Neoteric Fine Art continues its series of free-ranging talks featuring individuals from the South Fork who are doing something, creative, meaningful, or different in their careers or hobbies. 

   Those speaking next Thursday at the Amagansett Gallery will include John Randolph, an artist and academic; Amanda Merrow and Katie Baldwin from Amber Waves Farms; Tyler Armstrong an environmentalist and educator; Scott Lewis who will presenting new environmental technology and off-the-grid systems, and Daniel Cabrera, an artist who will discuss the Quechua language of the Andes.

   The symposium will last from 7 to 9 p.m. Admission is $10 and free for members.

    “Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating,” will open this week at not one, but two venues — the Parrish Art Museum and the Grey Art Gallery at New York University.

    The show, presented in partnership with the two venues and organized by Jonathan Fineberg, an adjunct curator for the Parrish, will follow the artist’s creative process from 1971 to the present through the vital and early stages of her ideas and their development.

    Viewers are accustomed to seeing Ms. Aycock’s work in its final form, large-scale installations and outdoor sculptures, but her drawings show a mind at work, solving problems and breaking new ground. They also provide further evidence of her ideas and sources, offering clues to their meaning.

    “Aycock is an artist who thinks on paper,” according to Terrie Sultan in her catalogue introduction. “Her spectacular drawings are equal parts engineering plan and science-fiction imagining. As in all of her work, fantastic narrative writings weave in and out of her images, inspiring her production of sculptural objects, drawings, and installations.”

    The entire show has some 100 works and will be divided into time periods. The Grey Art Gallery will show the earlier portion from the years 1971 to 1984. The Parrish picks up from 1984 to the present. According to the Parrish, this is a period when the artist “developed an increasingly elaborate visual vocabulary, drawing upon a multitude of sources and facilitated in part by the use of computer programs.” The New York City show will include detailed architectural drawings, sculptural maquettes, and photo documentation for both realized and imagined architectural projects.

    The Parrish will open its show on Sunday and the Grey show will open on Tuesday. At the Parrish there will be a gallery talk led by the curator at 11:15 a.m. Ms. Aycock will deliver an illustrated lecture on May 17 at 6 p.m., and Robert Hobbs, the author of “Alice Aycock: Sculpture and Projects” will discuss the artist’s work on June 28 at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 to all events and free for members. Advance purchase on the museum’s Web site is recommended.

Art Gets Its Groove Back

    This weekend at Ashawagh Hall in Springs, art and music will blend to form a show driven by a dance beat. “Art Groove,” in its third year, will present 14 contemporary artists with Motown, disco, and hip-hop music.

    Those providing the music are Out East, the East End’s newest fusion rock band, and D.J. G-Funk, who plays a dance mix. Participating artists include Charles Waller, Tess Barbato, Laura Benjamin, Kathleen Bifulco, Anahi DeCanio, Brian Flynn, Geralyne Lewan­dowski, Joyce Riamondo, Carol Griffiths, Lance Corey, Beth Barry, Cynthia Sobel, and Ursula Thomas.

    The exhibition will open Saturday at noon, with a reception from 6 to 11 p.m. It will remain on view through Sunday.

Neoteric Symposium, Reception

    Neoteric Fine Art continues its series of free-ranging talks featuring individuals from the South Fork who are doing something creative, meaningful, or different in their careers or hobbies.

    Among those speaking next Thursday at the Amagansett gallery are John Randolph, an artist and academic; Amanda Merrow and Katie Baldwin from Amber Waves Farm; Tyler Armstrong, an environmentalist and educator; Scott Lewis, who will present new environmental technology and off-the-grid systems, and Daniel Cabrera, an artist who will discuss the Quechua language of the Andes. The symposium will last from 7 to 9 p.m. Admission is $10, free for members.

    Tomorrow, the gallery will host a closing reception for “20 Under Twenty” from 6:30 to 10 p.m. The Jet Set Renegades, a band fronted by a participating artist, Sam DePoto, will perform at 9, with a $10 cover charge. The exhibition features 20 young East End artists, many in their gallery debuts.

Painting at Madoo

    The Madoo Conservancy in Saga­ponack is offering its spring painting classes beginning next Thursday, with Eric Dever as the instructor and Robert Dash offering critique.

    Mr. Dever, a Water Mill artist, will help students develop painting fundamentals through varied approaches, some nontraditional. According to the conservancy, the classes, in the Madoo gardens, are geared toward intermediate to advanced students who want to broaden their approaches to acrylic painting.

