PechaKucha Night

    Tomorrow at 6 p.m., the Parrish Art Museum will hold its first PechaKucha Hamptons event at the new location in Water Mill. The evening consists of presentations by 10 members of the East End creative community. They may be artists, musicians, writers, designers, architects, vintners, or other professionals.

    This week’s edition will feature six-minute presentations by Dianne Benson, John Bjornen, Jess Frost, Adam Green, Emma Walton Hamilton, Alicia G. Longwell, Natalie and Stephen Judelson, James Christopher Tracy, and Bruce Wolosoff. Music with Mister Lama as the D.J. will follow. Admission is $10, $5 for Parrish members.

New at Perlman

    The Perlman Music Program will give two concerts this weekend at its campus on Shelter Island. On Saturday, there will be an alumni recital at 7:30 p.m. Tessa Lark, the winner of this year’s Walter W. Naumburg International Violin Competition, and Renana Gutman, a pianist, will perform. Tickets cost $25 at the door and $20 in advance through the program’s Web site, perlmanmusicprogram.org.

    On Sunday, a free concert of works in progress will be performed at 3 p.m. Seating is limited and reservations have been suggested.

‘Money’ Auditions

    The Hampton Theatre Company will hold auditions for an upcoming production of “Other People’s Money” on Monday and Tuesday from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Quogue Community Hall. The play, by Jerry Sterner, is about Wall Street corporate raiders and their victims. It has three roles for men and two for women. Both union and nonunion actors have been invited to attend. One male and one female role have already been cast.

    The theater company is casting the roles of William Coles, a polished president of a regional corporation in his mid-40s; Lawrence Garfinkle, a New York raider who is cunning and ruthless, and Kate Sullivan, a sexy Wall Street attorney. Rehearsals begin after Thanksgiving and performances will run from Jan. 10 through Jan. 27, Thursdays through Sundays, at the community hall. James Ewing will direct.

    Readings will be from the script. No monologue or appointment is necessary. Questions can be e-mailed to [email protected]. Local housing is available for out-of-town actors.

Theater Talk

    Dominika Laster will moderate a conversation about and screening of the work of Jerzy Grotowski tonight at 6 at the Watermill Center. Mieczyslaw Janowski and Andrzej Paluchiewicz, who acted under Grotowski’s direction, will participate in the panel.

    Excerpts from “Akropolis” and “The Constant Prince,” two of Grotowski’s productions, will be screened. According to the center, Grotowski, who died in 1999, is considered one of the most important and influential theater practitioners of the 20th century.

    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.

   Many people have been wondering what is going to happen to the space vacated by the Parrish Art Museum. A better question may be, what isn’t?

    Southampton Village is embarking on a mission laid out in 2009 to enhance vitality in its core business district; the Southampton Center for the Arts, which will occupy the museum’s former building, is the nerve center of the ambitious plan. Siamak Samii, chairman of the Southampton Village Planning Commission, also serves on the Founders Committee, a 12-member advisory group formed by the village mayor, Mark Epley, to establish new programming, renovate, and restore the 1897 building at 25 Job’s Lane. Mr. Samii said the estimated $12 million endeavor is more than three years from completion.

    In the meantime, construction is under way for a state-of-the-art outdoor pavilion designed by the Rockwell Group, whose projects include Mohegan Sun, a Connecticut entertainment and gaming facility; the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center, and the JetBlue terminal at Kennedy Airport. Rockwell says the “soaring, circular, bright red structure” will be composed of sustainable materials such as steel truss and P.V.C.-coated fiberglass. Fabric will “undulate around the space, acting as a theatrical curtain between surrounding conditions.”

    The 300-seat pavilion is slated to offer a full lineup of theater, film, music, and lectures by next summer. In winter, it will house an ice-skating rink. Mr. Samii said the pavilion will function as a “gateway” to the arts center, inviting the community to utilize the three-acre grounds throughout the year.

    Mayor Epley envisions the arts center as a place where everyone, from children to the most culturally sophisticated, will go to “experience something new.” The first event held at the vacant site this past summer featured the journalists Bob Woodward and Chris Cuomo, sharing stories of covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Mr. Epley said his team, including Mara Manus, interim director of the arts center, will collaborate with such groups as the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center, The New-York Historical Society, N.Y.U. Steinhardt Music department, and The Orchestra of St. Luke’s, as well as East End organizations including Bay Street Theatre, the Hamptons International Film Festival, the Southampton Cultural Center, Stony Brook Southampton, Southampton Historical Museum, and the African American Museum of the East End. The mayor said the center will continue to host local artists and that he looked forward to forging partnerships with Guild Hall and Watermill Center to exhibit works from their permanent collections there.

