The Parrish Art Museum’s Salon Series of classical music concerts continues tomorrow at 6 p.m. with a performance by Inna Faliks, a pianist. Her program will include works by Chopin, Schumann, and Zhurbin.

    Since her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age 15, Ms. Faliks has performed at such venues as Carnegie Hall’s Weill Concert Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Salle Cortot in Paris, and Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall. She has won many competitions, including the Hilton Head International Competition and the Pro Musicis international award in 2005. Ms. Faliks is a professor at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music.

    The series will conclude Nov. 1 with a piano performance by Nadejda Vlaeva. Tickets cost $20, $10 for members.

    The Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons’ library in the Bridgehampton Community House, which was has been closed for renovations, will celebrate its reopening Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. with a reception for the public and members of the alliance. The library has Long Island’s largest collection of horticultural books, magazines, and videos.

    Visitors to the reception can acquaint themselves with the alliance’s year-round programs of lectures, workshops, garden tours, and other events, and network with other East End gardeners. Books from the library’s closeout sale will be given away, gardening films can be viewed, and refreshments will be served throughout the afternoon.

     “Aging Magician,” a new multimedia theater work about the journey of an elderly man to a Coney Island magic show, will be presented at the Watermill Center on Saturday at 4 p.m. With music composed by Paola Prestini, libretto and performance by Rinde Eckert, and design and direction by Julian Crouch, the production combines music, theater, puppetry, instrument making, and scenic design.

    The three created the work during their residency at the Watermill Center with students from the Park Avenue Armory Youth Corps, a program that provides opportunities for high school students to work behind the scenes at art organizations. “Aging Magician,” intended, in part, to acquaint students with themes of legacy and death, is part of a new partnership between the Watermill Center and the Park Avenue Armory’s artist-in-residence program. Admission is free, but reservations are required.

     “Music, Milestones, and Remembrances,” a concert at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church, will celebrate the rebuilding of the church’s Steinway piano, the 50th anniversary of the Austin pipe organ in the sanctuary, and present reflections on the church’s history on Saturday at 7 p.m.

    Thomas Bohlert, director of music at the church, will perform on both instruments, while Hugh King, East Hampton’s official town crier, will discuss little-known aspects of the early history of the church and town. Stephanie Mocilan will play violin. Music will include selections based on the hymns “There Is a Redeemer” and “Crown Him With Many Crowns,” and Beethoven’s Romance in F for violin and piano. A bolero by Lefebure-Wely and “March of the Torchbearers” by Scotson Clark will conclude the program.

    The Steinway Model L piano, which dates from 1927, was recently refinished and rebuilt after a successful fund-raising campaign. The pipe organ, built in 1962 and inaugurated a year later, is considered the largest on the East End. Suggested admission is $20, $15 for senior citizens, and $10 for students.

    Capt. Dan King, a former president of the East Hampton Town Baymen’s Association and a former town trustee, and Marsha King, his wife, have begun a Kickstarter.com campaign in support of a historical novel they are putting together, “A Fine Day for Fishing,” documenting “the death of a centuries-old way of life played out on a sandy beach,” according to a release. That is, “the ban on hauling a seine to catch striped bass.”

    “Today . . . fish stocks have rebounded,” they write, “but now the baymen are disappearing.” They have invited supporters to view a video of Billy Joel’s song “Downeaster Alexa” on the Kickstarter site. Contributions can be made until Friday, Nov. 1.

    A book launch and signing will take place on Nov. 23 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett. Baymen will be on hand to give tours of exhibits. Ms. King can be reached at marshaking324@yahoo. com.

    Guild Hall will open two exhibitions this week to inaugurate the museum’s fall season, each lively and provocative in its own way. In one gallery, Thomas Moran’s stylistic legacy and his preoccupation with European art movements will be examined in “Tracing Moran’s Romanticism and Symbolism.” In the other, Christa Maiwald will offer “Short Stories and Other Embroideries.” Ms. Maiwald was the winner of the 2011 members exhibition.

    The Moran exhibition was organized by Phyllis Braff to draw attention to the museum’s acquisitions both recent and longstanding and an extended loan by one collector. The show also features some other significant loans, including an 1884 painting from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

    Phyllis Braff, the curator and a co-editor of the Moran catalogue raisonne, organized the show with an eye to putting the artist within the greater context of what was happening in both America and Europe at the time he was painting.

