Josephine Meckseper, a New York City artist, photographer, and cinematographer, has installations of a different sort on display at the Parrish Art Museum this summer and fall.

    The exhibition is part of the Parrish’s “Platform” series, experimental artist-driven projects that aim to use all aspects of the museum as a canvas. The installations mix a number of artistic disciplines that in conjunction are designed to evoke certain feelings.

    Ms. Meckseper puts a wide range of skills and new ideas to use. Questioning consumerism and omnipresent marketing in society today, she has objects in her installations that represent the advertising and retail worlds.

    Ms. Meckseper is one of the first artists to use the outdoor gallery space at the new Water Mill museum. Two of her glass display cases are outside the main entrance. Her sculpture “Sabotage on Auto Assembly Line to Slow It Down” (2009) sits inside the main entrance, its chrome fixtures reflecting the passing traffic on Montauk Highway.

    Her other installations, including the slatwall works “Crow” (2011) and “Corvette” (2010), are accompanied by the works of John Chamberlain, Willem de Kooning, Dan Flavin, and Keith Sonnier. Each piece is positioned around the museum in such a way that they complement one another’s styles and objectives.

    Ms. Meckseper is German born but lives in Amagansett and New York. She studied at Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin and earned an M.F.A. at CalArts in Los Angeles. Her work has been shown in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, and the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles.

    The exhibit opens today and continues through Oct. 14. Museum hours are Wednesday through Monday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., with Friday hours till 8 p.m. Guided tours happen on Sundays, Mondays, and Saturdays at 2 p.m. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for senior citizens, and free for members, children, and students.   

   Music lovers have been invited to lounge on the lawn or the terrace of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill tomorrow for a performance by SisterMonk. The band, mostly female-powered, makes music that is soulful, easy to dance to, and draws on a variety of cultures. They have previously performed with Zap Mama, Michael Franti and Spearhead, Anoushka Shankar, and the Karl Denson Trio.

    The show, from 5 to 8 p.m., is free with museum admission.

   Dom Irerra, who has been nominated six times for an American Comedy Award, starred in countless comedy television shows for HBO, Showtime, Comedy Central, Fox, and Nickelodeon, and performed in four films, will take the stage as part of the 2013 Comedy Club at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor on Monday. Mr. Irerra sharpened his stand-up comedy skills growing up in a multigenerational Italian household in South Philadelphia.

    The following Monday, Paul Reiser will perform. As Paul Buchanan, Mr. Reiser earned Emmy, Golden Globe, American Comedy Award, and Screen Actors Guild nominations for Best Actor in a Comedy Series for his performances on NBC’s “Mad About You.” He had his own show in 2011, “The Paul Reiser Show,” and has starred in many TV shows and movies. He has written two New York Times best sellers, “Couplehood” and “Babyhood.”

    Tickets for the shows cost $69, or $62 for members. They are available online at baystreet.org or by calling the box office. The shows start at 8 p.m.

   The Sag Harbor Historical Society is starting up its Fridays on the Porch series — informal open house events at the Annie Cooper Boyd House with refreshments and speakers. On Friday, July 12, Rebecca Radin will talk about the influence of William Merritt Chase’s Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art on the painting of Annie Cooper Boyd.

    Ms. Radin, a former professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, ran an art gallery in the first Borders bookstore. The event goes from 5 to 6 p.m. Donations would be appreciated.

   Direct from her sold-out performance at Lincoln Center, Audra McDonald, the celebrated soprano and actress, will perform with her jazz ensemble at Guild Hall on Saturday at 7 p.m.

    Ms. McDonald, who is touring in support of her new album, “Go Back Home,” was a presenter at the recent Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall. She then closed the show in a surprise performance with the actor and director Neil Patrick Harris.

     Tickets for the performance only are $200 for orchestra and $150 for balcony, $145 for members, and are available at guildhall.org and theatermania.com, at the box office, or by calling 324-4050. A limited number of tickets are available at $650, $1,000, and $2,500 for the performance and dinner. Reserve tickets are with the special events department at 324-0806, extension 13 or 14, or by e-mail at [email protected].