    The 19,000-square-foot building’s existing 190-seat auditorium will be brought up to date and expanded, and “remaining spaces will retain flexibility to adapt a particular performance or event,” said Mr. Samii. “A key component of the restoration will be shifting interior walls.” He expects events of every size to be offered, from large symphony and ballet companies to workshops for youths and seniors.

    “When it is done,” he said, “It will be a place where people can gather to start, as well as end, the day.” Plans include a cafe offering sandwiches, pastries, and coffee.  

    The restoration will be in keeping with the style of the Italian Renaissance Revival building. The architect, chosen from a pool of 30, is the Boston-based firm of Machado and Silvetti, renowned for putting a modern spin on historic buildings, including the Boston Public Library, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and the Rockefeller family’s Stone Barns Center at Pocantico Hills, N.Y. The firm plans to begin design work this week.

    Grosvenor Atterbury was the original architect of the Job’s Lane museum, which opened in 1897 and until now has never been restored. Samuel Longstreth Parrish, the building’s original owner, who housed his art collection there, bequeathed the property to the village in 1932.

    Renewal will address bricks that pave the courtyard, ironwork on the fence and main doors, slate and copper roofing, and interior furnishings such as skylights, colonnades, and woodwork. Visitors will enter from multiple entryways, depending on the event; the original “East” entrance will be repurposed.

    A private nonprofit entity will maintain the grounds, modeled  on the Central Park Conservancy, and create programming, said Mr. Samii.

    According to Mayor Epley, the biggest challenge facing the arts center is money. “We’re in difficult financial times,” he said, noting that the village expects to foot under two percent of the projected cost, or $210,000. Private funds and programming revenues, it is hoped, will pay for the rest. “It is very important that people feel like this is their place,” said the mayor.

    The basis of a successful community is a strong business district, he added, citing the migration of the library, post office, and now the Parrish away from the village core. If he had his druthers, said Mr. Epley, the nearby privately owned former site of the Rogers Memorial Library would become retail space or “something else people could enjoy.” He foresees the arts center, historical society, galleries, shops, movie theater, and other businesses combining to create a bona fide arts district. The mayor also hopes WPPB, a local public radio station, will occupy a space in the new arts center.

    The Parrish has welcomed visitors to downtown Southampton for over 100 years, the mayor observed. “Our plan for the arts center and to enhance Southampton’s business district is also a hundred-year decision.”

The Crucible’

    Beginning on Tuesday, the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor will present “The Crucible” as part of its Literature Live! series of plays taken from the core curriculum of American schools. The play, by Arthur Miller, will be staged for school groups on weekdays and for the public on weekends. A special matinee at 2 p.m. will be performed on Nov. 24 in addition to that evening’s closing performance.

    The 1952 play is about the Salem witch trials between 1692 and 1693 and is an allegory of the Communist “witch hunts” of Joseph McCarthy.

    Murphy Davis will direct a cast that will include Ken Forman as Rev. Samual Parris, Joanna Howard as Abigail Williams, Kate Mueth as Mrs. Ann Putnam, Al Bundonis as Thomas Putnam, Mackenzie Engeldrum as Mercy Lewis, Kate O’Phalen as Mary Warren, Rob DiSario as John Proctor, Lisa Cory as Rebecca Nurse, Peter Connolly as Rev. John Hale, Chloe Dirksen as Elizabeth Proctor, and Joel Leffert as Deputy Governor Danforth.

    Tickets are $10 for students and teachers, $20 for others.

St. Luke’s Offers Music

    St. Luke’s Episcopal Church will present Robert White, an American tenor, on Saturday at 4 p.m. in Hoie Hall.

    Mr. White was a child prodigy who sang with Kate Smith and Frank Sinatra on the radio. He was a soloist under Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic and has performed for six United States presidents, the British royal family, and Pope John Paul II.

    He has recorded solo albums as well as collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma and Placido Domingo. More recently, he could be seen performing on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire.” He is also on the voice faculty of the Juilliard School.

    His selection of songs will include “My Wild Irish Rose,” two songs composed from poems of Yeats, and “Younger Than Springtime” and “Some Enchanted Evening” from “South Pacific.” Classical works will include pieces from Schubert, Schumann, and Rachmaninoff. He will be accompanied by Daria Rabotkina and William McNally on the piano.

    This presentation will be the first of five fall and winter musical programs.