    The classes will be taught on Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. through May 30 and cost $350, or $300 for Madoo members. Registration is available on Madoo’s Web site.

Grenning’s Spring Glory

    The Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor will open its 16th season on Saturday with “The Glory of Spring,” an exhibition featuring Karl Dempwolf, Thomas Cardone, and Geoff Kuzara.

    Mr. Dempwolf was born in Bavaria and studied art in California, where he became interested in American Impressionism and California Expressionism. The show takes its name from one of his works, “Glory of Spring,” in which, the gallery said, the artist breaks “new and important ground, while maintaining an eye for harmony, balance, and beauty.”

    Mr. Cardone had his first show at the gallery last year, and will have seven new and much larger works on display this time. His focus is on Long Island boats of all types, “in colorful yet peaceful paintings.”

    Mr. Kuzara is a Springs-based sculptor who will show “Stabile,” a tabletop mobile that rotates and swivels. Each piece of wood is hand-hewn and de­monstrates the balance and beauty of physics.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. The show will remain on view through May 13.

Turnbull at Lear Opening

    Lear Gallery will make its debut this weekend with an exhibition of Sarah Jaffe Turnbull’s “Phantoms” beginning Saturday. The gallery is tucked in the alleyway behind the Romany Kramoris gallery at 41 Main Street in Sag Harbor. It has only 200 square feet of space. The show will open with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m.

    According to the artist, her sculptures in this series “are not literal portraits, but references to or distortions of the human condition and imagination.” She said they are “unresolved, but bearing witness.” The show will remain on view through May 27.

    Other shows this year will include Ronald Gonzalez from June 1 to July 14 and Don DeMauro from July 27 to Sept. 8. The gallery’s Web site is leargallery.com.

Art at Home (on the Range)

    Pritam & Eames in East Hampton will add the photographs of Jennifer Aln­wick to its “Art at Home” series. Her show, titled “Working Cowboys,” is a study of the American West.

    Ms. Alnwick is a New York native who “fell in love with the West and the story of the American cowboy.” She approached the subject as an endangered species, “almost extinct,” she said. “I wanted to capture him before he is gone.” The images span states such as Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, and Texas.

    Her photography has been published by both the Wyoming and Colorado Departments of Tourism to promote Western culture and lifestyle. It will join the paintings and drawings of three other East End artists: Linda Capello, Aubrey Grainger, and Karen Kluglein.

Mannix at Marcelle

    Karyn Mannix will have a solo show at the Peter Marcelle Gallery in Bridgehampton beginning today and running through the end of the month. A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    Ms. Mannix, who lives in East Hampton and has a background in fashion and art history, bases her artwork on the female body in abstracted and literal forms. “As a breast cancer survivor, my work revolves around body image, gender, and the social and political,” she has said.

“The Juice”

Jay McInerney

Vintage, $15.95

   With the skills of a literary novelist, Jay McInerney writes about a California vineyard owner (Morgan Clendenen) and a Rhone Valley estate owner (Yves Cuilleron) who made an international wine blending grapes from their two countries, a wine called Deux Cs that caused a major squabble among sommeliers of the world’s great restaurants. The sommeliers competed for the privilege of selling and serving the wine. The soms (the author’s abbreviation) spoke reverently to one another, if they spoke at all, of the wine they called “sick juice,” meaning “great wine” in som-speak.

   A book about wine might have turned out to be dry or perhaps sweet and cloying (to keep things in wine-speak), even in the hands of a writer like Mr. McInerney. But a book about the people who grow, make, distribute, sell, and drink wine turns out to be informative, humorous, and entertaining. I’m not sure what’s more romantic, the stories of people from out-of-the-way places and the wine they make, or the story of the novelist from New York who, somehow, gets himself into a position where he is privileged to travel the world and interview and observe the wine people and make “great story” as he exposes both their fortes and their foibles. I feel very earnest when I tell you this book is great reading, especially if you approach it as you might approach a glass of wine, one generous sip at a time.

    “The Juice” describes what is admittedly a more expensive wine journey than many people will ever make. The only wine journey some people make might be limited to biking down to the local wine shop to sort through bargain bottles randomly stored in used oak barrels. One is not likely to find any of the wines mentioned in Mr. McInerney’s book in the $10-and-under sale bin. However, the book makes one thing clear: Because of improved viniculture, sick juice is being made all over the world, which includes the environs of eastern Long Island.