   The Choral Society of the Hamptons joined with the Greenwich Village Singers and the South Fork Chamber Orchestra on Saturday evening to fill the Parish Hall at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in East Hampton with the glorious sounds of masterpieces by Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, composers who brought Baroque music to its peak.

    Bach’s Cantata “Gott, der Herr, ist Sonn’ und Schild” (BWV 79) opened the program with a flourish. Originally written for the 1725 Lutheran Reformation Festival at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, the piece immediately achieves a celebratory mood by juxtaposing two horns against a rather jaunty countermelody in the strings and oboes. Under the clear and amiable direction of Mark Mangini, the South Fork Chamber Orchestra skillfully laid the foundation for the first thrilling entry of the chorus.

    In each of the choral movements of the cantata, the Choral Society and Greenwich Village Singers demonstrated a delightful combination of vigor and dexterity.

    The singer’s careful preparation was evident in the clear German diction, accuracy of entrances, and precision of consonant placement. This attention to detail helped to clarify the architecture and message of the music for the audience and freed the singers to express their joy at engaging with such finely crafted music.

    Whether navigating adroitly through a fugue or joining to offer a chorale, the chorus sang with beautiful tone and confident intonation. Mr. Mangini’s gestures during contrapuntal passages highlighted each appearance of the fugue subject: essential guidance for the performers, of course, but also helpful in directing the attention of the audience to each recurrence of the main theme.

    The cantata’s second movement features an aria for alto, brought pleasantly to life by Suzanne Schwing amid the delicately dancing ministrations of the principal oboist, Hugo Souza. Sara Paar and Mischa Bouvier were quite expressive and enjoyable to hear in the duet for soprano and bass in the fifth movement.

    Mr. Mangini and the South Fork Chamber Orchestra — a roundup of accomplished professionals from all over Long Island and beyond, which springs into existence whenever needed for a Choral Society concert — then presented the fourth movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1. They did an excellent job with this challenging work. There  was not a weak player among them, but special regard is due to the horn section. The tessitura of the horn parts in Cantata 79 lies quite high in the range throughout (especially on modern instruments), while the first horn part in Brandenburg No. 1 is stratospherically virtuosic.

    Thanks to the principal hornist, Luiza Raab-Pontecorvo, and her colleague, John-Morgan Bush, no one listening had any idea that the horn parts were an unusual challenge. They made the job seem easy.

    English oratorios as a genre show that necessity is often the mother of, if not always invention, at least innovation and exploitation. With the Church proscribing licentious and pagan entertainments like opera and theater during Lent, Handel successfully adapted the Italian oratorio model to the English language and public. Eliminating sets, costumes, and staging, and using Biblical story lines instead of pagan mythology, allowed creators of oratorio to work around the Church’s objections, while still providing audiences with dramatic musical settings of compelling stories.

    Saturday’s concert presented the central, dramatic portion of Handel’s “Israel in Egypt.” While an oratorio, like an opera, normally alternates between choral and solo or small group textures to tell its story, “Israel” employs the chorus as narrator nearly all of the time. Ms. Schwing returned for the alto solos and Gregory Mercer, a professional who also sang with the tenor section for the oratorio, delivered the two recitatives quite vividly.

    In fact, the whole piece is vivid: After all, the text and music portray the plagues visited upon Egypt before the Exodus. Handel clearly had a lot of fun writing musical figures to illustrate bloody rivers, flies and lice, fiery hailstones, and, especially, the blindness that comes with overwhelming darkness. The singers, divided into two separate choruses, handled these images in a way that showed they relished the chance to communicate such rich text painting.

    During the final movement, while singing enthusiastically of how “the horse and his rider” had been “thrown into the sea,” it seemed that one or more tenors were not far from breaking into a dance upon Pharaoh’s grave. Throughout all the choral movements, the singers maintained an impressive level of commitment to precision in attacks and cutoffs as well as clear articulation and animated interpretation of the text.

    In the eighth movement, the tenors were first to introduce a rangy and angular fugue subject on the text “He sent a thick darkness over the land. . . .” At this highly exposed moment (and once more in another movement) the blend in the tenor section became suspect as individual voices became more prominent on certain notes. However, this was an aberration in an otherwise solid performance from the section.

