“Good times,” yelled Inda Eaton to the Stephen Talkhouse crowd last Thursday — which she is indeed known for creating, with her music, raspy soulful voice, truthful storytelling, and sense of humor.

    With a gift for connecting with an audience, Ms. Eaton, who has lived in East Hampton for seven years, showed the locals she gets it, saying how thankful she was for being able to walk into the I.G.A. after the frantic holiday weekend “and load up for next weekend.”

    “I do tend to talk,” she told the crowd, and she does, whether it’s between songs or between phrases. Generating laughs and smiles with her stories, she takes the stage with a go-with-the-flow attitude, as when she decided she wanted piano accompaniment and sang out for Joe Delia, scheduled to perform next, to come from the green room and play. The show’s end-time was decided by asking the audience, “Are there 70 20-year-olds lined up outside?” Then “Bring in the Bonackers!” she shouted. “We need the liquor sales!”

    “I feel sorry for the rest of America that doesn’t have a Talkhouse,” Ms. Eaton said. “We can just stop by and see our favorite band, even on a Thursday night.”

    Last week, Ms. Eaton sang selections from her eighth and newest album, “Go West.” In September she will do just that, in her mobile studio, “Delmer,” for a tour. “I absolutely love a road trip,” she said on Monday morning, “wandering around gas stations, eating crap you never eat. It feels so free — no past, no future.”

    To raise money for the cross-country tour, the artist has launched a campaign on Kickstarter.com, a funding platform for creative projects, with a goal of $25,000 to pay for gas, graphics, and marketing. The adventure will become a documentary film, including not only shows and interviews but “handshakes, hugs, and barbecues.”

    With 17 days left on the Kickstarter site as of Monday, Ms. Eaton had 26 backers who had contributed $4,140. A $10 minimum pledge gets the donor a digital download; thank-yous go up and up from there to include an autographed vinyl record and Indawear T-shirt, a beach bonfire dinner for four prepared by Inda, private house parties, a song written and recorded for the donor, and advertising space on the 32-foot tourmobile.

    Ms. Eaton has been performing her mellow acoustic, country western, and rock music around the country for years, opening for acts such as the Blues Travelers, Hootie and the Blowfish, LeAnn Rimes, and Molly Hatchet. Yes, she said, “It is exciting working for bigger artists,” but what she’s doing now on the grassroots level “feels so good.”

    “We played the Whaling Museum the other day, oh my god it was delicious,” she said. A room of talented musicians, and about “30 people . . . hanging on every note of every song.

. . . To play and be part of that, it doesn’t get any better.”    

    Her plan is to hit key cities, playing in clubs, and living rooms too, for those who have pledged for it, with a focus on the cities where those on the record have ties, including Milwaukee, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. The album was recorded over three days by Cynthia Daniels at Monk Music Studio in East Hampton, with Eve Nelson on piano, B Rehm-Geredes on guitar, Jeffrey Smith on drums and percussion, and Curt Mychael on bass. Local artists also graced the recording, with thumbprints from Nancy Atlas, Caroline Doctorow, Lee Lawler, and Randolph Hudson III. The whole project has been “one big miracle,” Ms. Eaton said, made on a shoestring, promoted and produced on a grassroots level.

    The tour will probably extend through October, with a return to East Hampton in time for an October show at Guild Hall with Nancy Atlas and Caroline Doctorow. The three women are friends, and get together regularly. “All of us absolutely love music and love to cook,” said Ms. Eaton. She predicted that the show will be “intimate, acoustic, and raw.”

    Ms. Eaton began her career as a classical pianist in Casper, Wyo., but by the time she entered Boston University the portable six-string was her instrument of choice. “Coffeehouses and college stairwells proved difficult with a piano,” she said on her Web site.

    Over the years, she has endured several medical tribulations, including a hip replacement following a car accident and cerebral malaria, which she contracted in Africa.

    “Without the soundtrack,” she said, “I couldn’t function. That is the way to get through the trying times. It’s the nicest benefit of things going to hell.”    Ms. Eaton was working in New York City before coming to the East End. A voice-over project here for CMEE, the children’s museum, introduced her to the area. She still does some voice-over and production work, she said, including co-writing and producing a Julie Andrews song for one of her books, “The Great American Mousical.”

    Ms. Nelson captures “the best of what I do,” she said, calling the pianist “a brilliant musician, a savant really. She has been able to combine her pop sensibility with my raw live energy.” She also paid tribute to Ms. Daniels, calling her “the cool hand at the controls to not screw up the vibe, to encourage it, and to get the sound quality right.”

    Always down for combining her talents with others, Ms. Eaton will play tomorrow at the Wolffer Estate wine stand with Lee Lawler (Mama Lee), Scott Hopson, and Jeff Marshall. On Saturday, she will play for the wounded warriors and the Soldier Ride participants at a picnic at Ocean View Farm in Amagansett, and on Aug. 29 she will be back at the Talkhouse, just before she hits the road.

    “With the amount of effort and love and joy put into this project, it’s a great reason to go out and celebrate it,” she said. “Life is short. When a creative project comes along that allows you to have fun, break bread, talk about the truth, whatever that is to you — I can’t ask for anything more.”

   It was a Thursday afternoon, and Monica Banks was home listening to NPR. But it could have been any day, really, as long as she was at work in her East Hampton Village studio or in the workroom she keeps in her house.

