Film, music, or culinary arts, there is something for every taste at Guild Hall in East Hampton over the next few days.

    “The Wizard of Oz” will be shown tonight at 8 as part of a July Garland celebration in honor of the 75th anniversary of her feature film debut in the 1936 “Pigskin Parade.” Several more of her movies will be shown later on in the series, called “All Singin’, All Dancin’, All Judy.” Tickets are $12, $10 for members.

   On Saturday at 8, in conjunction with the Hamptons International Film Festival, Alec Baldwin will host a screening of “How to Survive a Plague,” a documentary that follows the fight of a group of mostly H.I.V.-positive men and women to turn AIDS from a death sentence to a manageable condition. A discussion will follow with Mr. Baldwin and guests. Tickets cost $22, $20 for members.

    “Stirring the Pot: Conversations with Culinary Celebrities” will be served up on Sunday at 11 a.m., when Tom Colicchio, a chef and a judge on “Top Chef,”   will be interviewed by Florence Fabricant, food writer and columnist for The New York Times. A book signing will follow. Tickets cost $15, $13 for members.

    The weekend will conclude with “An Evening of Song” with a Long Islander and Broadway musical star, Melissa Errico, in a special one-night-only event starting at 7:30 p.m.

    Ms. Errico first sang at Guild Hall in her early 20s after starring in the revival of “My Fair Lady,” and now she returns after last summer’s “Gift of the Gorgon” with Mr. Baldwin. Her performance, a solo concert, celebrates her newly released CD, “Legrand Affair.” Ms. Errico will sign copies of the CD at a reception after the show. Tickets begin at $45 and go up to $100 for prime orchestra seats. They may be purchased online at GuildHall.org, theatermania. com, or at the box office.

   A year after Rocco Gardner and his partners brought their ambitious Escape to New York music, art, and lifestyle event to the Shinnecock Reservation in Southampton, they will make a more toned-down escape, this time to Montauk.

   Escape to Montauk, dubbed a “unique boutique event,” kicks off tomorrow on the grounds of the Solé East resort on Second House Road, with live music, art exhibits, yoga, kids activities, a speakers’ corner, outdoor theater, and a “fashion village” planned throughout the weekend

   Jettykoon, a Montauk band, will start the festivities tomorrow at 6 p.m. followed by D.J. Michaelangelo L’Acqua at 10 p.m. The event continues throughout the day on Saturday, starting at 10 a.m. There will be yoga classes for adults, kids activities including yoga, face painting, and crafts in the morning, and boutique shopping all day until 9 p.m.

D.J.s such as Albert Hammond Jr. of the Strokes, Lauren Dillard of Creep, and D.J. Twilo, a local musician, will start to spin at noon. Waterworks NYC, a synchronized swimming team, will honor the 2012 London Olympics with an afternoon performance, and in the speakers’ corner, there will be short talks and theatrical performances by selected artists. Acoustic music will fill the evening hours.

   On Sunday, Solé East’s jazz and bossa nova brunch will feature Ludmilla and Marcello Pimenta, a bossa nova duo, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Attendees will be able to browse the boutiques all day until closing at 5 p.m.

Cocktails, local wine, and food from the Solé East’s Backyard restaurant will be available for purchase throughout the weekend, and can be eaten outside with garden-side tables, poolside cabanas, or around a fire pit.

   There is no charge to attend the event, but the number of attendees is limited, and advance registration is required. Requests can be sent by e-mail to [email protected]. Those wishing to guarantee entrance can purchase a V.I.P. wristband for $20, which will offer discounts on some activities, food, and drink, as well as provide priority access. The event will take place rain or shine.

   Houston may seem a long way from Sag Harbor and the South Fork, but when one starts out in Freeport, it turns out not to be that far at all.

    Such is the experience of Andrea Grover, the curator of programs at the Parrish Museum. Brought up in western Long Island by a father who was a commercial fisherman, boat builder, and artist, she has an innate appreciation for the issues and lifestyle that this region holds dear.

    She became an art scene insider in Houston for more than a decade by adhering to a straightforward formula: engage the public “with nomadic programs related to the site that feature local culture and history and combine several different disciplines in one evening.”

    This was the goal when she started showing films in her own living room in an old church on Aurora Street in Houston. With the Aurora Picture Show, she transformed the sanctuary into a 100-seat venue and started her own nonprofit arts venture. Houston’s freewheeling zoning laws and its artistic subculture made it all possible.

