gallery shows in Madrid and traveled to South America, where she exhibited in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay.

    Her experience in Spain had a big impact on her. “I became a feminist there. I came to understand the difference between being male and female in the art world. A woman at that time in Spain couldn’t sign a lease on an apartment or take her children out of the country without her husband’s permission. You could have a bank account, but your husband could take money from it. So when I came back, I was primed. I didn’t need to have my consciousness raised, it was already there.”

    Ms. Semmel returned to New York in 1970. “I had to come back since I wanted a divorce, and I couldn’t get one in Spain. It was tough. I had no money, two kids, and 35 really big paintings.” Within a year she found the Spring Street loft where she still lives. “SoHo was marvelous then. My real life began when I came back to New York.”

    She became part of a loose collective of female artists called Fight Censorship, which also included Louise Bourgeois, Anita Steckel, and Hannah Wilke. The first paintings she produced in New York were figurative portraits of couples having sex while she sketched them. The resulting paintings retained the gestural and painterly qualities of her earlier abstract work.

    After completing that series, which was derived from the “action drawings” she made of her subjects, she decided she needed better information to get the impact she wanted, so she began taking photographs. The photographs were black and white, the resulting paintings were more hard-edged and less gestural than those of the first series, but the colors were abstract.

    Galleries were reluctant to show the work from the erotic series. “My work wasn’t pornography, but was really a critique of pornography. I wanted to deal with the body and desire and sexuality without the kind of fetishism and power relationships usually represented in pornography. I was interested in getting into the public space a woman’s idea of what was sexually interesting.”

    From 1974 to 1979 Ms. Semmel produced what she calls the “self images,” which encapsulate many of the ideas that have informed her work since then. Rather than creating self-portraits from her image in a mirror, she photographed her body from the vantage point of her own eyes.

    The resulting images, while realistically painted, are radically foreshortened landscapes of male and female bodies that are at once recognizable but disorienting, in part because the camera does not compensate for perspective the way the brain does. “When I did that kind of image, it was very abstract,” said Ms. Semmel. “I thought of them as abstractions. I was a terrible photographer, but I used the mistakes.”

    Since 1979, Ms. Semmel has produced more than a dozen separate series of paintings, most of which, while moving back and forth between greater expressionism and greater realism, focus on some aspect of the human body. In 1986 she began a series of men and women working out in gymnasiums. “The mirrors were fascinating. They were a metaphor for the narcissism in the room, but they also allowed me to photograph people indirectly. Since I wasn’t pointing the camera at them, they weren’t posing.”

    “Once people got used to seeing me with a camera, I began to shoot in the women’s locker room — always with the subjects’ permission. That was when I started appearing in my paintings with the camera. I wanted it to be clear you’re seeing an image of me in a mirror. It’s flat, reversed — neither the painting nor the photograph is ‘reality.’ ” This led to “With Camera,” a series of paintings of Ms. Semmel photographing herself in a mirror from different, often awkward, perspectives. She also created several series that involve “echoing” or “shifting” images, which portray the artist in multiple positions, fragmented and in motion.

    Ms. Semmel has been coming to East Hampton since 1971, renting a different place each summer, usually in Springs. “I decided I wanted to buy a house, but each time I thought I had enough for a down payment, prices had risen beyond my means. I finally put down a deposit on my house in 1987.” She paused and laughed. “Then the market crashed.” But she proceeded, and later added a studio to her house in Springs, where she spends every summer with John Hardy, who is also a painter.

    A Google search of “athletics in India” reveals the not surprising fact that cricket is the most popular sport in the country. Chess, hockey, soccer, and tennis are also widespread. On Wikipedia’s “Sports in India” page, one must scroll past 26 other pastimes before arriving at baseball. Curiosity is naturally piqued by the knowledge that Mirra Bank’s new documentary film, “The Only Real Game,” is not only about baseball in India, but about the sport’s popularity in Manipur, a remote, isolated state on the Burmese border that is virtually closed to foreigners.

    By the end of “The Only Real Game,” Ms. Bank has fashioned a portrait of the past and present of a complex but little-known society and the engagement with baseball of a group of characters ranging from M.K. Binodini Devi, the octogenarian writer, cultural leader, and daughter of the last king of Manipur to Jeff Brueggemann and David Palese, envoy coaches for Major League Baseball who have led clinics throughout Asia.