    “He was addicted to America in his content, but used the stylistic tradition of European masters, using glazes, under-painting, and charcoal undertones” to express himself, she said last week. “He was never a plein air painter.”

    Indeed the stories that emanate from the Studio, his residence and working space on Main Street overlooking Town Pond, center on him taking sketches he made out West and translating them to canvas. “He used sketches as references and changed and adapted the views selectively,” co-opting landscape traditions established over centuries by Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and J.M.W. Turner, Ms. Braff said.

    While not a strict Romanticist and certainly working years apart from them, he shared some of the same sensibilities in his earlier works, such as “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” from 1859, which cribs from the poet Robert Browning cribbing from Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” In 1862 he revisited a Turner subject taken from Homer’s “Odyssey” in “Ulysses Deriding Polythemus.”

    In the same vein, he was not a member of the more modern “Symbolist” movement in art, but rather used symbolism the way old masters would. In 1864’s “Nutting, Autumn,” viewers will see a family gathering nuts, which he painted for the Philadelphia Sanitary Fair, a fund-raiser for the wounded from the Civil War. The peaceful scene sent the message that “soon all of the horrors of the war would be over, and families can get back to doing such activities together,” Ms. Braff said, adding that Abraham Lincoln visited the exhibition.

    The National Gallery painting from 1884, “The Much Resounding Sea,” has East Hampton’s Main Beach and Homer’s “Iliad” as inspiration. Homer seems to be an enduring inspiration. Ms. Braff said Moran was much attached to his earlier “Ulysses” painting, and it hung over the mantel at his East Hampton studio from the time he built the house until his daughter Ruth Moran died and the house was sold. This is also the painting on extended loan to the museum from Ian Cumming of East Hampton.

    In quite a different fashion, Ms. Maiwald’s recent embroideries tackle the zeitgeist with the famous and infamous stitched on seat cushions, lampshades, pillows, and pinafores. Each unit of a piece focuses on one person or subject, or at the most two. Yet each piece gains its potency and heft from the assemblage of those multiples set out in installations such as “Servitude,” representing famous tyrannical bosses such as Gordon Ramsey and actual tyrants such as Imelda Marcos as needlework portraits on miniaturized maids’ uniforms mounted over lamps.

    In “Musical Chairs: Economic Crisis in G Minor” from 2009, various bad actors and regulators from the financial meltdown of 2007-8 are depicted in brightly colored seat cushions, the musical chairs theme and installation implying the fluidity with which some of these figures moved from the industry that created the problems into the regulatory arena that was charged with solving them.

    “Garden Party” from 2007 is another lamp installation with found children’s dresses serving as the support for images of dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il. On an apparently lighter note but with darker undertones in the context of the Bush presidency, are the portraits of comedians from “Laughing Stock” featuring Jim Carrey, Whoopi Goldberg, and David Letterman to name a few. Her work from this year has taken on broader themes. One series features famous artists and their creations and another, “Plant Therapy,” conflates gardening with mental health issues and disorders.

    Ms. Maiwald, who lives in Springs, has been using the fiber-based medium since 2000, choosing it for its portability as well as the inherent tension that arises when edgy subject matter meets homespun charm. She has also worked in sculpture, film, photography, and installation art. She continues to work in video art as well. Guild Hall will present a gallery talk with her on Nov. 17 from 2 to 3 p.m.

    An opening reception for both shows will take place on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. They will remain on view through Jan. 5.

    Artists’ books have taken many forms. The ’70s were a sort of golden age, when boundaries between mediums had dissolved and so many artists were creating books and other ephemera that Martha Wilson founded Franklin Furnace in Tribeca as a repository for such work. In 1993, the Museum of Modern Art purchased the Furnace’s collection, which had become the largest of its kind in the United States.

    These thoughts come to mind when visiting the artist Barry McCallion’s house in Springs, where he creates his astonishingly beautiful and utterly unique books, an artistic treasure trove in an unexpected spot. Situated on Flaggy Hole Road, literally a stone’s throw from Maidstone Beach, it has been the full-time residence of Mr. McCallion and his wife, Joanne Canary, since 2000. It is the same house — though much changed — that his parents rented from 1943 until the early ’50s.