    That some difficulty arose among the sopranos of chorus one to keep to tempo in the melismatic passages of the final movement was surprising. However, the concert called for a lot of singing from the chorus, and despite having sung a rehearsal of the program earlier that day, the singers maintained fantastic vocal and facial energy all the way through the final cadence.

    It was a privilege to experience the incredible collaboration of so many singers and instrumentalists as they reinvigorated musical works whose pedigree is centuries old. Congratulations to all involved in sharing with the East End community such a vibrant, impressive display of talent and musicality.

   During a recent visit with Grace Schulman, a poet, translator, and professor, she remarked that the phone lines at her house were full of static.

    But she hadn’t called for a repair, she said — her Springs house, and the beaches and all of the corners of the hamlet, are a refuge where she takes in the observations that later emerge in her poems.

    A former poetry editor at The Nation, where she revived a poetry contest, Ms. Schulman directed the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan for a decade.

    “At this point in my life,” she said, “I’m simply writing my poems. And I hope to do that the rest of my life.”

    Not quite true. Although she carves out quiet time for writing at her wooded refuge in Springs, she remains a distinguished professor of English at Baruch College in the city, where she still teaches several courses, as well as a poetry class at the Y. She also serves as a judge for writing contests, reading manuscripts and poems.

     “This place excites me very much,” she said on a weekend afternoon. “My earlier books had a lot to do with New York, and the buildings and the history. Coming out here, the place took hold of me. It got into my consciousness and into my poems.”

    “I’m on the edge of my seat, always,” she said of making constant observations of the world, which surface later, in new forms, in her work. “Every observation is marvelous. What was it Marianne Moore said? ‘Curiosity, observation, and a great deal of joy in the thing.’ And I’m glad to be alive.”

    The first poem in her forthcoming book “Without a Claim” is titled “Celebration,” and the book, Ms. Schulman said, “is a celebration in everything around me.”

    In New York City, she walks the streets and draws inspiration from theater, music, and the arts. Here, Gerard Park in Springs is a favorite. “I’m struck by the solitude of the place, of the clammers . . . of the sense of aloneness,” she said. “I feel that there’s a current going on and on and on, and I feel it here, and I feel it in art galleries, and I feel it in concert halls.”

    “I suppose the insights about the observations come from a deeper place,” Ms. Schulman said. “I’m very attached to the past, and to the poets who have nourished me.” She named, along with Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Donne.   “I feel humble; I do not create. They are creating through me, I feel — speaking through me.”

    Contemporary poets she admires include Derek Walcott, W.S. Merwin, Anne Carson, and Marilyn Hacker. Two East Hampton poets, Carol Muske-Dukes and Philip Schultz, are close friends who share her connection to the local environment and its influence on the work.

    Ms. Muske-Dukes’s poem “Green River Cemetery,” named for the Springs graveyard where numerous artists and writers are buried, is “about a concrete place,” Ms. Schulman said, “and yet it lifts itself off into spirit and life.” And “The Magic Kingdom” by Mr. Schultz, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008, is, Ms. Schulman said, “a magical look at the beach here.”

    She’s also written about Louse Point, about Old Stone Highway —  “American Solitude” was written on a hike down Old Stone Highway, she said — and the Pussy’s Pond bridge, another Springs waypoint, which the poet called “the Monet footbridge.”

    “It’s difficult to know about obsessions in oneself,” Ms. Schulman said, “but there is a repeated theme I have worked on obsessively, and that has to do with borders and divisions. It occurs in all of my books; that I see the faces of people as one face; I see people without divisions, without borders. It’s in the poems.” She cited work that addresses “the borders between Israel and Jordan, the borders between people, the borders between ideas and things.”

    In a poem titled “Borders,” included in her collection “The Broken String,” she writes:

Soldiers were shot, and would be, ours, theirs,

and new borders, none deadlier than the mind’s.

Why was it then I had to cross, and why,

at that dizzying moment, fear disguised

as ignorance, I asked: “Where is the border?”

“Moved,” he answered. “Now it is where you stand.”