    The through-line of the film follows closely the instructional clinics in which the American coaches teach the game and encourage the progress of already-skillful players as well as children and other novices. One of the coaches, Mr. Brueggermann, was a pitcher in the Minnesota Twins organization until an off-season injury ended his career. Each takes to Manipur both enthusiasm for, and knowledge of the game. For many of the Manipuri, baseball is an obsession. For the more talented players, it is a hoped-for way out of a troubled society.

    Interwoven with the clinic material are archival photographs and film footage that fill in the history of Manipur; background material about the efforts of First Pitch USA, which organized the clinics, to develop a complex of playing fields there; conversations with community members about their lives, ambitions, and feelings about their country, and footage of life in Manipur, itself ranging from scenes of daily life — bathing, cooking, weaving, the market — to images of the omnipresent soldiers, visible evidence of 50 years of martial law.

    Manipur has a long history of independence and is renowned for its performers and athletes. It is the birthplace of polo, and its warrior culture has produced five forms of martial arts. After the country came under British rule in 1891, a rebellion was crushed and the royal palace destroyed by British troops. Manipur became part of India in 1949.

    Separatist groups arose as a result, and today there are some 30 armed insurgent militias and a visible militarization of the country. Scenes of violence captured by the film crew as well as testimony by Manipuri create a portrait of a violent, fractured society, to which the stately movement of cows throughout the city and the enthusiasm of players on the ball field provide stark contrast.

    The viewer learns that Manipur was a staging area for American troops during World War II for supply flights over the Himalayas, and archival film shows the G.I.s playing baseball, which two veterans recall was their primary release from the stress of those missions. The games, which were attended by the local community, are most likely the source of the region’s obsession with baseball. 

    The story of baseball and Manipur is a complicated one. Mirra Bank and her crew obviously earned the trust of the community. The uplifting baseball scenes and the reflections of the players on their love of the game and hopes for a future in it are offset by the failure of some of those dreams to materialize. The film engages the viewer, and twines his or her emotions with those of the Manipuri, so that one emerges from it inspired by the spirit of both the players and the coaches, but saddened by the overwhelming obstacles in their paths. Ms. Bank has woven an artful tapestry of a faraway culture and thereby breached the distance between it and the audience. The Manipuri become familiar, and their spirit and determination are unforgettable.

    “The Only Real Game” was shown at the Hamptons Take 2 Film Festival earlier this month. Information about future screenings can be found on the website onlyrealgamemovie.com.

     Gail Levin has organized an exhibition of the work of Theresa Bernstein, now on view at the James Gallery at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

    Ms. Levin, who has a house in Bridgehampton, is distinguished professor of art history at the graduate center and Baruch College. She edited the exhibition catalog, with articles written by her, her students, and other scholars interested in Bernstein’s work.

    Bernstein, who died in 2002, a contemporary of Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, and John Sloan, also painted in realist and expressionistic styles. Her artistic development dovetailed with theirs, but she never received the same recognition or commercial success, even though she showed regularly and was chosen to paint portraits of subjects such as Albert Einstein, Louis Armstrong, and Judy Garland.

    The title of the exhibition and catalog, “Theresa Bernstein: A Century in Art,” published by the University of Nebraska Press, acknowledges the unusually long life of the artist, who died at the age of 112. She was active up until the last few years, having exhibitions and writing a memoir and an illustrated children’s book.

    The exhibition will remain on view through Jan. 18.

    Pritam & Eames in East Hampton will host a book signing of “Speaking of Furniture: Conversations With 14 American Masters” on Saturday from 3 to 5 p.m. Just published by the Artist Book Foundation, the book is based on interviews with 14 furniture designers by Bebe and Warren Johnson, the owners of Pritam & Eames, where all the artist-craftsmen have exhibited.

    Featured are James Krenov, Wendell Castle, Judy Kensley McKie, Thomas Hucker, Jere Osgood, Richard Scott Newman, David Ebner, Hank Gilpin, Alphonse Mattia, John Dunnigan, Wendy Maruyama, James Schriber, Timothy Philbrick, and Michael Hurwitz. An introductory essay by Edward S. Cooke analyzes the American studio furniture movement and places it in its historical context.

    “Carnivale!” — a concert of classical works for piano and clarinet by Maksim Shtrykov and Alina Kiryayeva — is coming this weekend to the Montauk Library and the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton. The Montauk program is scheduled for Saturday at 7:30 p.m. The Southampton concert will take place Sunday afternoon at 3. “Carnivale!” includes works by Bassi, Chopin, Liszt, Saint-Saens, Messager, Giampieri, Rachmaninoff, and Rossini. The program, which is free at both locations, has been recommended for younger audiences, first-time concertgoers, and families with children.