    Before showing a visitor his own work, Mr. McCallion brought out Riva Castleman’s “A Century of Artists Books,” which traces the development of the form from the late-19th century. “What this does nicely is to show the entire range,” Mr. McCallion explained. “At first, illustrations were subordinate to text, then there was a gradual transition to a point where text and image had equal weight, and eventually artists began creating textless books.”

    Born in the Bronx, Mr. McCallion’s first involvement with books was as an English literature major at Columbia. After graduating, he moved to the West Coast, earning an M.F.A. at Claremont Graduate University. It was there he become involved with Fluxus, an international network of artists, composers, and designers noted for blending different artistic mediums and disciplines in the ’60s and ’70s. Among the dozens of artists associated with Fluxus were Joseph Beuys, John Kale, Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, and Carolee Schneemann.

    Recalling his introduction to the group, Mr. McCallion said, “When I was in California I was doing conceptual pieces. John Cage’s ‘Silence’ was very important to me. So I wrote to him. I said, ‘Here I am, all of 24, doing work nobody else is doing out here.’ ” After a pause, he added with a laugh, “I didn’t yet know Ed Ruscha’s work.” It was John Cage who told the artist that Dick Higgins, a composer and poet, and other members of Fluxus, were coming to California.

    “There was suddenly an impactful group that arrived on the West Coast,” Mr. McCallion said. “Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams, and George Brecht were all important to me.” Mr. McCallion traveled in England with members of Fluxus for a year, then returned by boat, docking in Montreal. From there he settled on a farm just across the Canadian border. “I realize now we should have driven farther south. Living off the land wasn’t fun,” he said. “At least not for me.”

    A grant from the Berlin Artist Program (DADD) took him in 1975 to Berlin, where he stayed for four years and met his wife, who was teaching at the John F. Kennedy School there. This was followed by a two-year grant from the Gardilanne-Moffat Foundation that provided him with a studio in Paris. He returned in 1981 to the United States, where he worked for two years managing a photo-retouching studio. In 1983 he was awarded a two-month artist residency from the Australian Arts Council, followed by a month in New Zealand, courtesy of the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council. “I like to say I ran out of countries that were willing to support me at that point.”

    His involvement with books began in the early ’70s, when he created a character he calls the oarsman, “which came in part from my literature background and my having read the ‘Odyssey’ far too many times.” The oarsman would travel from place to place and experience different things. Mr. McCallion created a series of collages at first, then provisioned the boat with two and three-dimensional pieces, including food and books. “The oarsman’s library was the first series of visual books I made. In all, I did around 35.”

    By the late ’90s, he stopped the series because it was losing its mystery for him. “As O’Neill said, ‘the kick had gone out of the booze,’ ” he said, laughing. An avid surfcaster, Mr. McCallion then wrote several short stories about fishing, which, to his surprise, he sold to a high-end, glossy fishing magazine. He followed that with two unpublished novels, written over a 10-year period. “I proved it was just as hard to get something published as it was to get something exhibited.”

    In January 2011 he started the second oarsman’s library, in which sometimes the character appears, sometimes the boat, sometimes neither. Before long, he showed the books, which were purely visual, to Priscilla Juvelis, a rare-book dealer in Kennebunkport, Me., who agreed to represent him. She suggested he put text in some of the books. “I said if I did add text, I would do Joseph Conrad’s ‘Typhoon.’ I had such a good time I did five versions of ‘Typhoon,’ as well as several involving the character Kurtz from ‘Heart of Darkness.’ Using text let me revisit books I loved.”

    Mr. McCallion’s books use an impressive range of materials and techniques. In one, he drew with white ink on a volume of black pages. In another, the center of each page has been replaced with a square of clear plastic, so that you see not just the drawing on the page in front of you, but also the drawings behind it. Mr. McCallion does a lot of cutting. In “Typhoon,” for example, he created three-dimensional dioramas of a stormy sea framed by fragments of text. In “Heart of Darkness” he adds to pasted bits of text his own hand-written version of the same fragments.

    Other books include Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” and “Gold Mountain,” inspired my Maxine Hong Kingston’s characterization of the way immigrants imagine the U.S. Another volume, “Interiors,” consists of collages, for which he found a paper with a sticky underside — the principle of contact paper — that allows him to make collages without glue.

    It’s difficult to do justice to the variety and complexity of the books in words or in photographs. They are ideally experienced by hefting and opening the boxes and exploring the contents in what becomes a very personal exploration of an artwork. In September, the Amagansett Library offered a hands-on book-share of more than 30 of Mr. McCallion’s books. Five are on display in a vitrine in the library.