    The fact that the artist works to the jumbled sounds of nations crumbling, world economies sputtering, talking heads debating health care reform, or, perhaps in lighter moments, the poignant oral histories of “Storycorps” resonates in her artistic output and seems to urge her along in her practice.

    While it can be seen literally in her recent series “Backstory,” it manifests itself in her “Cloud” sculptures, too, with their random yet obsessively attached doodads and whoziwhatzits: a tangle of buttons, dead insects, plastic mini-figures she has reformed into Centaur-like juxtapositions, and all manner of junk drawer marginalia. The “Clouds” are beautiful and sad in their colorful maximal-ism just as the stark white mini-figures of “Backstory” are in their minimal way.

    Speaking about “Backstory” recently at her house and studio, she said she was moved to begin the series after the earthquake in Haiti, and hearing about the dead bodies, the mass graves, and the disease and devastation on that island.

    If she is influenced by current events in that series, it is history she mines for the other. The “Clouds” come from “boxes of stuff from my childhood room and then I process my childhood with my current life with things like dog hair and dryer lint.”

    The artist is still pursuing both series, and she has another one in development. Yet the themes in “Backstory” seem to have the most resonance for her, no doubt for their strong emotional impact and as a way “to figure things out.” The themes of Haiti echo in many news stories past and present from Syria, Bosnia, Rwanda, to New Orleans after the hurricane, even the death toll of AIDS, she said. “I became compelled to make these tiny bodies.”

    First they were just piles assembled in shadow boxes in the manner of a mass grave. The bodies were generalized with few discernible features. “There’s a transition now from less piles of figures to fewer, but more in agony.” She realized recently that the change in approach was inspired by the Pompeii exhibit brought to New York in 2011 and the casts of dead bodies in the last gasp of their lives.

    “You often don’t know what your influences are until you realize it as you’re working. Then you think, ‘Oh, of course, that moment of life and death, that agony, that’s even more compelling.’ That was a turning point for me.” These figures are collaged on a board, as a relief, but she also organizes them in ways inspired by some of her favorite painters. Jasper Johns’s “Target” series and Mark Rothko’s layered color planes are some of her sources. The figures can be long and lean, short and stout, or any combination in a variety of poses, all evoking pain of some kind. “We always want to tell ourselves that people rest in peace, but it’s hard to buy sometimes.”

    Still another manifestation of the same theme is a group of works she has done that are just fragments of those figures, very small body parts or bones, too tiny and generic to be mentally catalogued, as in this is an arm here, or a jawbone there, but utterly recognizable when seen as part of the series. They are the same bodies, but just breaking down and fading from our view and memory over time.

    The idea of all these dead forms sounds disturbing or even creepy at first pass, but the actual execution is beautiful and full of humanity and reverence. She works in white clay for the figures and gray backing, which is somber and pure. “The material and scale came completely out of emotion. I didn’t set out to do anything visually, it came out of feelings of helplessness” that arose from her reaction to these tragedies.

    Along with the grander worldview, there is a personal side as well to the emotion they bring to the viewer. “It goes from the political to the personal. We’re not all teetering between life and death, but we all feel pain. I was trying to dignify the anonymous victims of natural and human-caused disasters and sanctify the pain we all feel as part of life. . . . It’s why the figures are so small and in a box and protected. They’re important.”

    Ms. Banks was doing completely different work in steel only a few years ago. She still has some works in progress in her studio, but the clay work has brought a new dimension to her sculpting. “I bought the clay because I wanted to try something different that I was not comfortable with. . . . Clay is a different sensation than steel where you’re always wearing gloves and have to be careful with a torch.”

    The hands-on feeling and its primordial nature appealed to her. She had purchased the clay before the earthquake and was working on figures as a reaction to the health care reform debate, after hearing stories of people getting sick and how the existing system failed them. They were larger figures then, but the same suffering, injustice, and cruelty she felt listening to those stories translated rather easily to the next phase of her explorations of human trauma.

    As the artist revealed her work in the workroom in her house and on the walls of her living area, a hanging mini curtain on the wall of her dining room attracted attention. The piece, two feet or so square, looked from afar as if it were made from mica sheets or some other thin, translucent substance. Up close however, it became immediately obvious that they were actually teeth on 256 little rectangles of X-ray film joined to each other by wire and then attached to a hanging rod.

    They are simultaneously beautiful, mysterious, elemental, sad, and eerie and are another natural extension of the artist’s aesthetic as well as the themes of “Backstory.” Called “Remains,” these were quite new works, just begun in the spring. She started collecting them a few years ago when she saw her dentist’s office throwing out the old films as they went digital. “I just said no, I have to have them. They are so evocative.”

     She said at first she wasn’t sure how they related to the other work, but she remembered the stories of teeth being pulled from the victims of the Holocaust and she thought that the white clay she was working in also looked like teeth. She acknowledged that teeth are often used to identify victims of accidents and disasters who might not be able to be identified in other ways. “It makes everyone special and different, an identifying feature.”

    She is still working on the other series and there were examples of works in progress in the house.

    Of the X-ray films, she has started to cull the children’s teeth images for a piece featuring just them. “That’s even more powerful to me, the idea of little children and being exposed to radiation.”