    “I would invite different people from the community to program these evenings. Houston had a thriving creative community. It was a way to engage the public in somewhat demanding moving images.” Allowing others to organize an evening of films gave the community a sense of ownership in the venture, and providing other enticements such as shots of tequila or picnics didn’t hurt either.

    She was soon invited to produce similar events at other venues, initially arts-based, such as the Menil Collection, and then less traditional places like an abandoned junkyard or a floating barge. Her most recent project there involved a series of artist films about boats and maritime history shown on the official tour boat of the Houston Ship Channel.

    “The Aurora Picture show became synonymous with roaming, multidisciplinary art platforms,” she said. Now, she is doing the same thing here. The Parrish Road Show is a South Fork version of her series of “nomadic events that engages not just our core audience, but people who have never set foot in the Parrish and people who think they know what the Parrish’s mission and program are, but then we try to tweak that a little bit.”

    The idea is to go where the people are, from a private golf club or the historical society in Bridgehampton to the radar tower at Camp Hero in Montauk “to be closer or more convenient at certain times.” Ms. Grover said the Road Show also serves a psychological purpose as the museum begins its plans to move to a new facility in November. “It is a way of moving our patronage out of our present building and toward Water Mill and our future.”

    The Eat Drink Local Film Festival, held at Silas Marder Gallery in Bridgehampton in June, was the first Road Show event. Showing films for free and offering tastes from South Fork food purveyors for a fee, the event also included a honeybee demonstration.

    A one-night exhibit of work by Jameson Ellis, a Sag Harbor artist, at the Bridge, a private golf club in the hills of Bridgehampton, included pieces inspired by military and industrial design along with a functional and luxurious display case designed and built by the artist by hand. The show included works on paper and a video presentation of photos from the past two years of his studio practice.

    This past weekend, Maziar Behrooz brought his “Rapid Deployment Meditation Unit” to a house he designed in East Hampton as part of the Road Show. The unit is a container outfitted for different activities and required a crane and a flatbed to move it on site. A screening of “Pulse,” a video by Matthew Biederman and Alain Thibault, took place on Friday and two guided meditation sessions with Kelly Morris were held on Saturday. On Aug. 12 at 8 p.m. Richard Vaudrey will perform Bach on cello in the unit, inviting the audience to roam inside and around the space.

    The unit has been exhibited before, but not outside, where sound travels through it like a megaphone and it “favors deep bass-y sounds,” that Ms. Grover said are also present in the video project and the cello piece. These tones are felt deep down to the bone. The video projection was done through the unit so that the images ended up on the roof of the house.

    Still to come is a bike tour of Springs on Saturday from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. for $39 that is co-presented with the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center and Amagansett Beach and Bicycle Co. The stops will include the Pollock-Krasner House, Green River Cemetery, Pussy’s Pond, and other artful places in Springs. It is the only event that has an admission fee.

    The remaining exhibitions are Alice Hope’s “Under the Radar” installation of ferrite magnets on an asphalt strip near the decommissioned radar tower at Camp Hero, which is on view through August. Another piece, “Satellite,” is on view at Nick and Toni’s during the same period.

    Finally, Jill Musnicki will have an installation in the engine barn of the Bridgehampton Historical Society on Aug. 18 and 19 called “What Comes Around,” a series of images taken with motion-activated cameras placed in uncultivated landscapes throughout the South Fork to capture both animal and human activity. Most of the still images will be looped together in videos projected on screens on three walls to make it an immersive environment. Other framed still photos will be displayed on the walls.

    Terrie Sultan, the executive director of the Parrish, recently announced that the Parrish Road Show will continue every summer. Inside the new building, Ms. Grover said a curatorial program called “Platform” will take a similar approach. “We will invite an individual artist or collective to consider the whole of the museum as a potential space for a project. These will take place in the building’s interstitial spaces: the spine galleries, its cafe, the covered entries, grounds, the car park, all of it.” They will become the setting for audio works, performance pieces, interventions, installations, and whatever else comes to mind. This will be in addition to more opportunities for performance, dance, and live music in the new space.

    A curator of programs is a curiously open-ended title. Ms. Grover said that in her preliminary talks with the Parrish, she too wondered what she would do here. Ms. Sultan’s response was “do what you do well,” i.e. “bring in this kind of adventurous, risk-taking programming, and connect it to the local community and history of artists on the East End.”

