The Salem witch trials, portrayed in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” currently at Bay Street Theatre through Nov. 24, show only one in a series of unfortunate periods in our history where mob mentality overcame common sense.

    It may seem ridiculous to us now that a few young girls in a Massachusetts town could point the finger at others — others who had caused them real or imaginary offense — and send those people to the gallows for witchery. But it happened. And, in the grand scheme of things, not really that long ago.

    Abigail Williams, dismissed from the Proctor household by Mrs. Proctor for having a tumble in the hay with Mr. Proctor, is found by her uncle, Reverend Paris, dancing in the woods with her friends at midnight. (What the good reverend was doing in the woods at midnight himself is perhaps another story.) Some of the girls have fallen ill (too much running around at night, perhaps), and to avoid trouble herself, Abigail tells her uncle that the Devil made them do it. And from there the trouble begins.

    As additional people come to believe Abigail, she grows more powerful and vengeful, and more of the townsfolk are either identified as witches, forced to become “friendly witnesses,” or left to rot silently in jail, and the horrifying cycle continues.

    This would be enough to make “The Crucible” the dramatic classic it is, but that’s not really what it’s about. Miller wrote the play as a response to the House of Un-American Activities Committee’s blacklisting of over 300 of the film and theater crowd during the early 1950s, including the famed “Hollywood Ten” and the playwright himself. During the Red Scare, which was fueled by the alcoholic ramblings of Senator “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy, friends turned on friends, citizens were threatened for harboring communists or being them, and hysteria bloomed across the nation. Again, this really happened.

    But back to Salem, 1692. Murphy Davis’s shortened version of “The Crucible” is part of Bay Street’s “Literature LIVE!” educational outreach program for middle and high school students and educators in the community, but it is open to the public. Mr. Davis explained before the show that in order to fall within the Board of Cooperative Educational Services guidelines, all “Literature LIVE!” performances must run 90 minutes or under, so cuts to the original production had to be made.

    Gary Hygom’s set of stark trees doubles, with an assist from Mike Billings’s lighting, as prison bars, and a skirt of dead leaves around the stage adds to the barren feel. The cast is exemplary. Joanna Howard’s Abigail sends off those obsessive “Fatal Attraction” vibes whenever Rob DiSario’s John Proctor is around, and Mackenzie Engeldrum as Mercy and Kate O’Phalen as Mary Warren turn in wonderful performances as Abigail’s cohorts. Ms. O’Phalen in particular gives a moving turn as a young girl torn between going with the crowd and doing the right thing.

    Kate Mueth plays Ann Putnam, who has lost seven babies, with just the right amount of crazy, a woman looking for a reason and finding one in the accusation of witchcraft. Lisa Cory — a descendent of Giles Cory, one of those found guilty in Salem three centuries ago — gives the audience a solid, no-nonsense Rebecca Nurse, and the three elders of the court, Ken Forman as Reverend Paris, Peter Connolly as Reverend Hale, and Joel Leffert as Deputy Governor Danforth, walk the line between hateful and human as the stakes are raised.

    Mr. DiSario and Chloe Dirksen as the Proctors, who are trying to recover their marriage in the midst of mayhem, give inspired performances. It’s a superior production. A single quibble would be the editing out of Giles Cory, whose character adds levity to a very serious play. But all in all, the production is a very good one, and we are lucky to have a professional theater of Bay Street’s caliber in our midst.

    The blame, the tension, the deceit and subterfuge exhibited in “The Crucible” reminds the audience that — in the words of George Santayana, who died during the H.U.A.C. hearings — “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”

There is little if any dispute that the 1960s were a high-water mark for popular music. With the arrival of Bob Dylan and, in quick succession, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to American ears, creativity exploded within the genre. No longer a collection of singles, the LP format became a sprawling canvas on which musical ideas within a song expanded dramatically, and individual songs could collectively form a larger theme.

At the same time, jazz was still a popular and evolving genre, with artists including Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk smashing through accepted forms and pushing their creativity into previously unexplored territory.