    The films feel to her “like a natural progression. Without the context they are probably not as powerful, but they still work on their own.” She had the films for a couple of years before she knew what to do with them. “They’re funny but disturbing, intimate, and anonymous, but I never thought beforehand, ‘Oh gee, if I can only get my hands on a few thousand dental X-rays.’ ”

   Sightings of literary legends on the East End are almost commonplace, but a look into the heart and mind of Virginia Woolf is a rare opportunity. Through the end of the summer, Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in East Hampton is showcasing an important collection documenting the life and work of the writer and feminist — manna to Woolf enthusiasts.

    From the library of William Beekman, the collection is being sold as a unit and, alas, will soon disappear into institutional or private hands. We may never again gain such rich insight into the private Woolf, literary and personal.

    While he was still a Harvard undergraduate, Mr. Beekman acquired a first edition of “The Waves,” before the 1972 biography by Woolf’s nephew reignited interest in her life and career. Over 40-odd years, his collection has evolved from first editions of the books to include more personal material documenting her relationship with her husband, Leonard Woolf; her sister, Vanessa Bell; her beloved nephews, Julian and Quentin, and friends and lovers in and outside the legendary intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury Group.

    Here, through Mr. Beekman’s curatorial eye, the Woolf long mythologized as aloof and troubled springs into new life. She is at turns bold and insecure, often funny, loving, insightful, scolding, and even gossipy. “Well, I won’t be indiscreet but between you and me that’s a marriage bound for the rocks,” she wrote about a friend in a letter to Quentin Bell. “Victor would make me shoot him in ten minutes.”

    The earliest piece in the collection is a rare and haunting photo, showing “Ginia” Stephen at 13 in mourning for her mother, her dark and melancholy face faintly recognizable from iconic portraits of her later years. Famously, Woolf had her first of several mental breakdowns after her mother died, a loss that was compounded by the death of a half sister and later her father, Leslie Stephen, and brother Thoby. Still another photo shows an unabashedly happy Virginia Stephen at the beach with Clive Bell, just after he married her sister, Vanessa. The exhibition catalog so grippingly describes the context of such photos — a portrait by “devil woman” Gisele Freund infuriated her — you may have to restrain yourself from pulling up a chair and reading it all.

    Much has been speculated about Virginia’s relationship with her husband, Leonard, a great deal not flattering to the man himself. This collection focuses on the playful banter of their partnership, in which Leonard was a self-appointed handler. The Woolfs often affectionately referred to each other as “animal avatars” in their personal zoo. In a letter to Vita Sackville-West, Leonard wrote, “I am entrusting a valuable animal out of my menagerie to you for the night. It is not quite sound in the head piece. It should be well fed & put to bed punctually at 11.”

    Together, the Woolfs started Hogarth Press, with the purchase of a printing press in 1917. In a letter to their subscribers they explain that they want “to publish at low prices short works of merit, in prose or poetry” that might not be of interest commercially. Their first effort, more of a “hobby of printing,” was “Two Stories,” one by each of the publishers. The print runs of “Three Stories” ended up with three separate covers, bound by Virginia, all of which are on display here.

    Hogarth would, of course, become the creative and political forum of the Bloomsbury Group and the fulcrum of Woolf’s writing career. “Yes, I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like,” she reported in her diary in 1925.

    What a pleasure it is to see fine first editions with dust jackets of those familiar titles — “Jacob’s Room,” “Mrs. Dalloway,” “To the Lighthouse,” “A Room of One’s Own” — with cover art by Vanessa Bell. The collection includes another important volume, Leonard’s “The Village in the Jungle,” inscribed to Virginia and described as the cornerstone document of their relationship:

I’ve given you all the little, that I’ve to give;

You’ve given me all, that for me is all there is;

So now I just give back what you have given —

If there is anything to give in this.

    There were other entanglements. Woolf was more the siren than we might have thought. She turned down a proposal from a married suitor, imploring him in a subsequent letter to abandon hope. But her true love, by her sister’s reckoning, was the writer Vita Sackville-West, whose poetry to Virginia, shown here in two working manuscripts, will sweep you away with its imagery.

    Virginia’s homage to Vita was “Orlando,” her mock biography in which the subject inhabits three centuries and two genders. A rare presentation copy of the novel is included here.

    From this collection, it is clear that Woolf had abundant love, public recognition, and success that was palpable even to her. Nonetheless, that intolerable “blankness” would again overtake her after her biography of Roger Fry, the artist who had such a profound influence on her lyrical prose. Her finished books always had the effect of abandonment.

    A series of eight letters from Vanessa and Leonard to Vita detail Virginia’s disappearance and presumed death. “I think she has drowned herself,” wrote Leonard, “as I found her stick floating in the river. . . .” With stones in her pocket, Woolf had walked into the river Ouse. The collection includes a typescript of Vita’s memorial poem, which concludes, “She has now gone/Into the prouder world of immortality.”

Paula Hayes

    Fears about the environment are often expressed in a barrage of punishing facts, but Paula Hayes comes at a solution with a living metaphor. The artist’s miniature landscapes suggest the fragility of our natural world, seducing us into paying attention to what’s going on. Along with her quirky, gorgeous terrariums and botanical sculptures, Ms. Hayes is presenting process drawings of the 1990s at Glenn Horowitz until the end of the month, as well as a driftwood sound piece, a collaboration with her husband, Teo Camporeale.