    The Parrish Road Show is just the latest in a series of programs Ms. Grover has started at the museum. Over the winter months, many attended the Lightning Rounds she organized, which featured 10 people given six minutes and 10 slides to describe what it is they do here. Artists, farmers, poets, designers, foodies, and some who were all of the above have participated in three such evenings, fueled by beer and wine and a kind of show-and-tell bonhomie that put the presenters, some not at all familiar with public speaking, at ease.

    Although a new concept to many on the South Fork, Ms. Grover said that “pecha kucha,” or chit-chat in Japanese, has been a staple of presentations in creative circles for many years and it seemed a good fit for the kind of engagement she wanted to foster here. The Parrish was recently recognized by the PechaKucha Foundation in Toyko. Future Lightning Round events will be called PechaKucha Hamptons, which is now the official name.

    Her evenings of East End Stories on Screen have included short films and videos from local media archives, such as LTV. “They are from amateur films, home movies, newsreels, and unedited footage from cable access programs,” she said of many of the sources. “They are things that don’t necessarily make it into documentaries or nonfiction films, but hold a lot of substance and first person accounts by the artists themselves.” Examples include the late Alfonso Ossorio giving Elaine Benson a tour of the Creeks, his house in East Hampton, or an Andy Warhol video diary from 1970 at a Montauk beach with Lee Radziwill and John Kennedy Jr. Guest speakers discuss the clips and are drawn from their relationship to the material, be it as filmmaker, scholar on the particular artist, or steward of an archive.

    Although her most recent work involved curatorial fellowships from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York, resulting in an exhibition and a book written with three other authors on the intersection of science, technology, and art, no one should fear that her approach to art presentation will be too didactic. “I’ve always operated from a street-level perspective of culture,” she said. Despite working from within the institution, she is still seeking an interactive experience in the types of programs and exhibitions she wants to present. “I don’t think I could operate from a position of institutional authority. It’s just not in my nature.”

    And despite a bit of culture shock, the transition to Sag Harbor, where she lives with her husband, Carlos Lama, and her daughters Lola, 10, and Gigi, 7, is working out just fine. “My daughters can now ride their bikes in the street. The fresh air, vitamin D, and the local produce and fish are a huge improvement.”

    Except where noted all Parrish Road Show programs are free, but some require reservations. Additional information on programs and registration is on the Parrish Web site, parrishmuseum. org.

“Big Maybelle: Soul of the Blues” will have its world premiere at Bay Street Theatre on Tuesday. Lillias White, a Tony, People’s Choice, and Outer Critics Award winner, will star as Maybelle Smith, a blues singer taking on the challenges of 1950s America. Written and directed by Paul Levine, recognized by Daily Variety for best director and best production of the year, the show will run through Sept. 2. Showtimes are Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7. There are Wednesday matinees on Aug. 15, 22, and 29 at 2 p.m., and matinees on Saturdays Aug. 18 and 25 at 4 p.m.

    Tuesday is the “pay what you can” preview performance, with a limited number of tickets available after 2 p.m., only at the box office. Hospitality Workers Nights are Wednesdays and Thursdays for any worker in the restaurant, hotel, and retail business. Tickets are $20 with proof of employment based on availability at the box office only.

    Tickets can be purchased online at baystreet.org or at the box office.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a tale of love and magic, is being presented by the Hamptons Independent Theatre Festival outdoors behind the Bridgehampton High School.

The production, conceived and directed by Joshua Perl, of the Naked Stage theater company, stresses the “dream state” that Shakespeare might initially have envisioned for the play.

The cast includes Gerard Doyle, a Broadway veteran, as Theseus and Oberon; Clodagh Bowyer, an established actress both in Ireland and New York, as Hippolyta and Titania, and a large cast of local and regional actors.

Performances will run through Aug. 19, Thursday through Sunday, starting at 7 p.m. Tickets are $20, and can be purchased at amnd.eventbrite.com.

   The Feminist Press, which is based at the City University of New York, is staging two cocktail parties on the South Fork this summer to introduce some of its recently published writers and to raise money.

    The first party, at the home of Flora Schnall on Pondview Lane in East Hampton, will take place on Sunday from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. The event will include readings by Helene Aylon, an artist whose book “Whatever Is Contained Must be Released” was recently published, and Claire Reed, a longtime East Hampton part-timer whose memoir, “Toughing It Out: From Silver Slippers to Combat Boots,” will be in print by Sept. 1.