    “A book is wonderful because you can spin out so many ideas,” Mr. McCallion said. A tour of his library of handmade books reveals that remark to be an understatement.

Abstraction at Ashawagh

     “Life in the Abstract,” a group show of paintings by John Haubrich, Fulvio Massi, Barbara Groot, and Dru Frederick, will be on view tomorrow through Sunday at Ashawagh Hall in Springs. Ms. Groot, who organized the exhibition, has pointed out that all four artists have design backgrounds — Mr. Haubrich as an art director, Mr. Massi as an architect, Ms. Frederick as an art restorer, and Ms. Groot as a textile designer. “Elements of mass, geometry, line, color, and balance are clearly informed by each artist’s background,” according to Ms. Groot.

     A reception will be held Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m.

New at Crazy Monkey

     Large drawings by Jim Hayden and photographs by Jana Hayden and Lenore Bailey will be featured in a group show that opens tomorrow at the Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett and will remain on view through Dec. 1. Mr. Hayden uses large, handmade brushes and sumi ink to create abstract visual images on paper. Ms. Hayden’s photographs focus on the many reflections found in nature, while vintage cars are the subjects of Ms. Bailey’s images.

     A group show of gallery artists will also be on view. A reception will take place Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

Howard at 4 North Main

     Thomas Howard, a 17-year-old self-taught artist who specializes in small-scale realism, is having a solo show at 4 North Main Gallery in Southampton through Nov. 12. Mr. Howard works exclusively with a #2 pencil to make finely detailed drawings of architecture and fantastic but anatomically precise figures. A reception with the artist will take place Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m.

Landscapes in Amagansett

     “Weathered Landscapes” by Roisin Bateman are now on view at Sylvester at Home in Amagansett. Her new series of abstract pastel drawings explore the effects of weather on the landscape. Ms. Bateman grew up in western Ireland, where the environment is “wild and magical,” she said, and now lives and works on the East End, “a more light-reflective” landscape. The works in the exhibition draw on her experience of both environments.

    It is funny, but I had to be reminded this week that Robert Dash wasn’t an abstract artist, not in the nonobjective sense anyway. The inveterate gardener, writer, and artist left us last month after a long illness, but his legacy in Madoo, his residence and conservancy, and his artwork, as well as a quite lengthy catalogue of columns he wrote for The Star over many years, will continue.

    At the Drawing Room gallery in East Hampton, Dash’s most recent pastels are on view and they are quite abstract. One can still sense the landscape they were taken from, but the artist once said all of his landscapes were extrapolations from memory, their compositions taken from the sense of a place with a dollop of artistic fancy.

    From earlier years, that recipe would have translated into more of a straightforward presentation of recognizable sites rendered in generalized daubs and planes of color and light. The work I had seen and begun to associate with him were his latest works, spied either at Spanierman Galleries in New York or on his studio walls in recent winters when attending lectures there. These were far more generalized and intuitive.

    The “Blue Hill” pastels at Drawing Room are even further removed from reality, taking what appears to be a single or at least limited vantage point. The source, according to the gallery, is the “rocky shoreline of Blue Hill Bay” in Maine, where Dash committed the cliffs and vistas across the bay to memory. The resulting images are referential, but also a clear departure.

    They are rather dynamic images, made more poignant and ecstatic by their execution at the dusk of an artist’s life. There is a sense of a hand and eye needing to fill the page with an expansive vision. Like Mont Sainte-Victoire for Paul Cezanne, also chosen as subject matter later in the artist’s life, Blue Hill becomes not just a landscape but a muse and icon, yielding infinite variety within a diminished visual range.

    Coloration can be straightforward, as in “From Blue Hill II” from this year, which appears to be inspired by a sunny day with the blue sky reflected in the water, and its possible pendant, “From Blue Hill III,” drawn in more somber tones and grays from an overcast one. Contrast both with Number I, where yellows, reds, blues, blacks, and greens comprise the setting, or Number IV, where the rendering in reds and yellows is most expressionistic. Number IV is also very granular and crunchy; the red brings out the bite in the rocks.