    In pieces such as “Living Time Machine Terrarium TM6,” Ms. Hayes has fashioned lush, tiny landscapes of botanical life in womblike blown-glass enclosures of her own design. The care and feeding of these living works are treated as a formal agreement between artist and collector — a responsibility that becomes a part of the work. Equally beautiful, the Crystal Terrariums are set pieces that incorporate sand, stones, minerals, and crystals, and suggest the complex layers of the earth’s crust. Because of the moon’s profound influence on human habits, their creation is calibrated on lunar cycles. The small botanical sculptures — in malleable, off-kilter containers — have their own demanding personalities. It’s impossible to conceive of them simply as plant life.

    “Paula Hayes: Drawings & Objects” is a site-specific exhibition, co-curated by Jeremy Sanders and Stephanie Hodor. The early drawings make this an interesting primer to Ms. Hayes’s work, in which fertility — human, botanical, and artistic — is underscored. Her landscapes and installations have been part of the Museum of Modern Art, the Wexner Center, the Tang Museum, and, more recently, the Lever House. As an accompanying monograph describes, Ms. Hayes catches the zeitgeist of our time, combining art, landscape design, architecture, gardening, and horticulture.

Fireplace Opens Koh

    A solo show by Terence Koh, “yes, pleased,” will open at the Fireplace Project in Springs tomorrow. In his first presentation at the gallery, Mr. Koh will offer a variety of mediums drawn from his work in drawing, sculpture, video, performance, and the Internet.

    Mr. Koh, who was born in Beijing and raised by adoptive parents in Canada, was known as “asianpunkboy” prior to 2004, a name under which he designed artist books and zines and had many followers. He has since developed a public persona that is its own work of art, dressing only in white and living only in white surroundings. His work has been described as “born of queer youth culture and luxurious decadence.”

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. The show will remain on view through Aug. 12.

Eve Stuart in Springs

    Eve Stuart, who divides her time between New York and East Hampton, will present her photographs this weekend at Ashawagh Hall. The exhibition opens on Saturday, with a reception from 4 to 7 p.m.

    Ms. Stuart has studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, the School of Visual Arts, and the International Center for Photography, among other institutions. Her images of ordinary objects are known for an ethereal or otherworldly sensibility that seems to come from the past.

Markel’s New Show

    Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in Bridgehampton will hold a group show beginning today and on view through Aug. 2. The artists, Eric Blum, Dan Gualdoni, and Annie Wildey, will all exhibit paintings.

    Ms. Wildey straddles both abstraction and representation in her renderings of waterways, a battle of freedom and control, she says. Mr. Gualdoni takes a more internal approach to his imagery, drawing from memory of places he has been, using a rich but monochromatic palette derived from printer’s ink and glue. Mr. Blum tends to find his images peripherally, attempting to capture glimpses of things that may or may not have been there. His materials are beeswax, silk, and resin, which create a scrimlike surface to view his semiabstracted compositions.

Woodblocks of the City

    Woodblock prints of New York City by Ted Davies will be shown at Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor from today through Aug. 9.

    Mr. Davies, who died in 1993, captured an earlier era. His subject matter includes Chinese laundries, in-town gas stations, and the old elevated trains. The colors he employs — warm yellows, oranges, and browns — heighten this sense of nostalgia. The highly detailed compositions reveal a vision of the city that is intimate and amused, according to the gallery. The artist lived in New York and Sag Harbor.

    Jude Amsel’s glass sculpture, with her photographic images floating within, will also be on view. Her work, meant to be placed on walls or pedestals, often deals with the themes of women’s drive for success and wealth.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

Studio Opening

    Daria Deshuk will open her studio space on Maple Lane in Bridgehampton to present “Resonance,” which was organized by Donna Leatherman. A reception serving summer cocktails will be held on Wednesday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    Ms. Deshuk will show photographs from her “Heaven on Earth” and “Meeting Narcissus” series, which explore healthy feminine iconography. The show will remain on view through August.

“For the Birds” in Sag

    The Sag Harbor Whaling Museum is presenting a group show organized by Peter Marcelle through Sept. 3. The theme is “For the Birds.”

    Artists in the exhibition include John Alexander, Eric Ernst, Kimberly Goff, Jane Johnson, Tom Judd, Susan Lazarus-Reimen, Steve Mannino, Dina Merrill, Paton Miller, Amy Pilkington, Dan Rizzie, Hunt Slonem, Joseph Stella, Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, and Darius Yektai.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Canio’s Landscapes

    “Imaginary Landscapes,” featuring paintings and pastels by Pamela Collins Focarino and Gabriele Raacke’s reverse paintings on glass, will open at Canio’s Books today and will remain on view through Aug. 16.

    A reception will be held tomorrow evening from 5 to 7.

Isham Open Studio

    Sheila Isham will open her Southampton studio for three days this weekend, from tomorrow through Sunday. The artist plans to show works from a series called “China Revisited,” consisting  of recent calligraphic paintings and works on paper, along with some older works painted in the early 1960s, when she was living in Hong Kong.

    The studio will be open tomorrow and Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m. and on Sunday from noon to 3 p.m. The address is 55 Mariner Drive.

Barry McCallion’s Books

    The Community Arts Project will present Barry McCallion and “The Oarsman’s Library,” a demonstration of the production of artists’ books, on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Springs Presbyterian Church’s parish hall.

    Mr. McCallion has had a long career as a painter and has exhibited widely in Australia and Europe. More recently, he began his investigations into book arts.    Refreshments will be served following the presentation. A donation of $10 will be requested for the church and its food pantry.

Parrish Talks

    The Parrish Art Museum will present two talks in the week ahead related to its exhibitions now on view.