With this expansion of aural possibilities, the artwork on an album’s front and back covers also saw a dramatic evolution that toyed with convention. The 12-by-12-inch cardboard sleeve of an LP provided a generous canvas to visually convey the artist’s music and personality.

Fortunately for Columbia Records and the artists whose music it released, this era coincided with the arrival of John Berg. A 29-time Grammy nominee and winner of 4, he designed more than 5,000 record covers, mostly for Columbia Records.

A small portion of Mr. Berg’s astounding collection of iconic album covers — the audio content within isn’t so bad, either — is on display at Guild Hall through Jan. 6. On Saturday at 11 a.m., he will discuss the collection in Guild Hall’s Wasserstein Gallery.

“John Berg: Album Covers, 1961-1985” will delight fans of jazz and rock from the 1960s and ’70s. The album covers of the wildly eccentric Thelonious Monk and the young, enigmatic Bob Dylan each complement the music within, yet are in stark contrast with one another. Multiple album covers by Chicago display madly creative incorporation of the group’s distinct, Coca-Cola-inspired logo.

“I knew what I wanted to do all my life, there was never any doubt,” said the Brooklyn-born Mr. Berg, who is married to Durell Godfrey, a photographer for The Star. “Well, it was either that or a fighter pilot.” Fortunately, art won the day, and he graduated from Cooper Union in New York City. He worked for magazines including Esquire, and was later hired on the spot by Bob Cato, Columbia’s creative director. “He didn’t even look at my portfolio,” Mr. Berg recalled. “What he knew, I don’t know.” His first album cover was Andy Williams’s “Moon River.”

Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” was a first in album design: The two-record set’s gatefold sleeve opens to depict a three-quarter length vertical photo of the artist. “The record would fall out on the floor when you opened it up. That was a big selling point,” Mr. Berg said. “Everybody wanted one, because they’d never seen that before.”

The daring cover to Thelonious Monk’s “Underground” depicts him as a French Underground resister, seated at a decrepit piano in a cluttered subterranean scene complete with Nazi imagery. The title, Mr. Berg said, referred to the small “underground” movement in jazz at the time. “I had this idea instantly, ‘underground’ — a lot of my work is done like that, words that pull the trigger on something. I convinced them to do the French Underground. I had just read a book about it, and they thought, ‘Why not?’ There was a lot of that.” Other times, he said, he would agonize over a cover.

Perhaps his best-known cover is Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” With the photographer Eric Meola, the musician himself came into his office, Mr. Berg recalled, with a stack of contact sheets. “Bruce showed me the picture he wanted, which I always describe as ‘John Updike.’ He looked like an author, one of those back-cover-of-his-book pictures. I asked him to leave the stuff with me and I would go through the contacts. There were about five shots like [the ‘Born to Run’ cover]. I took them up to management, got an okay that I could spend the extra money” — the gatefold sleeve costing more to produce — “then had to sell it to Bruce. The rest is history. It’s just charming, that’s the only word I can use.”

It was also fortunate that Mr. Berg’s time at Columbia overlapped with that of its legendary A&R man, John Hammond. “Think about his record,” Mr. Berg said. “Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Ray Vaughan.”

A conversation with Mr. Berg is like a walk through a vintage record store, albeit one overflowing with direct knowledge and experience of the creative works in it. Barbra Streisand, for example, “is smart! God, she’s smart. Ramsey Lewis is a really neat guy. Tony Bennett is fun, and he’s a good painter. Ted Nugent is totally out of his mind.”

The collection displayed at Guild Hall is stylistically all over the map, yet reveals a striking consistency: Each conveys a message that perfectly complements the sounds contained within. “That’s exactly the story,” Mr. Berg commented. “Selling stories, that’s all it is. And keeping the dirt out of the grooves.”

Handmade for Neoteric

    Neoteric Fine Art in Amagansett will open “Handmade” on Saturday. The show, which runs through Dec. 20, will be a holiday-themed exhibit of handmade artisan crafts and small works by local artists. The show emphasizes the personal human touch, according to Scott Bluedorn, the gallery director. Items will include jewelry, furniture, surfboards, home goods, designer objects, toys, trinkets, clothes, and other things small and large.