    Tickets are $20; children under 18 are admitted for free.

Reading in Springs

    Ellen Gilman will read pieces from “The Home,” a series she wrote while a therapeutic recreation counselor at a nursing home in the Bronx, on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Springs Presbyterian Church.

    Ms. Gilman trained as a playwright, director, and actor at the High School of Performing Arts and continued her studies at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is known for her transforming impersonations that turn her into people of all ages and ethnicities.

    She has performed the work previously on the radio and at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. Admission is by donation with the proceeds going to the food pantry, the Retreat, or East End Hospice. The evening will be produced by Eve Eliot.

Doing Wilde

    The Northeast Stage has adapted an Oscar Wilde classic in “The Importance of Being Earnest (in East Hampton),” which will be on the stage at the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Greenport this weekend and next.

    The characters and basic plot remain the same, but the action switches to a lot in SoHo and then a trip out to the character Jack’s estate in East Hampton as the cast pursues love, marriage, social mobility, and money. James A. Pritchard did the adaptation and will direct.

    Tickets are $10 for students and by reservation through [email protected], or at the door for $15. Showtimes will be Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 5 p.m.

   Inda Eaton celebrated her newest CD, “Go West,” by doing just that on a road trip from New York City to Los Angeles with stops including Philadelphia, Phoenix, Boulder, Colo., and Casper, Wyo. After an “epic drive from Milwaukee in full trucker mode,” she arrived home in Amagansett last weekend in time to perform on Friday night at Guild Hall at the “Way Out East” show with Caroline Doctorow and Nancy Atlas.

“Trucker mode gets the job done at the expense of all rational thought and life training,” she said on her blog.

   Her tour included “a little hospitalization” at an inner-city hospital in Phoenix. She left wearing only a hospital gown and sunglasses, determined to play a show two days later at the Hard Rock Hotel in Phoenix. She’d planned to “go blading, get adjusted, and a pedicure,” and ended up instead “face down on a stretcher.” With major sciatic inflammation, she said last Monday, “I couldn’t move . . . I couldn’t get off the table.”

   “You can’t [make up] this stuff,” she said during a TV interview on “Good Morning, Wyoming.”    

   The “mere two days in the hospital” put the whole tour in jeopardy, the musician said, but thanks to acupuncture and reiki she was able to do the show in Phoenix, sitting down, in flip-flops. She took the stage in 107 degrees, using crutches. It “took a week to return to the cowboy boots,” she said.

    The “boys deserve a medal,” she said of her “band of brothers,” Jeffrey Smith and Curt Mychael. “It made the music more emotional and tight. Our energy was so good . . . the zone we were in musically was unbelievable.”

    Even with “gargantuan medical bills,” Ms. Eaton was able to stay positive. “Here’s what’s good,” she said. “The music is good. In that zone, everything is right.”

    House concerts were also part of the tour, as promised on her pre-launch Kickstarter.com Web site, for supporters like the one who wanted her to play a surprise party for his sister. She said the band drove 20 hours straight in Delmer, their 31-foot mobile kitchen/studio, knocked on a door, and threw a surprise house concert.

    It was all part of her grand plan to “connect with everyone’s family.”

    “You have this art project,” she explained, and “people near and dear to you might not even know about it.” It was epic, she said: “Old fans, new fans, family, that was a total success.” A high percentage of show-goers bought the CD. “People pop it in the car after the concert.”

    The music translates well in a live situation, having been recorded live to begin with. She even managed to pull off a video shoot while in Los Angeles, which she called another miracle.

    The “carrot at the end of the stick” was the welcome home from her family on the East End, both personal and musical, whom she thanked on the stage of Guild Hall Friday night. Mr. Mychael, her guitarist, and Mr. Smith, her percussionist, were dropped off in Milwaukee on her way home, but Mr. Smith flew in to play Friday’s show. Ms. Eaton said they prepared on the road, in Delmer, by listening to Ms. Atlas and Ms. Doctorow’s music.

    The pair, who she said are “as different as their shirts,” are friends, and all three together put on a show that not only worked but received a standing ovation and encore from a packed house. Also brought on stage were Russ Seeger on guitar and fiddle, Neal Surreal on keyboard, Brett King on bass, and appearances by Mamalee Lawler on vocals and Job Potter on harmonica.

    The band will reassemble in December after a little decompression, Ms. Eaton said. “We are so vibrant and alive when we travel. That is why the road is so addicting. TV, radio shows, and all that — there’s probably some adrenaline in that. You feel invincible.”