    Adam Bartos, a photographer, whose images from Long Island are now being shown at the museum, will speak with Alicia Longwell, the chief curator of the Parrish, tomorrow at noon about his work. The talk is free with museum admission.

    Next Thursday, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, co-founders of Friends of the High Line, will discuss the creation and evolution of the elevated park in West Chelsea with Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel. She is the curator of the exhibition “Landmarks of New York,” a photography show now on view, and a founding High Line director. This talk will be presented at 6:30 p.m.; tickets are $10, or  $5 for members. Reservations are required.

A “Gorilla Monsoon”

    Outeast Gallery in Montauk will present a solo show of Mason Saltarrelli titled “Gorilla Monsoon,” beginning tonight with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m.

    Originally from New Orleans, Mr. Saltarrelli is now Brooklyn-based. He makes narrative works on paper and wood with themes drawn from “religious, tribal, and personal symbology,” according to the gallery.

    The show will be on view through Aug. 13.

Clay Art

    The Celadon Gallery in Water Mill will show “Clay: Collect it, Use it, Wear it!” beginning tomorrow.

    The juried show is a collaboration between the Long Island Craft Guild and the Clay Art Guild of the Hamptons. It features Jeanne Berkowitz, Gina Mars, Puneeta Mittal, Maria Orlova, Sigrid Owen, Patricia Hubbard-Ragette, Barbara Rocco, Phyllis Sullivan, Tom Walter, and Joan Walton.

    A reception will be held on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. The show will remain on view through Aug. 12.

Selling Your Art

    The last seminar of Jane Martin’s four-part series “The Business of Art” will tackle the complexities of taking one’s art to market. “Selling Your Art” will cover how to develop relationships with galleries, art consultants, interior designers, and art fairs. It will also explore taking one’s artwork straight to national and international audiences through Internet sites such as 1st Dibs, allowing artists to be gatekeepers of their own market.

    The guest speakers are Lisa Freedman, a public relations strategist for the arts, and Anne Raymond, an artist.

    The class will be held at the Springs Presbyterian Church from 5 to 7 p.m. The cost is $40, payable by cash or check only, at the door. No reservations are required.

   Suddyn, a band led by two brothers from Montauk, now has a new drummer, a new name — the Rebel Light — and a new gig: the July 28 and 29 Catalpa music festival on Manhattan’s Randalls Island. Alan and Jarrett Steil will fly home from Los Angeles this week for the show. With the new drummer, Brandon Cook, they will join headliners such as the Black Keys and Snoop Dogg.

    “It’s more than a name change,” Alan Steil said by phone earlier this month. Having learned a lot over the last few years, working with many different producers, the band changed its sound, as well, he said. They still “take what we want from the past,” he said, referring to a heavily produced “anthem song” rock sound, but expand on it. It “sounded great but it wasn’t organic enough.”

    While recording in-house demos that included vocals in a bathroom, the band enjoyed what they heard and decided to keep the tracks. Their new music is less guitar-based, Mr. Steil said. He played trumpet on a song for the first time, having learned the instrument as a youngster. He called the new, “totally different approach” real and honest. The two brothers tend to evolve musically in a similar way and “wind up in the same spot,” he said.

    The Steils launched their career in Ireland a few years ago, releasing singles and hitting the top-20 charts a few times. Their music has also been played on MTV and VH1 television shows like “Jersey Shore” and “Road Rules,” which resulted in increased sales of songs and CDs.

    The brothers grew up surfing and playing music in Montauk, where their parents still live. “It was hard, none of our friends played music or took it seriously,” Alan Steil said. Their preferred location is now Los Angeles, where they found a vibrant music scene and developed new friends.

    The Catalpa music festival boasts more than 40 performers across the genres of blues, rock, hip-hop, electronic, reggae, and indie rock. For those who cannot swing a $179.99 general admission weekend ticket or $99.99 for one day (not including parking or the ferry to get to Randalls Island), Mr. Steil said he would give away four tickets on a local radio show this week.

   Stony Brook Southampton announced last week that Christine Vachon, an independent filmmaker, has joined its faculty to begin the process of establishing a graduate program in film on the campus.

    Ms. Vachon, whose company, Killer Films, has been behind the production of “Far from Heaven,” “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Happiness,” and “I’m Not There,” among others, will be honored on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. during the school’s fifth annual Pakula Prize event, as part of its annual writers conference and broader “Southampton Arts Summer” series. Clips from her 70 films will be shown at the event, which is open to the public.

    Killer Films will participate in the new graduate program, allowing the school to enter the field with a fully realized production facility behind it. The company, which will split its operations between its offices in New York City and the Southampton campus, will offer internships to the students.

    “The goal is to match the reality of the film business today. That means turning the traditional film school on its head,” Ms. Vachon said in a release.

    The program will seek partnerships with distributors such as YouTube, Google, AOL, and other nontraditional platforms. Within the school, it will coordinate with Stony Brook’s programs in science and technology and the Stony Brook Film Festival, held every July.

    The school has recently developed courses in scriptwriting, directing, acting, screenwriting, digital filmmaking, and film criticism, with instructors including John Patrick Shanley, Jon Robin Baitz, Neal Gabler, and Julie Andrews.

    Ms. Vachon will offer a free master class in film production, which is open to the public, on Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m. Registration is through stonybrook.edu. 

   Films, thought-provoking talks, cab­aret, and pop music are on the schedule at Guild Hall this week.