    If the father of wine in the United States, Thomas Jefferson, could know the current situation, he’d be gratified, because he once predicted the United States would rival the great wine-producing counties of Europe. It took only 250 years for his words to ring true. Although Jefferson had developed an interest in wine as a student at William and Mary, his oenophilia developed beginning in 1784 when he became a commissioner to France and then “inherited the title of American minister to the king of France from the ailing [Ben] Franklin.” Ostensibly, his travels were for the purpose of promoting trade between countries, but his journey could have appeared as an extended tour of the great wine regions of Europe, a junket similar to the kind current politicians might be held accountable for when exposed.

    Each chapter in “The Juice” was once an article in a magazine or newspaper. They were written for popular but sophisticated consumption. “German Made Simple” (the author means wine not language), “Finally Fashionable: Rosé From Provence to Long Island,” and “Kiwi Reds From Craggy Range.” Other chapters introduce readers to unusual characters on the wine education road: “The Retro Dudes of Napa,” “My Kind of Cellar: Ted Conklin and the American Hotel,” “The Rock Stars of Pinot Noir,” and “Swashbuckling Dandy: Talbott.” These are samples, and are not intended to note the best of the best of the author’s writing.

    Having once been a farmer myself, the most interesting but oddball of the topics included in “The Juice” is biodynamic farming advocated by Rudolf Steiner, whose philosophy also undergirds the Waldorf School in Manhattan as well as other educational institutions the world over. As applied to winemaking, Steiner believed in more than organic farming. He advised planting and harvesting according to solar and lunar cycles, and burying a cow’s horn packed with manure in the vineyards each fall to be dug up and sprinkled on the vineyard come spring. Mr. McInerney gives Steiner and his followers, including some of the great vineyards of the world, such fair treatment that he reaches beyond mere information and floats into the realm of inspiration.

    While reading this book, I tried sharing its pleasures with some friends. A few listened but I was also greeted with raised eyebrows and rolling eyes. “Jay McInerney knows something about wine?” Someone else blurted, “He’s so pretentious.” These responses and others set me back, made me take stock.

    I’ve been interested in wine since 1979 when my wife and I purchased the Maidstone Arms in East Hampton and I fell into my own adventure of wine education that began with my first glasses of Reunite and Blue Nun. Mr. McInerney notes that his journey began with Mateus and Cold Duck. The only time I remember meeting Mr. McInerney along that journey came at a Long Island author’s event at the Morgan Library in Manhattan where wine (plonk) was served. Despite that he seemed more than personable around me and everyone there. Why did I receive negative reactions to my wish to share his book, a book that should appeal to a variety of people?

    Jay McInerney describes himself as “a downtown fuckup brat-pack novelist” and a hedonist. His early novels have much to do with excess, including sex and drugs. Is this all it takes to get some people to be suspicious of you?

    I came across a wine blog. “Our own, somewhat English opinion as expressed in our own www.sedimentblog.co.uk is that if drinking expensive wine requires hobnobbing with some of the appalling people one meets in this book, then we’ll stick with the plonk — McInerney can stick with the plonkers.”

   Now wait a minute. So what if there are pretentious oenophiles, and what if there are pretentious writers? These British blogger blokes have made a mistake to conclude that Jay McInerney is either if their opinion is based on this book. “The Juice” is a competent, well-researched piece of literature about people who are fair game for any good writer. As far as I can tell, Mr. McInerney and his subjects, no matter how oddball, are all enjoying themselves. Why do people seem to have a problem with that?

    Alexis Lichine, the great wine producer and educator, may no longer be a household name as he was when I began my wine education, but one might still do well to follow his advice. Mr. McInerney reminds us Lichine was once asked, “What’s the best way to learn about wine?” He answered, “Buy a corkscrew and use it.” I would add, “And read Jay McInerney’s essays on wine.” Treat them figuratively, as if you were drinking a glass of great wine. Twirl it, hold it up to the light, draw air through a mouthful with pursed lips, allow the juice to flow over the back of your tongue, then take small bites of food, whether your plate contains haute cuisine or scrambled eggs. Notice how the wine gives each bite a fresh flavor. And above all, as they now say in restaurant-speak, “enjoy.”

   Gary Reiswig is the author of “The Thousand Mile Stare: One Family’s Journey Through the Struggle and Science of Alzheimer’s” and “Water Boy,” a novel. He lives in Springs.

    Jay McInerney lives in Bridgehampton and Manhattan. “The Juice” came out in paperback on April 9.

Rolph Scarlett’s Geometrics

    Beginning next Thursday, Law­rence Fine Art in East Hampton will present a retrospective of the work of the American modernist painter Rolph Scarlett through May.