Marders Happenings

    In addition to a number of special events at Marders garden store in Bridgehampton this weekend, the Silas Marder Gallery will hold a reception for a “Holiday Salon” show on Saturday from 4 to 8 p.m. Painting, sculpture, and video work will be included, and two outside installations will be mounted. Claire Fontaine’s “Suicide Stack” will be on view, and a large interactive video project by John Carpenter will also be featured. The salon environment aims to encourage family and friends to enjoy the beginning of the holiday season in an engaged and lively atmosphere, the gallery said.

    The garden store’s open house, which runs throughout the weekend, will offer demonstrations of birds of prey by Nick Marzano of the Wildlife Rescue Center of the Hamptons. Cookies and cider will be served, and there will be live music and honeybee demonstrations. “Queen of the Sun,” a film about honeybees directed by Taggart Siegel, will be screened outside.

Nudes at Hampton Hang

    “The New Nude,” organized by Beth McNeill, will open at Hampton Hang in Water Mill tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. The group show includes work by Stephanie Farr, Jerome Lucani, Carlos Macias, Stephen Mannino, Raphael Mazzucco, Jeff Muhs, and Darius Yektai. It will continue through Dec. 17.

Grenning’s Jewels

    “Jewels of the Grenning Gallery” is an annual holiday show of the Sag Harbor gallery’s artists, typically in a small format. Previously called “Gems,” the title of this year’s show takes its name from several of Marc Dalessio’s large paintings, which are jewel-like in nature, according to the gallery. On view will be portraits and landscapes, some from his recent travels in Italy and Croatia.

    Work by Chad Fisher, Lynn San­guedolce, Michael Kotasek, Nelson White, Melissa Franklin, Ben Fenske, Ramiro, Leo Hresko-Mancini, Joe Altwer, and Tom Shelford will also be on view.

Demato’s Salon

    Richard J. Demato Fine Arts in Sag Harbor will exhibit “Art at the Salon,” a group show, beginning Saturday with a reception from 7 to 9 p.m. It will feature Donato Giancola, who will paint in the gallery and answer questions from 1 to 5 p.m. Also on view will be work by Eugenio Cuttica and Margo Selski.

     From 6 to 7 p.m., a “salon style” discussion will take place, with Emily Weitz, an East End journalist, moderating a panel that will examine art and the creative process. Reservations have been suggested for the panel discussion.

Emergency Grants

    The Pollock-Krasner Foundation is now accepting emergency requests for expedited grants for professional visual artists affected by Hurricane Sandy. Guidelines and an application are available at pkf.org. According to the foundation, all requests will be promptly addressed. To be considered for the emergency grants, the foundation requires a completed application form, cover letter, exhibition history, and 10 images.

Thanksgiving Collective

    The Tripoli Gallery of Contemporary Art will hold its annual “Thanksgiving Collective” show beginning Saturday with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. and running through Jan. 24.

    Tripoli Patterson has organized the show, which includes work by Linda K. Alpern, Ross Bleckner, Michael Chiarello, Lautaro Cuttica, Jameson Ellis, Eric Freeman, Felix Bonilla Gerena, Mary Heilmann, Heidi Hillenbrand, Judy Hudson, Miles Partington, Mason Saltarrelli, Enis Sefersah, Nathalie Shepherd, Aakash Nihalani, Keith Sonnier, Nick Weber, Darius Yektai, and Niko Yektai.

    Galleries across the South Fork will participate in a Thanksgiving Saturday Art Walk, a free self-guided tour of galleries from Amagansett to Southampton Village during the hours of 1 to 4 p.m. Guided tours led by South Fork artists will be available as well.

    Taking part are the Chrysalis Gallery, Tripoli Gallery of Contemporary Art, Arthur T. Kalaher Fine Art, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, Mark Borghi Fine Art, Julian Beck Art Gallery, Peter Marcelle Gallery, Dan Flavin Art Institute, Dodds and Eder Sculpture Garden, Monika Olko Gallery, Richard J. Demato Fine Arts, Romany Kramoris Gallery, Grenning Gallery, Hooke Sculp­ture Gallery, Tulla Booth Gallery, Birnam Wood Galleries, Davenport and Shapiro Fine Arts, Halsey Mckay Gallery, Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Sotheby’s, Wallace Gallery, Vered Fine Art, Quik Fun Gallery, Crazy Monkey Gallery, Ille Arts, and Neoteric Fine Art.