    The Red Carpet film series will present two documentaries by Albert Maysles — “Gimme Shelter” tonight and “The Love We Make” tomorrow, both at 8 p.m.

    “Gimme Shelter,” tells the story of the tragic 1969 concert featuring the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway at which a fan was stabbed to death in a near riot. Ali Wentworth will moderate a discussion after the screening with Mr. Maysles and other guests to be announced.

    Mr. Maysles will be back at Guild Hall tomorrow to discuss “The Love We Make,” with Michelle Murphy Strada and other guests. The film follows Paul McCartney after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 as he organized an all-star benefit concert, the Concert for New York City. It shows his band rehearsing for the concert and includes interviews on the street with New Yorkers and behind-the-scenes interviews with Dan Rather, Howard Stern, and others, and also features footage from the concert of people such as David Bowie, Steve Buscemi, Eric Clapton, President Bill Clinton, Sheryl Crow, Leonardo DiCaprio, Harrison Ford, Mick Jagger, Jay Z, Billy Joel, Elton John, Stella McCartney, Gov. George Pataki, Keith Richards, James Taylor, Pete Townshend, and more.

    The Red Carpet series will continue next Thursday with “#whilewewatch,” a look at the media revolution that emerged from the Occupy Wall Street events at Zuccoti Park in New York City as protesters used Twitter, texting, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, and livestream to get their story out to the world. Steven Gaines, an author and journalist, will moderate a discussion after the screening with Kevin Breslin, who directed the film. That screening will also begin at 8 p.m.

    Tickets for each evening of the Red Carpet series are $22, or $20 for members.

    On Saturday, TEDxEastHampton will bring a daylong program of video and live speakers to Guild Hall to share “ideas worth spreading.”

    The program is an offshoot of the TED conferences held each year in Long Beach, Calif., at which, according to the TED Web site, “the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less)” on a range of technology, entertainment, and design topics. There is also a TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh each summer and annual TED Prizes, which have gone to such people as the chef and food activist Jamie Oliver, President Clinton, the musician and activist Bono, and the oceanographer Sylvia Earle.

    TEDxEastHampton, which will run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., will feature Jesse Keenan, the research director for the Columbia University Center for Urban Real Estate at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation; Luc Wilson, a designer at Young Projects; Muchan Park, a designer at Latent Productions; Sarah Silverman, an Etsy artist and East Hampton High School student; James Ramsey, principal of RAAD Studio and the creator of the LowLine, an underground park on New York’s Lower East Side, and Reki Hattori, chief technology officer and application developer at Agency Protocol, a Web development company. TEDx is free, but tickets must be reserved in advance at the box office.

    That night at 8, Mark Ballas, a professional dancer who appears on “Dancing With the Stars,” will perform music from his debut album “HurtBox Love,” and his upcoming fall CD in the John Drew Theater. Mr. Ballas will sing and play acoustic guitar accompanied by Jeff LeBlanc.

    Tickets for prime orchestra seating and V.I.P. reception are $35; orchestra tickets are $25, or $23 members, and balcony tickets cost $20 or $18.

    Jacques Brel will close the weekend on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. with “Jacques Brel Returns: The Music of Brel, Blau, Shuman, and Jounnest en Cabaret,” which has been playing Off Broadway for over a year. Anna Bergman, P.J. Baccari, Tamra Hayden, Arlo Hill, and Ereni Sevasti star in the production. Tickets start at $40, or $38 for members.

   When George Frederic Handel presented his newly composed anthems for the coronation of George II and Queen Caroline in Westminster Abbey in 1727, the Archbishop of Canterbury is said to have commented, “The Anthems in confusion; all irregular in the music.”

    Poor George Frederic. There’s nothing about his masterly compositions that should evoke confusion or the accusation of irregularity, so unless the good archbishop was tone-deaf (always a possibility), we can only conclude that, with all the resources of London at his disposal, Handel must have had a disastrous performance. Too bad he couldn’t have made it over to the colonies, where, 285 years later, he would have heard his thrilling celebration music done up right in performances that were inspiring in their clarity, cohesion, and dynamic.

    Not only that, he would have heard a stirring performance of a masterpiece by his great successor. The so-called “Lord Nelson Mass” of Franz Joseph Haydn (who called it a “mass for troubled times” — also sometimes translated as “mass in a time of war”— reflects the unsettled period of the Napoleonic wars.

    How did Lord Nelson’s name get attached to this work? Haydn had recently had two very successful sojourns in London but this piece was written after his definitive return to Austria. Nelson’s naval victories over the French made him a big hero in Vienna, and the British admiral is said to have met Haydn on the occasion of a visit to Austria in 1800, only a couple of years after the piece was written.

    Nelson may even have heard a performance of the Mass to which his name has become permanently attached. The Handel pieces were attractive, but the focus was on the Haydn, a veritable musical monument in more ways than one.

    This is not just conventional religious music. It is often regarded as a very symphonic work, but it’s also a dramatic vocal piece, with stunning music for voices. It starts out in an atmosphere of minor-key doom and gloom but ends up in the sunshine of an almost operatic finale that is all light and joy; in between, there is a kind of narrative thread that never loses its forward motion. There are no true songs or arias, but Haydn uses the vocal quartet to set off the clear shimmer of solo voices against the powerful responses of the chorus, a kind of musical chiaroscuro, of which he was a master.