    Scarlett was a geometric abstractionist who shared affinities with Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Joseph Stella. His varied stylistic career explored Cubism, Biomorphism, Abstract Expressionism, and Surrealism. According to the gallery, the artist worked with Jackson Pollock and also produced drip paintings.

Freilicher at Tibor de Nagy

    “Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets” will open at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in New York City on Saturday. It will include Ms. Freilicher’s signature works, often views out her windows in the city and Water Mill, the latter with Mecox Bay in the distance.

    The exhibition coincides with National Poetry Month and will highlight her relationships with the poets she befriended in the post-World War II years in New York.

    Just as there was a New York School of painters, a similar group of poets, including her friends John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, became known as the New York School of writers. According to the gallery, Ms. Freilicher was in many ways a catalytic and consequential presence, although her work was not directly collaborative with them. She served more as a muse, prompting O’Hara to go so far as to write a series of “Jane poems” that used her name in the titles.

    The show will explore this relationship in depth. Works on view will include her drawings of poets, many exhibited for the first time, in addition to letters, films, book covers, and photographs. The exhibition will be on view through June 14.

Seeing Semmel Double

    Joan Semmel, whose recent work is on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through June, will also have work shown at Alexander Gray Associates in New York City beginning Wednesday and running through May 25.

    The show will include recent paintings and mixed-media collages from the late 1970s and early 1980s to “provide insight into her experimental representation of the female body.” The works “investigate color and flesh in explorative, intimate compositions,” according to the gallery. A theme of veiling is apparent in the works, as is Ms. Semmel’s early training in abstraction.

    Through these works she continues to examine “the voyeuristic culture of depicting women, redefining the role of the passive female nude in art history through radical explorations of the aging process.”

Spring Show at Xavier

    Salon Xavier will have a spring art exhibition to benefit Hurricane Sandy relief efforts and the Sag Harbor Food Pantry, with a reception on Saturday from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Artists included in the group show are Adriana Barone, Lane Berkwit, Marcia Ciriello, Rick Gold, Maryann Lucas, Kenna MacKay, Lindsay Morris, Jill Musnicki, Jonathan Nash Glynn, Dalton Portella, Ann Stewart, and Kevin Teare.

Markwith at Ille Arts

    Ille Arts will present a solo show of Alex Markwith’s recent work at its Amagansett gallery beginning Saturday with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m.

    Mr. Markwith, who works in Montauk, graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a bachelor’s degree in painting in 2011 and has been showing ever since. He uses found materials to make work that is often three-dimensional but still designed to hang on a wall. His manipulations include cutting up material and gluing it to a support and adding paint or other materials.

Grigoriadis’s “Strokescapes”

    Accola Griefen Gallery in New York City has “Mary Grigoriadis: Stroke­scapes 1970s-1980s” on view beginning today. A reception will be held tonight from 6 to 8.

    Ms. Grigoriadis, who lives in East Hampton, was a founding figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement. She layers her paint thickly to create a deep and glowing surface of brushstrokes with her own Byzantine, Islamic, and Native American-inspired icons. The exhibition will remain on view through May 18.

    From almost the moment that Gina Abatemarco conceived the idea six years ago for a film about a tiny island in Alaska that appears destined to be one of North America’s first victims of climate change, she has been raising money to bring that project to fruition.

    Now, with some 500 hours of original footage, plus archival stills and home videos, she is in post-production on a feature-length documentary, “Kivalina People.”

    She’s received funding from Vision Maker Media, formerly Native American Public Telecommunications, ensuring that the film will play on public television when it’s complete. She’s also gotten a New York University Richard Vague/Chris Columbus film production grant and support from the Tribeca Film Institute, the Independent Film Project, and the Puffin Foundation. Last month, she launched a $25,000 Kickstarter campaign online to raise the final money for post-production, the most expensive part of the filmmaking process. The campaign ends on April 25. If she does not meet her goal by then, the $11,000-plus in pledges she has received so far will be returned to backers.

    It doesn’t mean the film won’t be made. Ms. Abatemarco and her crew, including Zoe White, the cinematographer, her editor, Melanie Vi Levy, and her co-producer, Ann Takahashi, have poured too much time and energy into the project to walk away. “The litmus test for how passionate you are about the work is that you keep coming back to it year after year,” Ms. Abatemarco said Friday.

    Her parents have a house in Amagansett, and this winter she spent a month holed up with her editor at her parents’ place, poring over five years’ worth of footage from several trips to Kivalina Island, a 27-acre sliver of land 120 miles above the Arctic Circle on Alaska’s northwest coast.