    He chose antique rag paper in beige and gray as supports for the pastels. Those executed on the gray paper tend to be the livelier of the works, bringing more contrast into play. Yet my favorite has to be Number VI. The piece is positively on fire, though not in the literal way of the previously described work. Here, the rendering is most naturalistic in hue, but there is a purity that makes it electrically charged. The atmosphere crackles. Perhaps it is because of this work that the other beige-based ones seem so, in fact, beige. But my verdict is no, they are more wan and hazy just because they are.

    What is lovely about the show is how much it offers from so apparently little. The installation shows a real feeling for what pieces should hang together regardless of their chronology. Taking a spin multiple times around the single room with an additional work in the window yields fresh perspectives and correlations. It’s a show worth visiting more than once to view the art as well as to ponder the contribution of Dash to the greater artistic world.

    Chuck Holtzman has the same measure-taking feel as an exhibition. Here, the Boston-based artist is contrasted with himself, taking sculptures he did in the early 1980s and recent works on paper as a snapshot and larger examination of his career.

    The particular works chosen often seem to be directly related, as if the drawings were a kind of two-dimensional unraveling of the planar sculptural pieces. I like this. It’s elemental and obvious on one level, but it stops the viewer and opens the eyes to the process of perception in a lively way. On closer inspection there is not much cohesion to do a side-by-side comparison, but the suggestion of it is enticing nonetheless.

    The black-and-white ink and watercolors are rich in tonality and lively in their geometric precision. Their angular purity on the one hand makes their more expressive cousins seem precarious and exciting in comparison, each complementing the other in an enriching, but not essential symbiosis.

    Both shows are on view through Nov. 4. 

Miller at Four Seasons

    Steve Miller, an artist who divides his time between New York City and a renovated potato barn in Wainscott, created an installation at the Four Seasons one night last week. The “one-night stand with Philip Johnson,” the architect who designed the restaurant, consisted of work from his series about the Amazon entitled “Health of the Planet.”

    “The forests of the Amazon are the lungs of our planet,” Mr. Miller said. “This project gives Brazil a medical checkup by taking X-rays of the plants and animals of the Amazon.” Images from the series were projected on the ceiling of the bar and installed as light boxes and furniture around and in the pool.

    “When art and science intersect, it changes the context, beefs up the scale, and alters responses to imagery in unexpected ways. Images of the smallest of things become images you can get lost in,” the artist has said. Mr. Miller has exhibited worldwide, with recent solo shows in Rio de Janiero, Switzerland, and Washington, D.C.

John Gruen Interview

    Happen to be in Manhattan tonight? John Jonas Gruen, photographer and critic, and Deborah Rothschild, former senior curator of modern and contemporary art at the Williams College Museum of Art, will be there as well, to discuss life in the Hamptons during the mid-20th century.

    They will speak at 6:30 p.m. at the Susan Eley Fine Art gallery, 46 West 90th Street, in conjunction with Mr. Gruen’s current exhibition there, “Young in the Hamptons.” Mr. Gruen has been an integral part of the East End’s artistic community since the ’50s, and his photographs, especially those of artists, constitute a singular record of that time and place.

    In an e-mail announcing the talk, Mr. Gruen said, “I plan to tell all.”

Pollock-Krasner Symposium

    The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center is sponsoring a daylong symposium at Stony Brook Manhattan on Nov. 8, for which advance registration is required.

     “Art From the Ground Up: The Protection of Cultural Heritage Through Connoisseurship, Conservation, and Authentication” will include five lectures, each of which will be followed by questions, with closing remarks by Patricia Cohen, an arts reporter for The New York Times. A reception will follow.

    During the morning session, Francis V. O’Connor, an independent scholar who has written extensively on Jackson Pollock, will discuss the role of the educated eye in determining authorship of artworks: connoisseurship as the first line of defense against forgery. James Hamm, professor of paintings conservation at Buffalo State College, will review case histories involving advanced analytical techniques, and forgery in the 21st century will be the subject of a talk by Jeffrey Taylor, assistant professor of arts management at Purchase College.

    After a lunch break, Colette Loll Marvin, founder and director of Art Fraud Insights, will discuss her research on fakes. David L. Hall, an attorney who specializes in art and museum law, will speak on the investigation and prosecution of cultural-property crimes. Ms. Cohen’s concluding remarks will address the symposium’s issues from the perspective of a journalist.

    Admission to the symposium is free. Registration is by phone at 324-4929 or by e-mail to [email protected].