    Another “obsessive concern” that appears throughout her work, Ms. Schulman said, is the story of an aunt who, during World War II in Warsaw, leapt from  a tower with a Polish flag wrapped around her to protest the Poles having given her away to the Nazis.

    “Helen appears throughout my work,” she wrote in an e-mail following an interview. “Early on, during the Vietnam years, I couldn’t praise her kind of heroism. Later I saw it as an iconic act, one which drew the imagination to itself. In any case, it fired my poetry from the very beginning.”

    A job just after college as a newspaper journalist still shapes her writing, the poet said. “The art of using strong verbs and economy; all of that comes from newspaper work.”

    Before sitting down to work, she goes “into a very, very deep immersion . . . another world, really.  And when I’m there, I’m writing, and if I’m interrupted by anything, I completely lose what I have in the writing. I just shut myself in, really, to work, and I love it out here because it’s possible to do that.”

    “It feels wonderful to be writing in a time when so many poets are writing,” she added. “So many diverse poets with so many cultures.” But, she said, while there may be an effort to bring more readers to poetry, too much of it is being presented “because it’s easy . . . Marianne Moore said something I cherish: ‘It ought to be work to be reading something that took work to write.’ ”    

    A book about Moore and her work, “Marianne Moore: The Poetry of Engagement,” was published by Ms. Schulman in 1988. She also edited the 2003 “Poems of Marianne Moore.”

    Ms. Moore was a friend of her parents, and at age 14, Ms. Schulman sent her her first poem. Ms. Moore’s reply referenced only her “flawless typing.”

    “Without a Claim,” due out in September, will be Ms. Schulman’s seventh collection of poems. She has received many honors, including the Aiken Taylor Award for Poetry, the Delmore Schwarz Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, New York University’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and a fellowship from the New York Council on the Arts, as well as three Pushcart Prizes.

    A poetry class this month at the Writers Conference at Stony Brook South­ampton will be a first for Ms. Schulman, who joins Billy Collins and Heather McHugh as the workshop’s poetry faculty this year.

    “I look forward to it,” she said. “I love to teach. I really get a charge out of my students. I’m very excited by student work and students’ growing apprehension of poetry and themselves. And I don’t even feel that I’m teaching; I’m joining them, creating something out of the past.”

    And what does she tell her classes? “Focus on language. Read, read, read, and read for language. And write for language. Develop a passion for language. Read Emily Dickinson; read Donne. Feel a part of that masterly tradition. Reading is as important as writing; they’re part of the same thing.”

    “In fact,” said Ms. Schulman, “I will advise the beginning student not to write at all, but to study the parts of speech and how they’re used. Fool around with a word salad, make up word games of various kinds, rather than go for ideas or themes. Those things come later.”

   “Everybody knows we’re going down / When we walk around / Everybody knows we’re going down / When we’re out on the town.”

    With opening lyrics like these, it is quickly apparent that listeners are in for an emotional ride. Welcome to “Everybody Knows,” the eighth and most poignant, sometimes wrenching, album by Taylor Barton, who lives in Amagansett. A mostly acoustic, gentle, and contemplative collection, “Everybody Knows” depicts Ms. Barton’s reaction to, and journey to overcome, a period of great upheaval in her life.

    Though its official release date is Oct. 1, the CD will be available when Ms. Barton and her husband, the guitarist G.E. Smith, perform at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett on Wednesday. Also imminent is the online release of a bonus track, “Wind.”

    “Everybody Knows” is about “huge losses in my life,” Ms. Barton said. These included the sudden death of her sister, Blair, in 2011, as well as that of a close friend, the singer Rebecca Dorsey, and of Mr. Smith’s closest friend, the musician T-Bone Wolk.

    “When those things happen, you’re never prepared for it,” Ms. Barton said. “I was crushed, and G.E. was on the road with Roger Waters for two years. There was no getting around grief. I mean, by the time my best friend died, I was like, ‘That’s it. God, you have my full attention. I completely surrender.’ ”

    “All my intimate relations were cut off at the same time,” she recalled. “I have great, amazing friends around me. I have this amazing community. It wasn’t like I was without support, but I just found it the most ‘alone’ place I’d ever been. I don’t say this in a self-pitying way — there was no other choice than to go through this, and for me, the best way to go through it was with the music.”