    In Saturday’s performance by the Choral Society of the Hamptons, the solo quartet was dominated by the angelic lead voice of the soprano Anita Johnson, a perfect vehicle for the classical ring of Haydn’s melodic inventions; her inviting calls often provoked a thrilling response from the chorus. There were also strong contributions from her colleagues in the quartet: the mezzo, Charlene Marcinko, the very elegant-voiced tenor Eapen Leubner (who, let it be noted, sang holding an iPad instead of the traditional vocal score), and the bass, Eric Johnson, a last-minute fill-in for the originally scheduled singer. Mr. Johnson’s voice sounded a little worn at times but otherwise he blended in with his colleagues as though he had been singing with them all his life.

    I don’t know where the musicians of the South Fork Chamber Ensemble actually come from but, aside from an occasionally hesitant string sound, they constituted a strong and musical counterpart to the voices, with oboes playing major solos in the Handel pieces (which included an instrumental excerpt from the oratorio “Solomon”) and trumpets and organ taking equally important roles in the Haydn.

    Haydn’s employers, the Esterhazys, were on an austerity kick and their entire wind section was laid off; however this didn’t seem to bother Haydn, whose telling orchestration for strings, trumpets and drums, and organ was, except for a couple of moments of disparity with the somewhat distantly placed organ, a big part of the success of the evening.

    The Choral Society does not go back to Handel’s or Haydn’s time but it is one of the East End’s most durable and praiseworthy modern institutions; it was founded in 1946 and has thus passed the three-quarters-of-a-century mark. It man­ages to represent traditional culture in fast-moving times without losing its contemporary feel. And it maintains its status as an amateur community organization without sacrificing musical quality, beauty of sound, rhythmic energy, or accuracy.

    Mark Mangini, the conductor, seems to have solved one of the perennial problems of amateur choruses — weakness in the tenor section — by adding mezzos to the high-voiced men, achieving a solid balance of the four vocal sections. The singing always had forward energy and depth of feeling combined with clarity and sound quality.

    Mr. Mangini is a quiet, non-showy presence on the podium but he had a solid and clear command of both vocal and instrumental forces. The parish hall of East Hampton’s Most Holy Trinity Church has a bright sound that let the contrapuntal voices of these works shine through. And I have the impression that the presence of a large and enthusiastic audience galvanized the performers and helped turn a solid but potentially overwhelming challenge into a dynamic and communicative reading of a major work that caught its vocal, symphonic, and theatrical character, always in good measure.

    Eric Salzman’s “Big Jim & the Small-time Investors” had its first coming-out this spring in a Center for Contemporary Opera workshop at the Flea Theater in New York City. His early prize-winning “Civilization & Its Discontents,” co-written with Michael Sahl, has just been released by Labor Records. “The Nude Paper Sermon” with actor Stacy Keach and the Nonesuch Consort is scheduled to be out in the early fall. “The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body,” Mr. Salzman’s pioneering study of new and experimental opera and music-theater, was written with Thomas Desi of Vienna and is published by Oxford University Press.

   Scott Sandell grabbed one of a dozen baseballs from a tall glass vase on his desk and began rubbing the red stitching as he held the ball up for inspection. “It’s a good design,” he said, admiring the ball’s leather cover, “a beautiful thing.” The Sag Harbor artist said that the driving force in his life is his “quest to make a beautiful object.”

    The objects in his case are predominantly prints. He adopted the medium while studying for a B.F.A. at the University of Minnesota and has continued to work in it ever since, at one point sneaking back into his old school to run prints overnight and eventually buying his own 2,500-pound press.

    Now, in addition to his passion for printmaking, he will lead a new graduate-level visual arts program at Stony Brook Southampton, beginning with operating the Almost Beachfront Digital Studio, which will turn out large-scale prints at the annual Writers Conference this month. “It’s a trial balloon,” he said, “we’ll see how it goes. My feelings were that any new program had to reflect the recent changes in the world.”

    In his office at the Shinnecock Hills campus recently, the 6-foot-3 58-year-old climbed onto his chair, squatting like a little boy about to play marbles. “I can’t sit still,” he said. “I’m never satisfied with what there is.”  He punctuated his words with his long fingers as if he were molding clay, then rested his head against his hand, echoing the lines of Rodin’s “The Thinker.”

    A sailing enthusiast, dressed in topsiders and jeans for his interview, he comes aboard at Stony Brook Southampton in the midst of a transition to its new identity as a graduate arts facility. Visual arts is the latest discipline to be offered at the campus, which also offers M.F.A.s in theater, film, and creative writing and literature.

    Mr. Sandell tucked his shoulder-length white hair behind one ear and continued. “Our program needed to embrace new technology, recognize traditional methods, address contemporary issues in the visual arts, and provide a solid practical business experience to help artists negotiate the art world,” he said. “I think we’ve done all of these things with the classes we’ll be hosting this summer.”

    Robert Reeves, the Stony Brook associate provost in charge of the Southampton graduate arts campus, recruited Mr. Sandell last fall to start a visual arts program as the latest component of the rapidly evolving annual Southampton Writers Conference, which has become the traditional launching point for the college’s degree programs.

    Mr. Reeves said he first came to know Mr. Sandell’s work when his art was featured in The Southampton Review, or TSR, the literary and art journal published by the creative writing and literature M.F.A. program.

    Mr. Sandell and his wife, Catherine, used to come to the campus for evening events during the summer writing conferences. “Writing and painting are all the same in an artistic venture.” He recalled walking away “absolutely inspired.”