    Others taking part are Blanche Wies­en Cook of Springs, who is at work on the third volume of her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, and Audrey Flack, the sculptor, who has a house in East Hampton.

    The second party will take place at the home of Elaine Walsh and Brenda McGowan on Shrubland Road, South­ampton, on Sunday, Aug. 19, at the same hours. Isabel Sepulveda Scanlon of Southampton, publisher of Voz, a bilingual weekly newspaper, Merle Hoffman, who founded Choices Women’s Medical Center in Jamaica, Queens, and Florence Howe, the author of “A Life in Motion” and founder of The Feminist Press, will be among those reading.

    General admission at the door is $50. Gifts of various kinds will be given to those who contribute at higher levels.

    Tickets can be reserved by calling Joyce Whitby of Springy Banks Road, East Hampton, or on the Web at feministpress.org.

Baby You Can Drive My Car

    The Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton will show “Parts & Service,” a show dedicated to the “glory of the garage,” on Saturday beginning with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. The theme is racing, motorcycle culture, mechanics, and other automotive concerns and fetishes. The show will include artifacts, photography, and mixed-media works with images of car wrecks, burning rubber, car designs, and pinups.

    The artists are John Chamberlain, Pia Dehne, Nick Dine, Robert Lazzarini, Shelter Serra, Max Snow, Eric White, and Firooz Zahedi, among many others. The show will be on view through Sept. 2.

Lerma and Martinez

    Beginning tomorrow, Halsey Mckay in East Hampton will show the work of Jose Lerma and Eddie Martinez. According to the gallery, “both artists use creative material approaches to painting and its history as the starting point for their practice.” All fictive, the works display the political histories of made-up nations and conflicts using the interaction of the denizens. Mr. Lerma has a linear and sinewy approach, whereas Mr. Martinez “scrapes and scratches the oils onto the picture plane in an exorcism of angst.”

    This is the first showing of the artists’ work on the South Fork, and it will be on view through Aug. 29. A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Beres at Olko

    The Monika Olko Gallery in Sag Harbor will show the paintings of James Beres beginning Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Over the course of a 40-year career, the artist has had his work exhibited in museums such as the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut and the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan, as well as in galleries such as the David Whitney Gallery in New York and the one at the School of Visual Arts. He was discovered by Klaus Kertess, who had a long association with the Whitney Museum.

    Mr. Beres describes his abstract work as “images floating off the surface, at the same time reinforcing the flatness through the negative space.”

Photography by Berman

    The Youngblood Gallery in Sag Harbor will show the photographs of Fern Berman beginning Saturday and running through Aug. 25. Ms. Berman, who lives in Connecticut and East Hampton, prints her images on watercolor paper. While the images she captures are realistic, she focuses on close-up details that make the photographs seem more abstract. Her work has been collected by Wesleyan University and the New Britain Museum of Art.

“Convergence” Emerges

    Those who missed Christopher Engel’s paintings at Hampton Hang in Water Mill can see his work at Romany Kramoris in Sag Harbor beginning today. A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

    “Convergence” is a selection of his recent works with an ancestral theme. “There are points in life when all lines come together,” Mr. Engel said. “They converge. There is an alignment of thoughts and ideas.” In the paintings, figures may mix with Byzantine angels, and shamanistic figures play with toys and the spirit world, or they may refer to Matisse or other artists. The work is on view through Aug. 30.

Davis at Marcelle

    Beginning on Saturday, the Peter Marcelle Gallery in Bridgehampton will present paintings by Lisa Corinne Davis with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Her oil-on-wood-panel works suggest an underlying graph or map-like structure that appears to be obliterated by the application of painted elements on top of it. Other times it appears to dissolve as the surface liquefies in saturated colors, some that look like blood, bile, or other vital fluids. The compositions integrate geometric and expressionistic abstraction, breaking down one and solidifying the other.

    Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and has been exhibited and reviewed widely. An associate professor at Hunter College in New York, she has taught art at the Parsons School of Design, the Cooper Union School of Art, and Yale University. The show will be on view through Aug. 23.

Diaspora Vibe 2.0

    The Southampton Cultural Center will show “Diaspora Vibe 2.0,” featuring the work of more than 30 artists from the Latin American and Caribbean diaspora. A benefit reception and party on Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m. will honor Grace Y. Ingelton, an artist advocate. She will receive the 365 Art for Change Award for supporting several generations of outstanding artists through the organization she helped found, the Dedicators. Among those artists are Romare Bearden, Lois Mailou Jones, Benny Andrews, and Roy DeCarava.