    “I took apart my world, and I came back through these songs,” Ms. Barton said. “I found my strength there.”

    An attempt to explain the inexplicable to her daughter, Ms. Barton said, led to the title track. “My little girl said, ‘What happens when you die?’ and I really didn’t have an answer.” Her sister’s passing also laid bare decades-old family dynamics, which she set about deconstructing, as on “You Wanted Me,” featuring a fragile, wistful slide guitar. “My father had a lot of affairs when we were young,” she said. “ ‘You Wanted Me’ is the story of the girl who got involved. I took the persona of each person involved in an affair: the wife that was cheated on, the man having a midlife crisis, the girl who got involved.”

    “The Dawning,” the track that addresses her sister’s death most directly, is one of the album’s most anguished: “I can’t think a thought without you / I can’t speak a word of truth,” she sings over a sparse accompaniment of acoustic guitar and Wurlitzer electric piano. “I’m caught in the chaos of clinging to you / Or letting you go, it’s the right thing to do.”

    On another track, “Blindsided,” Scoville Hall, the Amagansett Presbyterian Church’s building on Meeting House Lane that burned in October 2011, serves as a metaphor for Ms. Barton’s emotional state. “The site of that really resonated with me, this beautiful, old, gorgeous hall,” she said. “To see it destroyed was somewhat like how I felt.”

    In attempting to process these shattering losses, Ms. Barton traveled to India, where she wrote “Wind.” “That was really freeing,” she said. “I have a sitar player on it, who studied with the late Ravi Shankar. He’s going play at the [Stephen Talkhouse] gig.” India, she said, “healed me. I came back free of sadness. That’s one of the things that have come into focus for me: I am doing what I need to do. I’d always wanted to go to India, but didn’t think it was going to happen. And then it did.”

    “Train is Coming,” the last song Ms. Barton wrote for the album, was an epiphany, she said. “The first song faces death right on: ‘We’re going down.’ And then ‘Train Is Coming’ was, ‘We’re all going, we’re going to be okay,’ ” she said. “It kind of came out of a dream of my sister, and I was finally released from this loss cycle.”

    “Everybody Knows” was made with the producer Tony Shanahan, who assembled musicians including Erik Della Penna, Graham Hawthorne, Chris Palmaro, and Ereni Sevasti. Mr. Smith also performed, but sparingly. On previous recordings, Ms. Barton said, “G.E. was always involved in the production. This was the first time I did it by myself. I was really proud of that. I always felt that part of me couldn’t stand up, because G.E. is so amazing, but this really allowed me to step forward and be fully present in the music and really show myself that I was doing this alone. And I was, basically — I was so alone. Not to say he isn’t always there, but this was a very solitary process.”

    It is often observed — and history demonstrates it — that great art arises from struggle, hardship, suffering. Ms. Barton is modest about her own art, but acknowledged a kind of breakthrough with “Everybody Knows.” Now, she said, she has attained a level to which she had always aspired, “to stand in front of people and be able to make the connection with them just by way of being open.”

    She admits to some reticence on previous recordings. “Whether it was the incredible brilliance of my husband, I couldn’t step up to the plate, whereas with this one there was no block. I just thought, ‘If this is it, this is what I need to say.’ That’s how I was living, every day: Wow, this could be it. My sister, suddenly gone, no warning.”

    “Everybody Knows,” she said, “was the conversation I was having with myself. There is no formula for this stuff. You just let it take you, and you follow it.”

   Karen Kluglein’s pleasant life fell apart in the year 2000, when her husband, a landscape contractor working with big-name East End architects, died suddenly at the age of 44, leaving her with a 4-year-old daughter, a mile-high stack of medical bills, and a career that had started going south just around the time the child was born.