   One thing I learned about Larry Rivers in speaking to some of the people who knew him best throughout his life a few years ago is that the musician, artist, and bon vivant simply loved people. Be they friends and ever-evolving family, fellow artists, or a parade of girlfriends and wives, he never let a relationship go if he could help it.

    For an artist whose life and art merged so seamlessly and who was truly interested in the people around him, it would be unnatural if he had not collaborated with those people. And so he did, and some of the byproducts of that are captured in the current exhibition at the “Staller Center for the Arts” at Stony Brook University called “Larry Rivers: Collaborations and Appropriations,” organized by Helen Harrison.

    As summarized in his New York Times obituary: “For a while, he was everywhere. He frequented the Cedar Bar with Willem de Kooning. He designed sets for Frank O’Hara’s ‘Try! Try!’ and for ‘The Slave and the Toilet,’ by Amiri Baraka. His sets and costumes for a New York Philharmonic performance of Stravinsky’s ‘Oedipus Rex,’ conducted by Lukas Foss, outraged music critics.”

    “Mr. Rivers appeared with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s offbeat film ‘Pull My Daisy,’ and played President Lyndon B. Johnson onstage in Kenneth Koch’s ‘Election.’ With Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau, he spent six months making a television travelogue about Africa before being arrested as a suspected mercenary in Lagos, Nigeria, and nearly being executed.”

    Ms. Harrison, the longtime executive director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, has also served as curator at both the Parrish Art Museum and Guild Hall and wrote a 1984 monograph on Rivers. In her essay for the show, she notes the show’s limitations in that it “only hints at the astonishing variety of his artistic achievements.”

    Still, there is a lot to take in and the amount of text in these works, his own as well as that of the poets with whom he worked, offers much to chew on visually and aurally, too, if you count the beats of the poems and the musical background in the films.

    Although “Stones,” his 1957 to 1959 lithographic series with Frank O’Hara, generates a lot of excitement for its possibilities, it feels ultimately artistically unsatisfying, even when all 12 of the resulting prints are displayed. Perhaps the recent display at the Museum of Modern Art and at Tibor de Nagy Gallery makes it seem a little tired, even if the idea of the collaboration is quite exhilarating. The pictures taken by Hans Namuth of the two of them, lovers at the time, both hands on Conte crayons crouched over the stone, capture the electricity much better than the final product.

    O’Hara comes out on top in the effort. His text, such as “. . . it is not the Parthenon/but a Vuillard small/as an Adam’s apple/where  pain mounts and falls,” has more staying power than Rivers’s scribbles. It may be, as the artist notes in a quoted passage included on the gallery’s wall, that lithography with its narrow-to-non-existent margin for error is not the natural medium for an artist who called erasure “one of my most important crutches.” His erasure here is just smears while O’Hara’s words are solid and sure, stealing the show.

    In other works outside of this medium, and highly personal milieu, Rivers demonstrates his more winning artistic style, real and/or natural, executed in as many mediums at once as he felt like.

    His collaborations with Kenneth Koch, another poet, are more engaging. One, titled “Collaboration,” features pencil drawings of artists and writers, sometimes given the suits and numbers of playing cards on scraps of paper applied to one sheet with collaged text by Koch. While the portraits are not exact likenesses, Rivers catches an essence of those he depicts that results in deeper contemplation of their character as it is understood as well as their legacy.

    There are a number of other collaborations with Koch on view, including several examples of “Song to the Avant Garde,” a series published in Artforum in collage, pencil, and colored paper. Their “In Bed: Collaboration with Kenneth Koch” has the typical Rivers cheekiness, with the additional twist of a very long Chinese fortune cookie joke. The piece’s cacophony of text, drawing, and appropriated images seems to blare out from afar, but the text is, for the most part, contrastingly rational in its progression and manner. It’s a heady balancing act.

    Although the show contains some early works, including a linocut print Rivers made as a cover for Koch’s “A Christmas Play” poem around 1953, most of the works are from the 1980s and 1990s.

    Two films by Rudy Burckhardt are shown as part of the exhibition and are must-sees in and of themselves. Both feature Rivers with a cast that, in the case of “A Day in the Life of a Cleaning Woman” from 1953, features Fairfield Porter with his wife, Anne Porter, who is the title character. The film is based on a story by Anne Porter in which a beleaguered housekeeper receives a magic dust brush that makes quick work of the household’s messes. “Mounting Tension” has music from both Thelonius Monk and Duke Ellington and features Jane Freilicher, John Ashberry, and Anne Aikman. There is a great deal of innocent and not so innocent romping in these films that seems ahead of the time, both harkening back to the visual absurdity of silent film comedies and looking forward to the more drug-fueled free-for-all experiments of the 1960s.