    Mr. Shtrykov was a first-prize winner of the Belarus National Woodwind Competition and performed his solo debut recital at Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall in April 2007. He has given clarinet recitals and chamber music concerts at the Polish Baltic Philharmonic, the Belarusian State Philharmonic, Izumi Hall in Osaka, Japan, the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, and the Baruch Performing Arts Center, among other venues.

    A native of Ukraine, Ms. Kiryayeva gave her first solo piano recital at age 8 and had her solo debut with an orchestra at the age of 11. A winner of Italy’s Senigallia International Competition, Ms. Kiryayeva has also claimed top prizes in several piano competitions in the United States, including the Grace Welsh International Competition and the California Young Artists International Competition.

    Qi Xu, a 19-year-old pianist from China, will present a program of works by Chopin and Liszt on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Levitas Center for the Arts at the Southampton Cultural Center. Qi Xu, a Pianofest alumnus who performed at the Levitas Center in 2011, is enrolled in the Columbia-Juilliard exchange program. He has performed in Poland, Ukraine, Germany, France, and Morocco, where he won first prize in the Morocco Philharmonic International Piano Competition.

    The concert is the concluding program of the 10th anniversary celebration of the Rising Stars piano series. Tickets are $15, free for students under 21.

    Bookmarks have not always been made of heavy paper stock. Selections from one of the world’s largest collections of antique silver bookmarks are on view at the Pelletreau Silversmith Shop in Southampton through Dec. 23. Approximately 330 examples made by European and American silversmiths between 1800 and 1920 have been selected from the collection of Myra Weiser. These bookmarks, many of which were used not only to hold a place but also to detach pages from each other, reflect the fine craftsmanship of the silversmith.

    Scott Schwartz’s choice for the first production of his first main stage season as Bay Street Theatre’s artistic director augurs well for the goal of returning Bay Street to the cutting edge of America’s regional theater scene.

    “Conviction” by Carey Crim will make its world premiere at Bay Street in 2014 with Mr. Schwartz directing. It is the story of a trusted and honored teacher accused of sexual misconduct with a student.

    The idea behind the play “came to me from many different sources,” Ms. Crim said two weeks ago. “It was something I knew I wanted to write, but I had to let the story percolate for a while.”

    “Carey is a wonderful up-and-coming writer,” Mr. Schwartz said two weeks ago. “She has a very distinctive voice. She writes characters like you and me.” And the play, he said, “digs into an impossible moment in their lives.”

    “What does that sort of not knowing the truth do to the people who love the accused?” Ms. Crim asked. She paraphrased a line from the play: “I’m not saying that he’s not a wonderful teacher of the year, all these wonderful things, but what I am saying is, what if he’s both?”

    For the artistic director of a regional theater, selecting a play that will premier there is not a casual choice. The rewards, both financial and artistic, can be great for the theater involved. Any revival afterwards lists the theater as the original producer. Bay Street will produce this world premiere in association with the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg, the Rubicon Theatre Company of Ventura, Calif., and Dead Posh Productions of London, which recently staged another play of Ms. Crim’s, “23.5 Hours.”

    Ms. Crim caught the playwriting bug during another world premiere, appearing in Lanford Wilson’s “Book of Days” at the Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea, Mich., in 1998.

    Though born in Kentucky, she considers herself a Michigan native, having grown up outside Detroit in Grosse Point. A graduate of Northwestern University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in performance studies, she went on to study acting at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

    While pursuing an acting career, making the prerequisite career sojourn to Los Angeles, then New York, she found an artistic home with the Purple Rose Theatre Company. Founded by Jeff Daniels and named after the Woody Allen film, “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” in which Mr. Daniels starred, the regional theater was a nurturing environment that allowed Ms. Crim to find her legs, first as an actor then as a playwright.

    During the premiere production of “The Book of Days,” Ms. Crim was inspired by Mr. Wilson’s almost ruthless ability to cut his own work in order to make the play better.

    “If he can be ruthless and he’s Lanford Wilson, than who am I not to follow suit?” she asked last month.

    Bay Street will announce its choices for the 2014 season’s revival and the always-much-anticipated musical in the coming weeks. Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play, “The Little Foxes,” has been under consideration for revival but negotiations are still ongoing.