    In the years before Steve Jobs and Photoshop and the baby came along, Ms. Kluglein had been a successful illustrator for commercial displays, packaging, and book and magazine covers, with such clients as Nestle, Keds, and IBM. Caught unawares by the digital revolution, like a medieval monk turning out illuminated manuscripts and stopped in his tracks by Gutenberg, she hardly noticed that the demand for her meticulous hand-drawn images was fading until it was too late. What Madison Avenue ad agencies expected in 2000 — computer-generated graphics, pixel art, digital painting — was outside her comfort zone.

    “The last job I did was for Earth’s Best Baby Food,” she said last week at the Sag Harbor studio where for the last seven years she has created botanical paintings that are much prized by collectors, though perhaps not as well known here on her home ground. “I didn’t want to use a computer. It’s so different. The work even looks different. It’s too perfect — airbrushed, maybe. It has a cold look to it. There’s something so tactile about using brushes.”

    Instead, Ms. Kluglein, whose watercolor of Rosa rugosa will be the poster for next month’s East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society Fair, went to work for James Alan Smith of Water Mill, painting decorative surfaces and trompe l’oeil on beach house walls, as well as large landscapes, chiefly of rocky shorelines, for a now defunct Southampton gallery. (“ ‘People want big paintings in their big houses,’ ” the dealer told her.) In the studio, she still has a few of the landscapes, which look about as far from her delicate botanicals as an ostrich from a hummingbird.

    “Then came ASBA,” said the artist, recalling the aha! moment when she happened to drop in on the American Society of Botanical Artists’ annual show of work by its members. “I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh! That’s where my work belongs!’ Because when I had free time or was between jobs, I’d do those for myself.”

    Goodbye walls, hello calfskin vellum.

    A small tulip — just a single tulip — may take the meticulous Ms. Kluglein four days to paint; large assemblages need up to a month. Her luminous creations start at about $1,800 for watercolors on paper and go up to $5,000 or more for work of the kind she’s doing at the moment for a Russian collector, who has commissioned a series of paintings that uncannily echo those ornamented medieval texts.

    In the United States, one of the most prominent collectors of botanicals is a stockbroker-turned-entrepreneur named Isaac M. Sutton, who lives in Brooklyn, where he has an ongoing project revolving around his favorite tree, a pink dogwood. Every year when the tree is in bloom he asks a different artist to paint it. (“It’s taking the Monet haystack theory but distributing it among different artists,” he once explained.) Among botanical painters, being asked to paint the Sutton dogwood is apparently like being told you’ve won a MacArthur genius grant (without the $500,000). Ms. Kluglein, who was asked several years ago, assumes the paintings will make a book someday.

    The challenge for the botanical artist is not only to capture the beauty of the subject but also, with scientific accuracy, its unique form and function, and to do it in a way peculiar to the artist’s own sensibility, so that the viewer, ideally, will recognize it as hers.

    Ms. Kluglein had a banner year in 2010, when, after her work was named Best in Show at ASBA’s annual exhibit at the Horticultural Society of New York, she also won ASBA’s annual award for excellence in botanical art and had exhibitions both in California and at the Spanierman Gallery in East Hampton.

    This year, her finely drawn watercolor of a Frankliniana twig in flower was chosen by ASBA, which has 1,500 members here and abroad, to illustrate its current traveling exhibition, “Following in the Bartrams’ Footsteps.” The show opened last month in Philadelphia and will go to Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Berkeley, Calif., before closing in February 2015. (John and William Bartram, brothers, were 18th-century naturalists who found a hitherto unknown tree with red leaves and white blossoms growing wild in Georgia, collected its seeds, and named it for their friend Benjamin Franklin.)

    Warren and Bebe Johnson of East Hampton’s Pritam & Eames Gallery spotted Ms. Kluglein’s work a year ago and are currently exhibiting several of her watercolors in conjunction with their 33rd anniversary show, on view through July 30. “There’s a line her paintings tread, particularly her still lives, that is especially provocative,” Ms. Johnson said, citing a painting of hydrangeas in a metal container with a pair of scissors off to the side, its point headed directly at the viewer. “There’s this absolutely luscious gathering of hydrangeas,” said Ms. Johnson, “and then this edge.”

    “When I find a subject I want to paint I often know right away,” Ms. Kluglein said. “Sometimes something looks so absolutely perfect you can’t believe it.” She once brought home an entire heirloom rosebush because it had “one exquisite blossom,” and bought a “perfect-looking oyster mushroom” in a grocery store because “I have never seen another quite like it.”