    The most recent works in the show are a series of appropriations, many of which are based on famous artists and their artwork. They are a virtuosic mix of sculpted foamboard and oil on canvas, almost all from the Larry Rivers Foundation.

    Here, in this later work, we see clearly how Rivers, in a vein he chose decades before, helped allow artists to see that they could be both figurative and subversive if they chose to be. As Ms. Harrison noted, the movement that came to be known as Abstract Expressionism adhered to artwork created from interior inspiration, pure of outside influence or taint. Rivers not only wanted to work with others, he wanted to make art about art, too, in a practice that began as early as “Washington Crossing the Delaware” in 1953.

    In the 1990s series the art looks amateurish and grand simultaneously and the subject matter often absurd. In “Modernist Times” a Charlie Chaplin tramp-like figure is at work on a giant gear as if he has transported himself into a Fernand Leger painting. The wheels and other compositional elements move in and out of space, varying in depth and projection, providing a rudimentary sense of movement that is fun and kitschy, kind of post-Pop. Other subjects included in the show are Vincent Van Gogh and his iconic chair from the “Bedroom at Arles,” and Matisse’s “La Danse.”

    They so well fulfill what the artist’s ultimate goal seemed to be. For all of their art establishment kitschy no-nos, they are irresistible anyway.

   Previews of “Murder Ballad,” a new rock musical about a love triangle gone horribly wrong, commenced on Tuesday at the newly re-launched Studio at Stage II at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Set in New York City, the show opens Nov. 15 and is scheduled to run through Dec. 2, and features a combination of traditional and cabaret-style seating, with the actors moving throughout the entire 150-seat space during the performance.

    “Actors in the action with you,” is how Juliana Nash described it. “It’s really exciting.” The Amagansett resident should know: Julia Jordan, who conceived the musical, a Jonathan Larson Award winner and two-time Susan Smith Blackburn Prize finalist, invited Ms. Nash to collaborate on the project.

    Ms. Nash’s former band, Talking to Animals, was a popular alt-rock outfit in the 1990s, and was signed to the Columbia and Velvel labels. With Ms. Jordan, she reworked some Talking to Animals songs and composed new music for the show. The result, says Ms. Nash, is an authentic rock ’n’ roll sound that is uncommon in theatrical productions. “This is actual ’90s alt-rock,” she said.

    In June, the Manhattan Theatre Club announced the Studio at Stage II, an initiative to support new plays and one of the organization’s two Off-Broadway homes. Manhattan Theater Club also announced the Writer’s Room, a partnership with the not-for-profit group Ars Nova, which develops and produces performing artists in the early stages of their careers. The staging of “Murder Ballad” is the first result of these initiatives.

    In 2009, Ms. Nash and Ms. Jordan, who lives in Westchester County, attended a workshop at New Dramatists, a “new play laboratory” founded in New York City in 1949. “We were waitresses in the early ’90s in SoHo,” Ms. Nash said of her collaborator. Today, “she’s a successful playwright. Manhattan Theatre Club took us on quickly, in April 2010. They hosted us to write one week a month for over two years, so we wrote it at Manhattan Theatre Club — they’ve been incredibly supportive — and at our kitchen tables.”

    As the title suggests, “Murder Ballad” is based on the song form in which the events surrounding a crime of passion are typically described. “Delia’s Gone,” famously recorded by Johnny Cash, is one example. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released an entire album’s worth of them (“Murder Ballads”) in 1996.

    “You never know who’s singing,” Ms. Nash mused. “Is this person dead, is it the killer?” In this production, she said, “We have a narrator who’s singing a murder ballad that’s all cut up between the action. It’s about a love triangle, about making decisions. It’s for people my age — 40s — and about choices you’ve made in life, what road you are going down and why, regret, and longing. It’s about that journey, how things can undo you, or you can rise above them. It’s your basic love triangle murder plot, but it’s really about relationships.”

    “Murder Ballad” stars Karen Olivo, who won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for her performance as Anita in a revival of “West Side Story,” Rebecca Naomi Jones, who has appeared in Broadway productions including “American Idiot” and “Passing Strange,” and Will Swenson and John Ellison Conlee, both of whom have numerous theatrical, film, and television credits. Trip Cullman, a Drama Desk Award nominee, is the director.