    Many of the participants will have curators and artists available to discuss the works on view, and several will serve refreshments. Maps of the suggested routes and reservations for the guided tours, which cost $10, are available at artwalkhamptons.com.

    Scheduled tours will start at 1 p.m. In East Hampton, Andrea Cote will lead, beginning at Quik Fun Gallery. In Bridgehampton, Molly Morgan Weiss will start at Peter Marcelle. In Sag Harbor, Paton Miller will begin a tour at Arthur T. Kalaher. Kathy Zeiger, the founder of ArtWalk Hamptons, will lead the tour in Southampton, beginning at the Chrysalis Gallery. Ms. Zeiger is also looking for photographers to document the tours.

Best Play Ever

    The Naked Stage will give a free staged reading of “The Best Play Ever . . . Seriously!” by Mike Anderson on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at Guild Hall. It tells the story of Harris Fynneman, the local mailman and fool, who finds himself the writer of the greatest play ever after a night of debauchery. In disbelief, he retraces his steps to discover how he stumbled upon his genius. Isaac Klein is the lead performer, joined by Meghan O’Neill and Ted Schneider.

    The producers promise “something to offend everyone” in this jumble of “slapstick, Shakespeare, sodomy, strippers, suicide, Snuggles the Cat, and a lot of things that don’t start with ‘s.’ ”

Talkin’ Crossroads

    Crossroads Music will be at Guild Hall with Cynthia Daniels’ show “On the Air” at 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 30. She will host the WPPB broadcasters Bonnie Grice, Brian Cosgrove, and Ed German, as well as a variety of musical performers, to raise money for the public radio station and Guild Hall.

    Performers are to include the Kerry Kearney Band, Black & Sparrow (Klyph Black and John Sparrow), Miles to Dayton, the Black Petals, K-O-S (Keeping Original Sound), Darcy Fulder, Glenn Feit, Dick Johansson, Michael Pour, Alfredo Merat, the Ross Brazilian Jazz Quartet, the Jet Set Renegades, and Adam Baranello (featuring the A&G Dance Company).

    Musical direction will be by Randolph Hudson III, who will play guitar in the house band. The house band will also have Paul Gene on keyboards, Klyph Black on bass, Jack Marshall on violin, Paul Chapin on drums, and Abby Levin on other percussion. Tickets cost $20, $18 for members, and $10 for students.

   The East Hampton Historical Society’s ever-popular house and garden tour will be held on Saturday with an advance cocktail celebration tomorrow evening.

    For those interested in sleek and modern, the tour features a modernist-style house in Wainscott by Maziar Behrooz with hanging gardens. Those with a more traditionalist bent might enjoy a cottage on a quiet village street decorated by an East End interior designer. For village historians, the Stafford Hedges house has endured a move, a colorful past, and federal government seizure, but has remained intact at its 230-year-old core. The house was featured in the Star’s Habitat section last year. Another historic property, this one in Amagansett, features an updated but sensitive renovation that allows a family to mingle in open spaces while maintaining the farmhouse’s unique charm. A Tuscan-style “casetta,” a recent addition to the town’s landscape, uses the best of new technology to recreate a building style steeped in centuries of tradition.

    Richard Barons, executive director of the East Hampton Historical Society, said the society chooses its properties for their mix of architectural styles as well as their character, particularly as it demonstrates the aesthetics of the area.    “Our community has the added benefit of having wonderfully diverse architectural styles that span several centuries,” he said in a release. He said he believed that design enthusiasts as well as those curious for a peek behind hedgerows will enjoy this year’s edition.

    The cocktail party will take place tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. at the William E. Wheelock House on Georgica Road, a Shingle Style cottage dating back to the original East Hampton summer colony in 1891. The house is set on 10 acres of well-tended grounds and is a relatively “hidden gem” in the village.