    The mediums of painting, photography, installation, mixed media, metal works, wood carvings, printmaking, textiles, and miniature drawings on handmade paper are part of the show. According to the organizers, the works on view will “express the daily struggles, triumphs, and spiritual journeys of many of the artists exhibited.” Tickets to the party cost $125 and can be purchased online at globalartsmediainc.com. The exhibit runs through Aug. 26.

On the Pottery Trail

    Five ceramicists in East Hampton, Springs, and Sag Harbor will hold a studio tour and sale on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The East Hampton studios belong to Phyllis Spiegel at 15 Springwood Way and Karen Lissack at 85 Old Northwest Road, and the Springs studio is Joel Kaplan’s at 28 Cedar Ridge Drive. The Sag Harbor potters are Beverly Granger at 24 Soundview Drive and Nancy Robbins at 51 Round Pond Lane. Those who visit all five studios will receive a free gift.

Franklin and Sobel

    The Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett will show Anna Franklin’s flower paintings and Cynthia Sobel’s abstract paintings in a show opening today. A reception will be held Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. Other artists on view in a separate group show will be Andrea McCafferty, Daniel Schoenheimer, Jana Hayden, Wilhelmina Howe, Lance Corey, Bob Tucker, Sheila Rotner, and Diane Marxe.

    Ms. Franklin’s series is called “ Incandescence,” to mark summer and its bounty of colorful and fragrant flowers and memories of her childhood in Italy. Ms. Sobel’s new paintings are abstract memories of the island of Capri and Gardiner’s Bay. She will also show impressionistic plein-air watercolors from both places. The exhibition is on view through Aug. 27.

Watermill Open House

    The Watermill Center will open its doors to the public on Sunday from 3 to 6 p.m. In addition to tours of the grounds, on view will be a Mike Kelley video display and installations put together for the center’s annual benefit, which this year is called the Big Bang. Artists who have been participating in the center’s summer residency program will be on hand to speak about their work. The event is free.

Lola Schnabel at Tripoli

    “Night Vision,” a solo show of work by Lola Montes Schnabel, will open next week at the Tripoli Gallery of Contemporary Art in Southampton. A reception will be held next Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    The show will feature 13 new paintings that resulted from the artist’s experiments painting with a single candle burning in an otherwise dark room. The focus is on the burning wick and the properties of the flame. The series is about constraints — in subject, light, and a limited palette of black, gold, and white. It will be on view through Sept. 13.

   Kevin Breslin’s short documentary “#whilewewatch” was shown last Thursday night at Guild Hall. The film, shot within the Occupy Wall Street protest at Zuccotti Park in September, was the latest in Guild Hall’s Red Carpet film series.  

    The author Steven Gaines moderated a question-and-answer session at the end of the film. During the session, a bearded man of a certain age, who identified himself as being part of the Occupy movement, first berated Mr. Breslin for referring to the woman who coined the “1-percenter” slogan as being “Oriental.” “The word is ‘Asian,’ ” he shouted. The filmmaker apologized for his political incorrectness.

    Later the man raged against the machine: “We don’t need your system,” or some such; the system in this case being a well-meaning independent filmmaker and moderator. Mr. Gaines, resorting to humor, told the man he had no dog in the race, that he had simply agreed to a request to moderate, and that by doing so he was in danger of missing the new “Batman” premiere.

    For a reviewer who came of age during the protests of the late 1960s and early ’70s, the angry man sounded a bit like Don Quixote raging against a windmill that no longer turns. 

    Mr. Breslin’s film is provocative, but in unexpected ways. The occupiers talk about being “citizen journalists,” telling a story that they say the established media, co-opted by Wall Street and all things corporate, is missing completely.

    Instead of placing flowers in the barrels of rifles pointed at them, they challenge police with their iPhone video apps, shouting, “The whole world is watching,” not on television but on their computers. Well, maybe. More likely the world is busy getting its Facebook fix, or watching Arab citizen-journalists’ reportage of their life-and-death struggles.

    I was struck by the narcissism of the movement. Pointing up the injustice and criminality responsible for the yawning gap between the 1-percenters and the 99-percenters is a worthy cause. Unfortunately, Mr. Breslin’s honest reportage found the occupiers not only preaching to the choir but, in full citizen-journalist mode, reporting on their own preaching.