    Ms. Nash’s former bandmates are also involved, she said, including the guitarist Thomas Juliano and bassist Greg Porter. “My music director, Justin Levine, is unbelievable,” Ms. Nash added. “He’s on Wurlitzer [electric piano].” Mr. Levine, she added, served as music director for “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” which was staged at New York’s Public Theater in 2009 and 2010 and later at Broadway’s Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.

    A surround-sound system complements the 360-degree seating, Ms. Nash said. “There’s no stage, it looks like a bar and you’re not sure where the action would be. One of the people standing at the bar is one of the actors. And it rocks!”

    Tickets for the 90-minute show, which cost $30, are available at nycitycenter.org.

   The opening of the Parrish Art Museum’s new building in Water Mill on Saturday will include a multimedia concert of compositions by a young composer with local roots.

    Both Sag Harbor and San Francisco were home in Nell Shaw Cohen’s bicoastal upbringing. Soon after her parents moved to Sag Harbor full time, the budding composer was off to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Now 24 and pursuing graduate studies in composition at New York University, Ms. Cohen will present “Watercolors,” a 15-minute piece inspired by four paintings by the watercolorist Charles Burchfield, at the Parrish opening. One of the four, “Glory of Spring,” is in the museum’s permanent collection.

    The Chelsea Quintet will perform “Watercolors” in front of projected images of the paintings in the new museum’s performance space.

    The intersection of aural and visual is familiar territory for Ms. Cohen. Much of her work is inspired by visual art, including a 2011 collaboration with the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., and members of the string orchestra A Far Cry, to present music inspired by the work of the 19th-century painter Thomas Cole.

    “The first piece I composed inspired by art was ‘The Course of Empire,’ ” Ms. Cohen said of her 2008 piece, a string quartet inspired by Cole’s paintings.

    Visual art has always been significant in her life, she said. As a teenager she was particularly fascinated by art history. “As I got deeper into composing, I realized that I could bring these two passions together. I sought to communicate my interpretation of the art, so that when listeners are hearing the music, it’s music that stands alone, but it also has this connection to something larger. It’s almost like an essay in the musical form, but not that literal. Once I started doing that, I realized that it was a way for me to continue engaging in the visual art that I found compelling, and share that with people in my own way, which is through music.”

    Another fascination, she said, is synesthesia, “an anomalous blending of the senses in which the stimulation of one modality simultaneously produces sensation in a different modality,” according to Thomas J. Palmeri, Randolph B. Blake, and René Marois, who study the phenomenon at the Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience at Vanderbilt University. A synesthete “hears” colors, for example.

    This explains Ms. Cohen’s obsession — her word — with Burchfield. “His art is really fascinating,” she said. “It’s especially suggestive of music. Some feel he was a synesthete in that he experienced a psychological connection between music and art. Some of his art — the colors, the shapes, the whole way he conceptualized it — has a very musical quality. And some of his paintings literally depict sounds, where he has jagged lines or repeating circular lines that represent insect noises and birdcalls. He said that he was thinking about Beethoven and Sibelius while he was making his paintings.”

    As to her own approach to composing art-inspired music, “I try to have a really good sense of what my take on the painting is before I start writing notes, because I really want the music to be a natural extension of my experience of the painting,” she said. “I interpret the paintings into music on several levels. There’s a larger narrative or atmospheric quality that I might get — that’s almost a film score-type approach — where I’m thinking, what is the musical atmosphere that can support and embody this visual? Then there are more specific things. If there are jagged shapes or lines in the visuals, I might write music that has an angular, jagged quality, or if it’s flowing and lyrical, I might create something of the musical equivalent.”

    Colors, and light and dark, are also manifested in her music. “Sun and Rocks,” the third of four movements in “Watercolors,” “has these very vibrant, striking colors, and the whole picture almost seems to be vibrating,” Ms. Cohen said. “So I created music that had extremes of dynamics — loud and quiet — and extremes in register — really high notes and really low notes — to capture that intensity that I saw in the painting.”

    The process is, of course, subjective and personal: different composers may interpret a painting in dramatically different ways, but “it’s a direct response to what I’m seeing in the painting,” she said.

    Ms. Cohen’s Web site, beyond­the­notes.org,­ includes recordings of “Watercolors” and video interviews with experts on Burchfield and synesthesia, as well as her own videotaped discussions of the creative process, among other features. The site also features a blog in which Ms. Cohen writes about “Watercolors” and her other work.

    “Watercolors” will be presented at 12:30 p.m. and again at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday. Admission to the museum and concert is free.