    Tickets for the tour, which takes place from 1 to 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, are $75 on the day of the tour and $65 in advance. They can be purchased at Clinton Academy tomorrow and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets to the cocktail party start at $200 and include the tour. They can also be purchased on the society’s Web site, easthamptonhistory.org.

   While the new, state-of-the-art Parrish Art Museum building designed by an international architectural powerhouse firm is attracting much of the attention, what really stands out in the Water Mill museum is the art.

    Have we seen it all before? Yes and resoundingly no. Tucked away in themed shows in the charming, but in some ways utterly inappropriate setting on Job’s Lane in Southampton Village, some first-rate examples of 20th and even 19th-century art in the Parrish’s permanent collection have been hiding in plain sight for years. Some are old friends, but it’s like watching the high school wallflower return junior year in full bloom, braces and glasses gone, pigtails exchanged for a shiny long mane. Where have these paintings and sculptures been all of our lives? In addition to our old friends glamorized by their new surroundings, the Parrish has been the recipient of a bounty of new gifts, which it has also put on display.

    The new exhibition space takes up 12,200 of the building’s total 34,000 square feet, with 7,600 square feet dedicated to the permanent collection. The rest is for temporary shows, now occupied by work by Malcolm Morley, a British-born artist who lives in Brookhaven.

    Mr. Morley’s art of action and saturated color fills the new rooms with light and heat. The two show-stopping works are his model of a World War I plane that appears to have flown into a wall and a motocross rider jumping through a ring of fire. That most of the works on view are made largely of paper only heightens their drama. Children will no doubt find a lot to marvel at along with the adults who bring them.

    The show is substantial enough to merit a separate future review. The same can be said for the myriad separate rooms that make up the permanent collection installation. For now, one word will suffice. Wow.

    The larger rooms that make up the bulk of the space near the entrance provide space for B-I-G works. There is enough space to fit them on the wall with plenty of eye wash between them, allowing their mass to exist in proportion and relation to their neighbors in an engaged conversation, overseen by Alicia Longwell, the Parrish’s head curator. Billy Sullivan’s playful beach brightness chats with Eric Fischl’s overly formal dark moodiness. Alan Shields’s scraps and voids provide a foil for Richmond Burton’s dotty horror vaccui. With soaring ceilings and monumentality all around, a more than 10-foot-high John Chamberlain sculpture looks merely large, but no less significant.

    Easel-sized paintings and older works receive more intimate spaces. There are landscape paintings in “American Views” by well-known artists and those less so. Jennifer Barlett, Frederick Childe Hassam, Fairfield Porter, and many others make up the former group. William Stanley Haseltine, Theodore Robinson, and Samuel Colman are examples of the latter. All are in fine company, however, and some of the earlier works look surprisingly modern next to their more contemporary cousins.

    The galleries devoted to individual artists are well-executed showcases, but do point out some weaknesses. Chase’s interior portraits have a claustrophobic, gas-lit darkness to them compared to his light-filled Shinnecock landscapes. Fairfield Porter’s work looks both luminous and muddy depending on where it was painted and the subject matter. Esteban Vicente, also given a solo room, once again looks as worthy of reappraisal as he did in some recent shows at the Parrish and New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, but not all works are created equal.

    Highlighted in this way, the collection, drawn from some 2,600 works in total, looks mostly first-rate, but some important representatives are missing from the East End story the museum is attempting to tell. In some ways the shows can be seen as an advertisement for donations that the Parrish lacks, something the museum acknowledges in its show of recent acquisitions titled “Building a Collection.”

    The essentials of the new space were outlined in The Star in September, days before the staff prepared to move in. Sculptural in nature, it is built of concrete, aluminum, steel, wood, and glass. The exterior walls are molded concrete, which gently undulates outward toward the base to form a human-scaled bench that runs the length of the building on both sides. The aluminum roof gives the design a hard-edged, industrial feeling, and the glass a bit of transparency and evanescence in the midst of all this mass and solidity.

    Inside, visitors see the unfinished plywood ceiling and beams. Walls are white, doors are black.  The poured concrete floors have the color and texture of water-washed sand.