    Of course, it’s harder to foment antiestablishment  fervor when the president of the United States is protesting the same thing the protesters are. Very strange.

    And, where’s the hatred? As many will recall, the thing about the antiwar and civil rights protests that took place from about 1967 through the end of the Vietnam War — protests that spawned the “counterculture” — was the pure hatred generated by establishment types.

    The Occupy movement is a sort of caricature of a protest. Occupiers are marching (occupying) against the machine, but the machine doesn’t care. It seems that except for hedge funds and banks, most of the machine is on its ass.

    Mr. Breslin’s documentary kept begging the question: If one is really angry about what Wall Street has done, why occupy a private park instead of invading the Stock Exchange or storming the Goldman Sachs bastille?

    This also points up something I think about quite a lot, form versus content in the digital age. Occupiers had the means to be citizen-journalists to get out to the world the raw, on-the-street stuff, the straight skinny unadulterated by corporate spin, but the struggle wasn’t there, except for a few man-made dustups with New York’s finest, who, as middle-class types, probably had as much reason to protest the 1-percenters as the occupiers.

    Don’t get me wrong, the movement was and is important. The occupiers are saying what a lot of Americans feel strongly. But it’s difficult to “out” the unethical, greedy mother*&)+@!s, when the whole world already knows they’re unethical, greedy mother*&)+@!s.

    The government knows it, the people at large know it. Even the greedy mothers know it, which is why they don’t help with the narrative by fighting back. As a result, the choir winds up filming themselves in the mirror.

    By offering what the occupiers insist they don’t want and don’t need — that is, a comprehensive view of the movement from the outside — Mr. Breslin succeeds in shedding much needed light on very worthy motives.

   As an art photographer, Mary Ellen Bartley may have had a long gestational period, but after finding her muse not all that long ago, her career has taken off on a steady upward trajectory.

    Her still-life images of books have been recognized five times in Guild Hall member shows, four years in a row for best photograph, and this year with top honors by Lilly Wei, a critic for Art in America and other publications. In return she will receive a solo show at Guild Hall in 2014.

    Ms. Bartley was also chosen by Ross Bleckner to exhibit her work with him and Renate Aller at the Parrish Art Museum’s “Artists Choose Artists” show last summer. The two have struck up a friendship and they have spoken about him dropping by her house in Wainscott to catch up on her latest work.

    “Things have definitely been happening in the last few years. It’s been a good time,” she acknowledged while seated at her kitchen counter last month. “Being out here has been so great,” she said of the shift she and her family made seven years ago to live full time in Wainscott after living part time in Springs for 14 years.

    She loves the community and the art institutions of the South Fork. “It’s magical that all these connections are happening. I love these places.” A show of her work along with that of Costantino Nivola will open in August at the Drawing Room in East Hampton, a place she has also long admired.

    While she goes to Beach Lane every day to take pictures with her dog, the bodies of work she is known for are quite minimal. They include the stark allusions to still life through the filter of Giorgio Morandi in her “Paperback” series, and the quiet, fleeting, and cryptic homages to some of her favorite artists in her “Open Book” series.

    She doesn’t much like to talk about the food photography she did prior to committing full time to art photography around the time she relocated here permanently. Although it gave her the inspiration and discipline to pursue still life, it was more of a distraction that kept her from her own work.

    During that time, she said, “I started some series as bodies of work, but when I was doing editorial work I found, being here, that it was difficult to shift gears.” Pretty soon after the move her focus changed. “I found my practice. It became a daily thing. Then, things started to happen.”

    She needed the separation and the extra time. “My work is about looking at things slowly and carefully. I can’t do that with breaks. I’m not a multitasker.”

    She spoke of finding her various inspirations as somewhat magical events. “I had to find a muse, something that would keep my interest that I could go back and look at differently. I tried a lot of different still-life things, but the books work best for me because of their geometry. I’m a minimalist at heart.” Yet, there was an element of conceptualism there, too. “Books contain so much narrative and information, but I was looking at them in a way that denied that at the beginning. Then I started opening them up.”

    The “Paperback” series came from seeing a pile at a friend’s house. Although she liked the purity of the geometry of the books themselves as they lined up in stacks, she found the black line drawn on some of the used books particularly arresting. “I liked all the space and formal connections,” she said, and they reminded her of works by Rachel Whiteread and Wayne Thiebaud, artists known for a certain geometric purity even in their more excessive works.