    The New York Botanical Garden, where she teaches classes in botanical art, has her painting of grapes, done from a photograph she took at the Channing Daughters Winery in Bridgehampton, in its library. “One of the nicest things for me was to get into the [N.Y.B.G.’s] historical library,” she said. “It means your work is saved and taken care of.” For someone who sees her living subjects die or decay within days, preservation on that level is understandably meaningful.

    Ms. Kluglein lives with her daughter and her second husband, a retired fireman for the New York Fire Department, in East Hampton. Her mother, June Kluglein, also an artist, died four years ago, and a year later her father suggested she move into her mother’s studio behind their garage. The setup has been perfect for both of them; he has his daughter around and she, who’d been using a spare room in her house, has both her father and the space she needs.

    “Rosa rugosa,” her L.V.I.S. Fair poster, will be on sale at the fair itself on July 27,  and she will be there to sign her work. Notecards will be available as well. The chairwoman of the fair, Wendy Serkin, who chose the subject, was a student of hers one summer. And speaking of notecards, Caspari, a maker of high quality paper products, has bought nine of Ms. Kluglein’s images in the past year for use as cards and placemats. “I saw one at the East Hampton Party Store,” said the former commercial illustrator.

   Brooks Elms, writer, director, and producer of countless films, is coming home to East Hampton this summer. 

   Yes, he plans to see his mother, who still lives in the family house on McGuirk Street, but his real mission is all business. He will be holding a script reading and eventual casting for his new movie, “Montauk Highway.” The film, which takes place in East Hampton, is a teen love story that focuses on tensions and bitterness between locals and the summer crowd.

    “Growing up here in East Hampton, I felt like it was basically a small town, and then in the summer it would change. It was a town with two identities. That split identity was strange. With the tensions growing up toward the people that came out in the summertime, I thought it was a great place to have the film,” said  Mr. Elms.

    Born and raised here, Mr. Elms attended East Hampton High School, where he made almost 50 short films and videos, before going on to study film at New York University. He earned a screenwriting award for his thesis film, “Drew, Trip, and Zoey,” as well as film-making grants from Warner Bros. and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

    More recently, he wrote, directed, and produced “Schooled,” which was nominated for Best Ensemble Performance and the Maverick Production Award at the Method Fest in Los Angeles in 2007.

    “Montauk Highway” is a new type of film for Mr. Elms, a result of years focusing on psychology and story structure. It obviously strikes close to home for him, and for his co-writer, Greg Cantwell; many of the issues the characters face are the same ones they encountered as teenagers.

    But in an interview, Mr. Elms made it clear that the film is in no way autobiographical. 

    “Emotionally, my experiences as a kid in East Hampton absolutely relate to the story. The characters in the script are similar to what Greg and I experienced. It’s absolutely personal and vivid and true to our experience. But what’s on the page is not autobiographical at all,” he said.

    “I shot my senior thesis film out there. It’s beautiful. Because I grew up in the town, it’s my home. It’s a place I feel very comfortable in. It was a very supportive place for us, as local kids, to shoot, but this will be the first time as a full professional to shoot something out there.”

    Although “Montauk Highway” isn’t supposed to premier until early 2015, Mr. Elms already has big hopes for its success. “I know it’s a film that a lot of people will really appreciate. I know it can be profitable. And I think it’s going to be a way of showing a side of the town that no one’s really seen before. The hope is that this will put East Hampton on the map in a different way.”

    “But basically, it will appeal to the under-25 crowd. It’s a teen romance, with all the excitement. But it’s also thoughtful and personal. So it could appeal to anyone. It really could be a movie that does five or ten million in the box office.”

    If all goes as planned, shooting will begin next spring. Mr. Elms plans to cast all the supporting roles with local talent. The two leads will be young stars with previous feature-film acting experience.

    Auditions will be held on July 8 at East Hampton High School. The script reading will be on July 13 and is free and open to the public.

    More information about the movie and auditions can be found at montaukhighwaythefilm.com.