    Herzog and de Meuron, the firm that designed the building, has also designed significant art spaces such as the Tate Modern in London, the Walker Art Center Expansion in Minneapolis, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. They are currently working on a restoration and redesign of the Park Avenue Armory into a multifunction arts space. The firm is known for its unique take on museum design and its sensitivity to site and place.

    For this project in particular, it was engaged by the lifestyles and work practices of a vibrant artistic community, which began here as early as the 19th century with artists such as William Merritt Chase and Thomas Moran, up through the heyday of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists and today’s diverse mix of old, established, young, and struggling artists and artisans drawn by the light and legends of these storied shores.

    The first design the architects devised was a literal interpretation of these artists’ studios, a series of small, interconnected structures that mimicked the style of those buildings, which the architects saw first-hand through tours provided by the museum. When the 60,000-square-foot original design outstripped the potential of the museum’s capital campaign, the firm reconsidered the project and came up with the present design.

    The current project is the former one’s exact opposite in many ways, linear and structured in the way that the former was rambling and organic. However, the plan’s dedication to incorporating the natural light of this setting remains the same. It is a feature that may work better in theory than practice. Many naysayers have noted that the florescent bulbs the museum is using to buttress the natural light on overcast days and in the evening can make the artwork suffer. Opening in the late fall cannot help matters for those who find this a problem. Having only seen the rooms under sunny conditions around midday, I still think the underlying theory is sound, particularly when most people will likely see the museum in the summer months during the sun’s peak performance.

    Will the new space attract to the museum top-notch examples from this area’s most noteworthy denizens? The lack of a Jackson Pollock or Roy Lichtenstein, and only a late Willem de Kooning, highlight some significant gaps (or omissions if there are some significant examples in the collection). 

    The fact that works by de Kooning, Pollock, Lichtenstein, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, and Andy Warhol continue to attract huge sums at auctions such as Sotheby’s Contemporary Art sale last week, where a 1951 Pollock sold for more than $40 million, make such acquisitions even more challenging.

    Have the architects, in concert with the museum’s administration, produced a space that merits such gifts of the world-class artwork that originated here? Time will tell, but from first glance, I would aver that they are on their way.

    This year’s Black Film Festival, from the African American Museum of the East End, will take place on Saturday at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill from 12:30 p.m. until the evening.

    Five films will be screened. “Raising Izzie” is about two young girls who struggle to stay together on their own without their parents, and a couple who long for children. Directed by Roger M. Bobb, it will be shown at 12:30 p.m.

    “Purlie Victorius” is a 1964 film starring Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, from a play written by Mr. Davis that premiered on Broadway in 1961. It follows a black preacher and a young girl’s efforts to con a plantation owner he once served. Nicholas Webster was the director, and Alan Alda can be seen in his first film role. It starts at 2:25 p.m.

    “The Last/First Kiss” is about a couple in their 20s who have a spontaneous and brief romance after meeting in a park. The short film was directed by Andrea Ashton and will be screened at 4:15 p.m.

    “The Learning Tree,” from 1969, is about African-Americans growing up in segregated Kansas in the 1920s and 1930s. It was written and directed by Gordon Parks from a semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. The first Hollywood studio film directed by an African-American, it will start at 5:15 p.m.

    “Hoodwinked” is a documentary by Janks Morton, who will be on hand for a discussion at 8 p.m. following the 7:15 screening. It examines what shapes the perception of black men and how they see themselves. A number of black scholars from universities such as Syracuse, Columbia, and Howard discuss the statistics and stereotypes that affect the self-image of African-Americans and particularly the young.

    Admission is $20 for all five films, including refreshments. Tickets can be reserved by phone at 283-5072. The museum is also seeking support for its programs, and donations can be made to AAMEE at P.O. Box 2263, Southampton 11969.  

Absence of the Body

    The Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton will present “Habeas Corpus” beginning Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition will take the legal writ, which prevents unlawful detention, in its most literal sense — to produce the body. For the purposes of this show, however, it will subvert this right by removing the figure from these works.