    Once protected from harsh winter seas by slush and sea ice that formed at its shores in the fall, Kivalina has become increasingly vulnerable as Arctic temperatures rise. Its native Inupiaq people, who were forcibly settled at the turn of the 20th century on an island that had previously served only as their summer hunting grounds, have asked the state and federal governments to support their relocation.

    “Our goal is to respond and reflect on a moment in time in this community,” Ms. Abatemarco said. The film is a portrait “of a place that really could be gone” in a matter of years. It is about climate adaptation and “a community in transition trying to figure out what the future holds.”

    “A film is a moment when art can meet activism,” said Ms. Abatemarco, who works as a film editor and is also writing a feature film about the life of the poet Lord Byron.

    “You can have many, many conversations after this film . . . but ultimately it was meant to be a work of art. . . . The quality of the film is top of the line, and we did all of this paying ourselves really nothing.”

    Since she began visiting the Arctic in 2008, Ms. Abatemarco has watched it change rapidly. The warming of the Arctic, she said, opens it up to oil exploration previously too difficult for large corporations to consider. And, “Since President Obama’s decision to lift the hold on Arctic ocean oil leases put into effect after the BP Deepwater Horizon tragic spill, there are more concerns for the people of Kivalina,” she wrote in a press packet on the film. Shell Oil began an Arctic development project last summer.

    “These junky little towns now have a nice hotel and it’s hard to get a seat at the little diners,” she said of some of the nearby Alaskan villages. She feels an urgency to finish the film, not only because of how the changing climate is affecting the people of Kivalina and the very land they live on, but also because of this new interest in the Arctic.

    A successful Kickstarter campaign will allow her to keep Ms. Vi Levy working full time on “Kivalina People,” with a goal of finishing by the summer. Those wishing to contribute to the project can find it at kickstarter.com.

    “This needs to get out,” Ms. Abatemarco said, “and it needs to get out sooner rather than later.”

    The Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill will host a series of musical “blind dates” beginning next Thursday with Dalton Portella and Ryan Messina from 6 to 8 p.m.

    Mr. Portella is a Montauk artist and guitarist and Mr. Messina, who is from Dix Hills and is a teacher, plays the trumpet. They have never performed together or even met previously.

    According to Ms. Nightingale, she will select the musicians in the early stages of this program, but then hopes that those interested will come up with their own match-ups. She would like the program to become a “networking system for performers and listeners alike.”

    “Like a blind date, each performance has the potential to go tremendously wrong. But it can also work tremendously well, spark great chemistry, and initiate a musical dialogue that may or may not be continued elsewhere later.”

    Guild Hall, in partnership with the Naked Stage, will present the Naked Stage Radio Hour, a staged reading, on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. Joshua Perl will be the lead artist at this free performance.

    Maria D’Amato, a soprano and former lead singer with St. Luke’s Choir, will make a return engagement to East Hampton when she pairs with her fiancé, Dimitrie Lazich, a baritone, for a concert at the church’s Hoie Hall on Saturday at 4 p.m.

    The couple will sing duets of Italian arias, familiar American songs, Broadway tunes, and a special set selected from the works of Sheldon Harnick, an East End resident and Pulitzer Prize-winning lyricist. Bill McNally, the artistic director of the Music at St. Luke’s series, will accompany the singers on piano.

    Ms. D’Amato was previously featured in the Sarasota Opera, playing such roles as Desdemona in “Otello,” and she will play Mimi in “La Boheme” in July. She has also been a soloist with the Seattle Symphony in Mozart’s Requiem and appeared in concert at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall before joining the Metropolitan Opera.

    Refreshments will be served following the concert. Tickets cost $20 for adults; children 18 and under get in free.

The Bridgehampton Museum’s Parlor Jazz series resumes Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with a performance by Ada Rovatti, a jazz saxophonist, composer, and arranger. The program, “Colori di Primavera,” will be hosted by Jane Hastay, a pianist, and Peter Martin Weiss, a bassist.

Ms. Rovatti’s playing and compositions have been described as natural, flowing, and energetic, and she has been known to add funk, folk, rock, and fusion flavors to the jazz idiom. She has appeared in important jazz festivals such as JVC in New York City, Detroit Jazz Fest, and Montreal Jazz Fest, and has performed with Aretha Franklin, Herbie Hancock, Randy Brecker, James Moody, Anne Ducros, and many others.

Tickets are $25, $15 for members. All concerts take place at the museum’s Archive Building at 2539-A Montauk Highway, east of the monument.