    Mr. Reeves asked him to describe his vision for a graduate level program that could incorporate the visual arts with creative writing and literature. “To be a part of this team,” Mr. Reeves explained, “You have to be able to build something from scratch based on our model.”

    Mr. Sandell went home and built a diorama out of foam-core board, complete with tiny classrooms and miniature artist studios. He laughed as he remembered changing his diorama into a brochure, “so that Reeves wouldn’t think I’m as nuts as I am.”

    Notwithstanding an inability to sit still, there is nothing nutty about this artist, whose installations, paintings, and prints can be found in collections from Tokyo to Dubai, and from South Africa to the secure interior of the Internal Revenue Service building in Kansas City.

    Jumping down from his chair and standing at his outsize drawing board-desk, he tapped his computer keyboard with ink-stained fingers to show off a 1970s photo of his mentor at the University of Michigan, the lithography professor Zigmunds Priede, who was connected to some of the great contemporary printmakers of the time — Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and Cy Twombly, among others.

    After college, Mr. Sandell took a job as a sail maker in Peewaukee, Wisc. He picked up extra money by driving a delivery truck for a racing sailboat company. But his zeal for printmaking pulled him back in the spring of 1976 to Minneapolis, for those all-nighter printmaking sessions in the university studios. “It was me and the Mississippi river rats,” the artist joked. “I developed a technique for mono prints wherein I could print unlimited colors with one press run.” He hopped off his chair again, this time to show an image of one of his prints from that period, a large, colorful work in the shape of a kimono.

    In the 1970s, Mr. Sandell went to New York City, found a dealer to represent him, bought a black Porsche, rented a loft in the Minneapolis warehouse district, bought his 2,500-pound press, and started making prints full time. Also a musician, he formed a band called the Rods and Cones. By 1979, he had had his first art shows in New York City and Chicago. But he continued to drive the sailboat delivery truck for fun.

    After delivering three boats to Yale in 1980, Mr. Sandell continued driving down I-95 on a whim until he reached the ferry to Long Island. “I went east searching for my idols: Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, and Larry Rivers,” he said as he returned to his perch on the chair. “I felt like I needed to get out of Dodge.”

    He sold his press and his Porsche and moved to Southampton. By 1990 he had settled in Sag Harbor with his wife and two sons.

    He conceded that he has been lucky to be able to support his family with his art, noting that “artists go through cycles of commercial success.” As a visiting artist at Pierson High in Sag Harbor for the last 10 years, he has been working on an installation piece consisting of 20 very small racing sailboats, which he said the students “have been dutifully building.” 

    The Stony Brook Southampton campus has been the victim of funding issues since Long Island University ran Southampton College there. “Developing a program that publishes fine prints could underwrite much of our visual arts program here at Stony Brook Southampton,” he said. “Our program also has the potential to join with the publishing operations at three other universities, Tandem Press, Tamarind Editions, and Vermillion Editions.”

    Musing about the future, he suggested that the inclusion of a visual arts component during the summer conferences might lead eventually to an M.F.A. in visual arts, which could in turn lead to an in-house design department, book publishing and print editions connected with The Southampton Review, workshops in Florence, Italy, and a visual arts semester abroad program, which would “make our program attractive to both M.F.A. candidates and practicing artists looking to develop and expand their work.”

    He pulled one knee up to his chin. “There is much to be excited about,” he concluded with pride, “and I’d like to think the possibilities are endless.”

    Tula Holmes is an M.F.A. candidate in the creative writing and literature program at Stony Brook Southampton. 

   Beginning this weekend a series of July art fairs will erect tents in a variety of fields from Bridgehampton to South­ampton, offering attendees a pleasant environment to see work from galleries from the East End to Europe and beyond under one roof while benefiting some local nonprofit organizations.

    First up is the oldest, ArtHamptons, which will begin its fifth iteration today at Nova’s Ark Project in Bridgehampton with two benefit previews for the LongHouse Reserve. It will remain open through Sunday.

    In addition to the offerings of its 75 or so exhibitors, there will be a number of events such as a birthday party for Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong fame, who is a noted art collector, and a conversation with Dan Rizzie and Bruce Helander on the role of money in art making. A painting raffle and an event tomorrow, “Pollock at 100,” will benefit the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs. Ed Moses, an artist and Gail Levin, an art historian and author, will also speak at separate events and Kristin Verano will offer a live performance. More information about these and other events are on the fair’s Web site arthamptons.com.

    Beginning next Thursday through July 22, artMRKT Hamptons will return in its second visit to the grounds of the Bridgehampton Historical Society’s Corwith House. Its opening night preview will benefit the Parrish Art Museum. Guests will enjoy “refined” summer barbeque foods prepared by Leon Gunn, a Brooklyn chef.

    Many New York City galleries will participate as well as some East End galleries familiar to those in East Hampton, Bridgehampton, and Shelter Island. Some 40 galleries will be included, a few from as far away as Oakland, Calif. (Gallery Sam), and Florence, Italy (Arte Nova).

    On July 26, Art Southampton, an off-shoot of Art Miami, will open with about 50 exhibitors on the grounds of the Elks Club in Southampton. The preview will benefit Southampton Hospital. The next night, the fair will have an event to benefit the Watermill Center. A film about the life of John Chamberlain, a Shelter Island sculptor, will be shown, and Susan Davidson, a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, will speak on the artist’s legacy. The fair will run through July 31.