    Prior to that, she was working on a series of “Blue Books,” which she continues to work on today. The title is quite literal. So many older books are bound in blue covers. She composes them into groupings then photographs them in low light on a blue background. The results are lushly textural prints that have a visual finish like blue suede and subtle shifts in tones that seem much more painterly than photographic.

    While these prints are produced digitally, she said she still works occasionally with the older large-format view cameras she used in college, when she made palladium prints. She recently purchased some 4-by-5 negative film, even though she still plans to print those images digitally. With the inkjet printers, “I feel like I can get a similar quality of subtle transition of tones that I wasn’t getting in regular black-and-white prints.” She said, however, “I think like a view-camera person. When I first looked through one and saw the flattening of space and the quality it has of drawing with light, I thought it was so cool. It was my aha! moment. I thought, ‘I have to do this.’ ”

    A subtle but rather radical departure came in the “Open Book” series. In looking for other ways to portray her “Paperback” series, Ms. Bartley began to stand them up to show them vertically, which led to their sometimes splaying open. It was then she noticed the shadows, stripes, and strong verticals that were the byproducts of seeing just a small glimpse of what was contained within.

    “The text didn’t excite me. I liked when I saw images this way. I played around with the depth of field. I would make the page sharp but the rest dissolved. I liked how there was a re-sequencing of the book by seeing the images out of order.”

    Her treatment also changes the basic functions of the books. In a Hiroshi Sugimoto monograph of beachscapes, the page numbers, which float in the center at the right end of the page, take on a different, mysterious significance when only a few are apparent. The similar horizon line in the glimpses of images within gives them a quality like an accordion-folded print of a Rothko composition.

    In this series, she has done a number of photography books but is also looking at books with reproductions of paintings. It is a different effect and not just because of the addition of color that is often absent in the photo books she chooses. There is a tenderness and an ethereal quality to them, almost reverential. Some of this is the depth of field she spoke of, but it is also the soft northern light of her bedroom, where she takes these images, that embraces and softens them.

    She always titles the works after the book title and said her intent is homage and is in no way cynical. “I came of age right behind the ‘Pictures Generation’ and all that media-centered art didn’t appeal to me. I thought art was sacred. I would sit in front of a Rothko for hours, thinking, ‘Give me your wisdom.’ ”

    What excites her about the “Open Books” is the element of chance that comes into play as to just what can be seen in this presentation. The “Paperbacks” are marked by precision and control. “This series connects to things outside of myself and outside of the room.”

    She began her work with books before digitization of them became big business and said it was not a concern of hers when she started this work. Still, as technology has made the book an increasingly outmoded and sacred object, she has taken note. She likened it to a weird inversion of Walter Benjamin’s notion of an original object’s aura compared to a serially-made copy.

    In this context, “the book has its own aura. It’s original in its own way. The form of a book, its format, is so specific and in real time. You have to hold it open and move the pages. It’s not flashing on a screen, not in the ether ready to be experienced by anyone. It’s a much more intimate experience. It’s sort of quaint now.”

    As precious as those objects are to her, she is beginning work on a new unreleased series in which she is rephotographing images she has taken at the beach all these years, in one case folding them and having the light hit one side more than the other. This approach allows her “to think of it more as a still life, like the books. I like it and it’s fun. To be continued,” she said with a smile and closed the portfolio.

August, I walk this shore in search of wholeness

among snapped razor clams and footless quahogs.

How easily my palm cradles a moon shell

coughed up on shore. I stroke the fragments

as, last night, I stroked your arm

smelling of salt, scrubbed clean by the sea air.

Once you loped near me. Now, in my mind’s eye,

your rubbery footsoles track sand hills

the shape of waves you no longer straddle.

You inch forward, step, comma, pause,

your silences the wordless rage of pain.

But still at night our bodies merge in sleep

and fit unbroken, like the one perfect shell

I’ve never found and can only imagine —

and crack when we’re apart. I clutch the moon shell,

guardian of unknowing, chipped and silent,

until I fling it down and feel its loss.

Broken, it fit my hand and I was whole.

This poem previously appeared in The Kenyon Review. Grace Schulman, who lives part time in Springs, has a new collection of poems, “Without a Claim,” coming out in the fall of 2013. She will read from her work at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Aug. 4 at 5 p.m.