    Ted Gahl, An Hoang, Shara Hughes, Alisha Kerlin, Keegan McHargue, Jeanette Mundt, Sara Murphy, Ryan Mrozowski, Christoph Robner, Lisa Sanditz, Ryan Schneider, Billy Sullivan, Paul Wackers, and Chuck Webster will show work in which human presence is suggested even when no physical form is present. In their representations of vacant interiors and littered landscapes, and other works such as collections of objects, the artists imbue their pieces with a human spirit instead. The show will remain on view through Dec. 31.

Johnston at Firestone

    Gregory Johnston will show new work at the Eric Firestone Gallery on Newtown Lane in East Hampton beginning Saturday with a reception from 4 to 7 p.m. The art is a merging of cars and abstract painting, two of the artist’s passions.

    Automotive enamel meets cut aluminum to form a mirrored finish on wall-mounted panels of geometric abstraction that owe a debt to Frank Stella, another car-racing and abstract-painting enthusiast, as well as Donald Judd and Ad Reinhardt. According to the gallery, the reflective finishes add another dimension of contemporary social critique. As they reflect every passer-by and onlooker, the works add a layer of narcissism and seductiveness that brings them fully into the present tense.

    Mr. Johnston’s work will also be shown in Miami during Art Basel Miami week, Dec. 4 to Dec. 9, at Miami Project, a new fair in the Wynwood Art District.

McDowell at Olko

    The Monica Olko Gallery in Sag Harbor is showing the work of Michael McDowell through Dec. 1. The artist was born in Santa Barbara, Calif., and started painting in high school. It became his preferred medium. In visiting museums, he was drawn to the way Venetian artists used oil paint. At the same time, he strove to make metaphors in his art while reveling in the physical nature of the act of painting.

    He attended art school in the 1960s at San Miguel de Allende in Mexico and at CalArts in Valencia, Calif. He moved to New York in the 1970s. The subjects of his paintings are unmistakably contemporary, but his backgrounds and settings have hints of Paul Gauguin in their richly saturated colors and dreamlike compositions.

Slater at Marcelle

    David Slater’s work from the 1960s and 1970s will be shown at the Peter Marcelle Gallery in Bridgehampton beginning on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Mr. Slater, who lives in Sag Harbor, is known for mixed-media work on canvas that depicts dreams, symbols, and icons to communicate a narrative.

    Prior to the 1960s, the artist painted in the Abstract Expressionist mode of the time, but learned from Willem de Kooning how to use figuration in an abstract way. The resulting style became the genesis for this group of works. Mr. Slater was also influenced by British Pop Art. The show will be on view through Nov. 26.

Seeking Artists, Artisans

    Neoteric Fine Art in Amagansett will hold a holiday market show on Nov. 24. The gallery is looking for artists, artisans, and craftspeople to submit special handmade items and small works of art suitable for holiday giving. Pictures, descriptions, and prices of items should be sent by Wednesday to [email protected] for consideration.

On Pond Lane

    The Southampton Artists Association has a show at the Southampton Cultural Center through Nov. 26. A reception will be held on Sunday from 4 to 6 p.m.

To the split mimosa, still standing, pink-tan bark fleshy in the odd after-shine.

To the man who answered the storm info number at 4 a.m.: Miss, you can sleep now.

To the women and men who lift branches from the roadside in dark, wave cars to detour

in fluorescent jackets, and those who leaning out of cranes — tap, pull, bend — work wires.

To the people who can’t get to jobs and to the King Kullen cashier who stowed a towel

in the car to shower at her friend’s. To postal workers sorting mail by kerosene lamp

and the poet, basement three feet deep in water, wading through poems and letters.

To the children playing with worms in sudden backyard rivulets, and to mud.

To the farmers upstate, crops wasted now by giant balls of hail,

and the farmer on my road who lost a week’s business.

To the mother who insists on staying home with her dog and a flashlight,

to the gaura whirling butterfly now burnt by salt and wind.

To the hibiscus saved, its lush yellow petals.

To the battered birdhouse and the scattered birds.

To criss-cross corn stalk, potato sog, ocean rock and whip, and to

this family, and to these friends, gathered at the table, where we begin.

    Kathy Engel is a visiting professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and lives in Sagaponack. This poem previously appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal.