Jong on E.L. James

    BookHampton will host a provocative discussion with Erica Jong on Saturday at 8 p.m. at the East Hampton store. She will discuss the book “Fifty Shades of Grey” in a talk called “Is This What We’ve Come To?”

    Ms. Jong’s 1973 “Fear of Flying” was one of the first popular erotic novels penned by a woman. She has continued to write in that genre, crafting some of the more graphic sexual descriptions in contemporary fiction.

    She objects to the popular “Fifty Shades” trilogy because, in her words, “it is just bad writing. That and the fact that the heroine is subservient, allowing her body to be abused in order to ‘get her man.’ Is this what we’ve come to?”

‘Graduate’ Auditions

    Center Stage at the Southampton Cultural Center will hold open auditions for performances of “The Graduate,” based on the 1963 novel and 1967 film of the same title, on Sunday at 4 p.m. and Monday at 6 p.m. The center is on Pond Lane in Southampton Village.

    Michael Disher will direct the play, which was adapted for the London stage in 2001 by Terry Johnson. The film told the story of Benjamin Braddock, a recent and aimless university graduate who is seduced by an older woman and falls in love with her daughter.

    No prepared monologue is required. Sides will be provided at the auditions. Auditions will begin promptly; late arrivals will be seen at the discretion of the director. Performances will begin on July 12 and run through July 29. Questions can be e-mailed to Mr. Disher at [email protected].

‘Black Tie’ Onstage

    The Hampton Theatre Company will present “Black Tie” at the Quogue Community Hall beginning next Thursday. A.R. Gurney’s play features a clash of cultures and generations at a traditional WASP wedding. The play will run Thursdays to Sundays through June 10.

     The cast of five includes Andrew Botsford as Curtis, the father of the bridegroom, and Cyrus Newitt as the ghost of Curtis’s father, who returns to help his son be the perfect host according to family dictates. Rosemary Cline plays Curtis’s wife, who tries to help her husband embrace a multicultural world. Christopher Scheer is the panicked bridegroom, and Sydney Schwindt is his sister.

    The play will be onstage Thursdays at 7 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Ticket prices are $25 for adults, $23 for senior citizens (except Saturdays), and $10 for students under 21. Reservations can be made through Hamptontheatre.org.

‘American Meat’

    A new documentary, “American Meat,” will be screened at Guild Hall on Saturday at 2 p.m. It chronicles a grassroots evolution in sustainable meat production from the current industrial meat system, as told through the eyes of farmers who live and work in the industry. Smaller-scale operations and the farmers, food advocates, and chefs who support them are featured, and the film addresses whether such efforts could meet the demand of American consumers.

    “American Meat” focuses in particular on Joel Salatin, a Virginia farmer who began a movement to raise animals outdoors and without antibiotics. After the screening, Graham Meriwether, the filmmaker, will take part in a discussion with Joe Realmuto of Nick and Toni’s restaurant in East Hampton, Scott Chaskey of Amagansett’s Quail Hill Farm, and Alex Balsam and Ian Calder-Piedmonte of Balsam Farms, also in Amagansett.

    Nick and Toni’s will serve small plates, wine, and beer from local sources at 4:30 p.m. The film and discussion cost $12, $10 in advance at AmericanMeatFilm.com. The event at Nick and Toni’s costs $25.

The Wine of Love

    Morris Goldberg, a virtuoso on clarinet, saxophone, flute, and even the pennywhistle, will perform at the last Candlelight Fridays show of the season at the Wolffer Estate Vineyard tomorrow from 5 to 8 p.m. An East Hampton resident, Mr. Goldberg plays in many musical genres, among them classical, jazz, bebop, and mbaqanga. Well known among jazz aficionados, he worked with Paul Simon on his album “Graceland.”

    Next week, live music will continue at the Sagaponack winery on Thursdays in the tasting room from 5 to 8 p.m. and on Fridays at the wine stand, both with no cover charge. Wine, with cheese and charcuterie plates, will be available for purchase. Food may not be brought in from outside.

Lichtenstein Retrospective

    The Art Institute of Chicago on Tuesday will open the largest exhibition to date of Roy Lichtenstein’s work —  more than 160 works, including drawings, paintings, and sculpture, from more than three decades, some of which have never been seen publicly.

    Lichtenstein, a long-term Southampton resident who died in 1997, began making Pop Art in 1961 with a hand-painted Mickey Mouse and other images inspired by cartoons. His use of comics and other mass-media imagery, as well as the benday dots, became a trademark of his style and his process of painting. As the museum said, “This technique also masked the effort and meticulous preparation — drawing, transposition, enlargement, and editing — he put into what can appear to be mechanically produced paintings.”

    The exhibition is on view until Sept. 3 and will travel to Washington, D.C., in the fall, then London and Paris next year.

Albertini at Ille

    The next Ille Arts show will feature Sydney Albertini in a solo exhibition. It will open on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. Ms. Albertini, who has a variety of mediums at her disposal, including ceramics, quilting, painting, and sculpture, will present recent work at the Amagansett gallery. In addition to studying at the Parsons School of Design in New York and the Atelier de Sevres in France, where she was born, she studied fresco painting in Italy.

    The show will be on view through June 12.

Parrish for Free

    The Parrish Art Museum in South­ampton is offering free admission tomorrow as part of the Association of Art Museum Directors’ Art Museum Day, which coincides with International Museum Day. The association’s members in the United States, Canada, and Mexico intend to use Art Museum Day as an opportunity to focus attention on the role of such institutions in North America. A comprehensive list of participating museums is available in the newsroom of the association’s Web site.

Portella Outeast

    Dalton Portella will be featured in “Closed to the Public,” a show at the Outeast Gallery in Montauk beginning Saturday at 7 p.m. with an opening reception.

    Mr. Portella was born in Miami and moved as a child to Brazil, studying art along the way. His studies continued as an undergrad at the United States International University in San Diego, then at Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz, Calif., eventually transferring to the Parsons School of Design. He lived in New York for many years, painting and doing commercial work for the Miramax film production company. He moved to Montauk in 2001.

Silver at Temple Adas

    “In the Tradition,” a show of Joyce Silver’s work, is on view at the art gallery at Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor through June 6. A reception will be held on Sunday from 4 to 6 p.m.

    Ms. Silver, who has a certificate in fine arts from Cooper Union in New York City and a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of New Mexico, makes works inspired by the Torah, the Mishnah, and other commentaries from classes she took at the Skirball Center at New York University.

    “Some of my work is directly related to a class theme,” she said. “Other pieces, like the Hebrew letters, are my response to their visual beauty. I am a mixed-media painter, and I use collage, which allows me to play and be spontaneous.”

Reverie at Demato

    The Richard Demato Gallery in Sag Harbor will present “Reverie,” a group show with an emphasis on themes related to being in a pensive, daydreaming, or trance-like state. The artists participating include Michael Carson, Margit Fureder, Mikel Glass, Donato Giancola, Stephen Hoedecker, Kyla Zoe Rafert, Joshua Suda, Bart Vargas, Maggie Taylor, and Phillip Thomas.

    Mr. Giancola was commissioned by the postal service to make a painting for a stamp, and his series “Astronauts in Reverie,” which was used as the basis for the stamp, will be on view. The show opens on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.

New at Romany Kramoris

    Paintings by Tory Cowles, mobiles by Ruby Jackson, and handbags painted by Annemarie Feld will be featured at Romany Kramoris in Sag Harbor beginning today.

    Ms. Cowles has influences ranging from Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Joan Miro, and has a vibrant palette. Ms. Feld designs handbags from odd shapes of colored leather. Many feature stained and used studio paintbrushes as handles or as accents. Ms. Jackson’s “Animated Suspensions” are mobiles of amorphous shapes that glow in the light.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. The show will remain on view through June 7.

Marder Gets Small

    The Silas Marder Gallery in Bridgehampton will present “The Big Show 7,” a large show of diminutive works, starting on Saturday with a reception from 5 to 9 p.m.

    Some 50 artists are participating, each given three blank 8-by-10-inch canvases. In each show, Mr. Marder invites an eclectic mix of emerging and established artists, ranging from the regional to the international in scope. The only instruction is to “reflect on where they are in their current body of work.” He was inspired by the artistic community spirit he saw at Ashawagh Hall as he was growing up in Springs.

    This year’s show will feature works by William Steiger, Jill Musnicki, Perry Burns, Jeff Muhs, Rex Lau, Shelley Reed, Cornelia Foss, Nathan Slate Joseph, Janet Culbertson, Alice Moore Hope, Carol Hunt, Gavin Zeigler, and Christian Little. The show will run through June 24.

Arms Honored

    Anneli Arms’s print “Crocodile Teeth” was recently cited at the second National Intaglio Exhibition, sponsored by the New York Society of Etchers. David Kiehl, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, gave it a “recognition for excellence.” Ms. Arms teaches a seminar at the Manhattan Graphics Center called “Altered States” and has a house in Bridgehampton.

Schmidt in the City

    The Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York will show “Silhouette Vessels,” paintings by Bastienne Schmidt of Bridgehampton, beginning today and running through June 16. A reception will be held tonight from 6 to 8. The show will feature 30 works of polymer paint on paper on the theme of vessels, which comes from her childhood in Greece as the daughter of an archaeologist.

India’s Textiles

    On Saturday at 5 p.m., Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada will give a lecture, “India Unfolds: Seen Through a Textile Artist’s Eyes,” at the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton.

    Ms. Wada will focus on historical and traditional designs in architecture and textiles and how they relate to various landscapes and religious practices. She will draw on her own experience of living in Ahmedabad, her research studies throughout western India, and her travels across the subcontinent since 1983. Illustrations in the lecture will highlight the Indians’ extraordinary sense of color and their practice of design.

    Ms. Wada is an award-winning artist, author, curator, textile researcher, and proponent of traditional and sustainable practices in fashion and textile production. This fall, she will lead the first LongHouse Reserve “Insider’s Tour: Passage to India” along with Jack Lenor Larsen.

    Tickets are $30 and $20 for members and can be purchased through events@ longhouse.org.

‘Reality,’ Rising Stars

    Two events of a very different kind will take place this weekend at the Southampton Cultural Center.

    On Friday at 8 p.m., the Long Island Creative Vortex in coordination with the East End Arts Council will bring its project “Shifting Reality Across Long Island” to the Southampton Cultural Center with the musical guest Ravalias.

    The Long Island Creative Vortex is a collaborative of regional artists of all types who promote the arts as an important part of the Long Island experience. The project is based on a central piece “Reality,” which is taken from location to location and is constantly repainted by anyone who wants to leave their mark, allowing the piece to change and shift from place to place.

    Each session is accompanied by live music and-or local D.J.s to create a multisensory interactive experience. Rava­lias is a trip-hop electronic trio based out of New York. Admission is free.

    On Saturday, the Rising Stars piano series will host Soyeon Lee at 7 p.m. A popular and well-reviewed peformer, Ms. Lee will be making her third appearance at the center. She will play Bartok’s “Six Romanian Dances,” Mozart’s Sonata in C major (K. 330), Albeniz’s “Iberia Book I,” and Liszt’s paraphrase on the waltz from Gounod’s “Faust.” Tickets are $15 general admission with no charge for students.

‘Immortal Love Songs’

    Frances Devine, a mezzo-soprano, and Richard Cassell, a bass-baritone, will perform “Immortal Love Songs” at the Montauk Library on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

    The program consists of duets and arias from opera and Broadway productions such as “Carmen,” “Don Giovanni,” “The Merry Widow,” “Carousel,” “Kiss Me, Kate,” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”

    Yannis Xylas will provide piano accompaniment. Ms. Devine and Mr. Cassell appeared last year at the library in “La Cenerentola.”

Music at the Museum

    The sound of guitars will be heard in the parlor room at the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum when the second annual music series organized by Dick Johansson starts on Saturday. Mr. Johansson and his band, the Highlanders, will welcome a special guest, the bluesman Jim Turner, as they play from 5 to 7 p.m.

    The four other scheduled performers are Gene Casey of the Lone Sharks on June 23, Inda Eaton on July 14, and Caroline Doctorow on July 28. On Aug. 11, members of Hamptons Singers and Songwriters and In the Round will perform.

    The cover charge of $20 includes an open bar offering beer and wine. Those under the age of 21 will be welcomed for $10. A portion of the proceeds from the series benefits the museum.

    The Bay Street Theatre, which is celebrating the extension of its lease on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor, has announced a 2012 mainstage lineup that includes comedy, a story of local baymen, and a world premiere musical.

    On May 12, for Mother’s Day, there will be a one-night-only return of “My Son the Waiter: A Jewish Tragedy,” written by and starring Brad Zimmerman. Proceeds from the tale of one man’s struggle to make it as an actor in New York City will be donated to the Bay Street Theatre, with a cost of $20 in advance or $30 at the door. Mr. Zimmerman’s acting roles include one on “The Sopranos.” He has also worked with such comedians as Joan Rivers, who said, “I’ve had three great opening acts in my lifetime: Billy Crystal, Garry Shandling, and Brad Zimmerman.”

    Ana Gasteyer and Brian d’Arcy James will present “One Night, Two Voices, Three Cheers,” an evening of song on May 26. Both actor-musicians have earned rave reviews for their work, with Mr. James nominated for Tony Awards, and Ms. Gasteyer famous for her Saturday Night Live characters and impressions of Martha Stewart, Celine Dion, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Tickets are $65, $75, or $100, the latter to include an “after party with the stars.”

    A world premiere of the musical “My Brilliant Divorce” will take the stage from May 29 through June 24. The one-woman show tells the story of an American woman with a fleeing British husband, a disapproving mother, a shifty attorney, and hypochondria. The musical was written by the Irish-born Geraldine Aron, who has authored several award-winning plays, 12 produced television and radio plays, and two screenplays. Matt McGrath, one of the Bay Street Theatre’s artistic associates, will direct. Mr. McGrath has directed Darrell Hammond in “Tru,” in addition to his many acting performances on Broadway and off.

    Joe Pintauro’s “Men’s Lives,” a story of local baymen, which had its inaugural production at the theater in 1992, will return to Bay Street for a 20th-year revival from July 3 through 29. Murphy Davis, the theater’s artistic director, said that “its message about change and the human condition is as pertinent today as it was 20 years ago.” Harris Yulin, who has many film, Broadway, and Off Broadway credits, will direct the production.

    A world premiere of the musical “Big Maybelle: Soul of the Blues” will run from Aug. 7 through Sept. 2, with Lillias White as the legendary blues singer taking on the challenges of America in the 1950s. Ms. White, a Tony Award-winning singer, has numerous Broadway film credits and has been promised to “blow the roof off Bay Street Theatre as she brings Big Maybelle to incandescent life.” The musical was written and directed by Paul Levine, a winner of many best director and production of the year awards.

    Tickets and subscriptions for the mainstage productions are available online at baystreet.org or by phone during box-office hours, Wednesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

   While never as down and out as the Nathaniel Rogers House across the street, the other Greek Revival structure at the intersection of Main Street and the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike has not looked its best in recent years.

    Known predominantly as the Bull’s Head Inn, it is being restored by a group of investors who are adding a modern commercial kitchen and restaurant, additional guest rooms, a meeting barn, and a spa. When it opens this summer, they will rechristen it Topping Rose House after the man who built it, Abraham Topping Rose.

    Tom Colicchio, known from the television series “Top Chef” and for his mini-empire of restaurants, will operate the “vegetable-focused” restaurant and the inn. Jeff Morgan, who has managed luxury resorts in the Caribbean, will provide day-to-day management. Bill Campbell and Simon Critchall are backing the development of the site.

    For the past year, the buildings there have been brought up to modern standards while keeping as much intact from the original structures as possible. At the same time, a state-of-the-art waste management system, a collection of guest cottages, the inn’s spa and pool building, and a new building that stands right behind the main restored inn have been laid out or are moving toward completion.

    At the site on Friday, Robert Strada said that the restoration had revealed some exciting finds, such as the foundation of John Hulbert’s 18th-century house that predated Rose’s 19th-century version. Mr. Strada is a historic preservation consultant from East Hampton who is working with Roger Ferris and Partners, an architectural firm from Connecticut, to advise on the restoration of the site’s historic buildings.

    The project has also revealed that a dilapidated building originally slated for demolition was Hulbert’s warehouse, a “historic gem of a building” dating to 1730, according to Mr. Strada. In “Discovering the Past,” Jeannette Edwards Rattray mentioned a Capt. John Hulbert from Bridgehampton, who designed a stars-and-stripes flag that predated the one made by Betsy Ross and that his company carried on its way into Philadelphia in late 1775.

    Once the building was identified, “the town committed to having it deconstructed and stored so that it could be rebuilt in the future on a suitable site,” Mr. Strada said. He supervised that project with the aid of the inn’s construction workers.

    Rose, who first lived across the street in the house he eventually sold to Rogers, built the grander structure on the northeast corner of the intersection in 1842. It was originally purchased from the Hulberts in the first decade of the 1800s by Abraham Topping, Mr. Rose’s grandfather. Born here in 1792, Rose was the son of Samuel Rose, a doctor and Revolutionary War surgeon. He received his law degree from Yale University and worked for the district attorney in New York City, according to a history of the site conducted for Southampton Town. When he married, he decided to practice law in Bridgehampton. He became a county judge in 1847 and died a decade later. Soon after, the family of Henry Corwith made it their summer house. In the 1930s, it became the first of a succession of inns and restaurants operated on the site.

    During excavation, other objects turned up, such as a number of granite fence posts and two gate posts that are being reincorporated into the property. All of the windows on the inn are being restored and will be reinstalled when the main building is ready. The original doorways have been taken off to be preserved and will return to the finished building. “The windows are an important feature of the building, they are key to this as are the entrances and the doors,” Mr. Strada said.

    Often restorations involve taking things off that were added haphazardly over the passing decades. In this case, something that was taken off — the second of the inn’s entrances as well as its porticos, porches, and their balustrades — is being put back. The resulting building may not be what local residents have been accustomed to seeing more recently, but it will be historically accurate. A western wing on the original house that appears to have been an office will not be added.

    In the construction trailer on Friday, between debating the merits of the region’s professional sports teams, much work was being accomplished. Steve Kropp, the site manager, was unflappable about all that remained to be completed. While some of the archaeological finds had cut into the construction time, the mild winter put them ahead of where they might have been otherwise. For example, an orchard with sod had been completed in March, long before they had anticipated, and has given the site some early polish.

    “We are pounding away to try to get this done by summer,” said Andrew Baekey, the project manager for the architect. The goal is to have at least the inn building, which includes the restaurant and several guestrooms, open by July. The rest will have to be phased in over time. Mr. Baekey pointed out that the owners are also trying to be environmentally friendly, using planted rooftops to diminish a “heat island” effect.

    On Friday, the focus of the work on the inn was on the porticos and the porches underneath them. The foundation for the kitchen had been finished during the winter while the inn was raised off it. It includes a new 12-foot ceiling to accommodate the needs of Mr. Colicchio’s restaurant.

    The third floor of the inn, which “did not exist when the judge built it,” will remain, Mr. Strada said. “Somewhere in its history in the 19th century they raised the attic roof to accommodate a true third floor.” The windows from the third floor, which were not original to the building, will be replaced.

    Behind the inn stands a new structure that echoes the old building’s form without replicating it. Part of the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards and Guidelines for Historic Preservation include an admonition against falsehoods — implying by appearance that new buildings on the site might be original. The guidelines were established in 1983 and provide technical advice “about archaeological and historic preservation activities and methods” and are administered through the National Park Service.

    If a structure is new, it should be apparent. “Otherwise, if everything looked the same it would confuse people,” Mr. Kropp said. At about half of the inn’s depth, but the same width, the new building was constructed to stand alone, but will connect to the three floors of the inn through a glass enclosure. The solution will allow an elevator to be installed in the annex to accommodate people with disabilities.

     Other new structures include the spa building and guest cottages at the middle and east side of the property. Both will be constructed from concrete block with primarily glass walls and wooden louver panels. The look will be boxy and minimal, designed to fade into the landscape with the wood panels graying over time, lending a more contemporary ethereal approach to what might otherwise look similar to a clapboard exterior.

    While the other buildings have a way to go on their completion, the foundations are all in place. They supply an underground link between the core buildings of the site: the inn, the barn, and the spa. The barn will serve as event and conference space and the spa site will house the outdoor lap pool and Jacuzzi, so easy access to the kitchen would be a concern for both. When completed, a total of 22 rooms will be available. Reservations are already being taken, according to the inn’s Web site.

The Harnicks Outside

    “The Outdoor Museum” is a group of photographs taken by Margery Harnick and included in a book of the same title with poems by Sheldon Harnick, and a selection of both will be on view at Guild Hall’s Boots Lamb Education Center through July 29.

    The couple, who have had a second home in East Hampton for decades, are typically known for work in other mediums. Ms. Harnick is a painter and actress who has taken up photography relatively recently. Mr. Harnick is a famous Broadway lyricist who won a Pulitzer Prize for the musical “Fiorello!” and Tony Awards for such musicals as “Fiddler on the Roof.”

    The show will feature, as the book’s subtitle states, “not your usual images of New York,” and will include some 15 works with accompanying verse. It is a fresh view of the city that is by turns gritty, graceful, melancholy, and romantic.

    The education center will also offer an adult art workshop for beginners starting Saturday and running through June 9, from 2 to 4 p.m. Roisin Bateman will lead five sessions devoted to charcoal drawing, painting, collage, and hand-printed monotypes. The cost is $150, $125 for members, with a $5 materials fee per class. Registration is available by e-mail with [email protected].

Claus Hoie Talk

    Judith Sneddon of the Helen and Claus Hoie Charitable Foundation will discuss the work of Claus Hoie at the East Hampton Historical Society annual meeting on Saturday at 10 a.m. The talk will take place at the East Hampton Town Marine Museum in Amagansett, and the public has been invited to the free event.

    Ms. Sneddon will examine the life and work of the artist, who died in 2007. Hoie played a significant role in the artistic community of the East End in his prolific career and was best known for watercolors that often incorporated handwriting.

    The talk will highlight the new installation of Hoie’s paintings illustrating an actual 19th-century whaler’s log on the first floor of the Marine Museum.

Halsey Mckay Returns

    The Halsey Mckay Gallery will return to East Hampton tomorrow in a new space at 79 Newtown Lane formerly occupied by Giraffics. The gallery will show the work of Timothy Bergstrom and Denise Kupferschmidt.

    Mr. Bergstrom’s “Glound” series incorporates wire, acrylic, glue, and other materials on canvas. The results are topographically multidimensional works that are either monochromatic or very limited in palette. Each has a rather assertive presence even though the composition may suggest very little.

    Ms. Kupferschmidt’s “Motifs” are more graphically oriented with very little use of color. They tend toward seriality, with repetitions of shapes or objects across different pieces and materials.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. The show will be on view through May 29.

Mizrahi at Ashawagh

    Haim Mizrahi is taking over Ashawagh Hall in Springs this weekend with a show titled “The World Is Hanging by a String,” which will include paintings and sculpture. The opening reception on Saturday from 4 to 9 p.m. will feature a glow-in-the-dark presentation.

    On Sunday, a poetry reading by South Fork writers will take place at 3:30 p.m. The show will be on view until Sunday at 7 p.m.

Sullivan at Salon

    Bob Sullivan’s “Chasing the Light” show is on view now at Salon Xavier in Sag Harbor. Mr. Sullivan earned a fine arts degree at Ithaca College and had a varied career at the Children’s Television Workshop and as an art director in New York City until moving to East Hampton full time in 1999. The show will feature representational paintings from the past few years.

Murray in Southampton

    “Chris Murray’s Paintings of New York” is the title of a new exhibition at the Southampton Historical Museum opening on Tuesday.

     For the past two decades, Mr. Murray has used New York City as subject matter for his brightly colored and slightly primitive paintings consisting of fragments of paper, acrylic, and pencil.

    His architecturally based works rely on a ruler for their sharp edges and graphic style. The Murray family has summered in Southampton for three generations, beginning in the 1920s. This has recently inspired him to incorporate Southampton landmarks in his subject matter. There is an obsessive quality to the work, which may be attributed to his autism, as he draws each building, window by window. The precision of the graphic elements is balanced by the more flowing brushwork used in his depictions of clouds, trees, and people.

    The show will be on view through Aug. 11. A preview on Saturday is offered as part of the museum’s house tour, which costs $75 and includes tours of six Southampton area residences.

Funding for Artists

    There will be two programs offered in the next two weeks for artists on the South Fork who would like to discover what funding opportunities are available. The Parrish Art Museum in Southampton will host a session this weekend, and Guild Hall will have one on May 19.

    The Parrish’s program will be held on Saturday at 2 p.m., sponsored by Artspire and the New York Foundation for the Arts. It will discuss free and low-cost services and resources available nationwide for artists at every stage of their careers. The presentation is geared to individual artists across disciplines and small or emerging arts organizations. Visual and performing artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers have all been encouraged to attend. Admission is free.

    On May 19 at 10 a.m., Guild Hall will present “Grants and Funding for Artists,” with remarks by Rebecca Cooper and a panel discussion that is to include Michelle Stark, the director of film and cultural affairs for Suffolk County, Michael Royce, director of the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Charlie Bergman, chairman and C.E.O. of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. This event is also free and will take place in the John Drew Theater.

Larry Rivers’s Late Work

    The Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City is showing the later works of Larry Rivers through June 15.

    The selection of paintings and works on paper done in the last two decades of the artist’s life, primarily between the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrates the artist’s continuing interest in subjects such as the Holocaust, his family, and artists he admired such as Balthus, Picasso, and Mondrian. During this time he also depicted his favorite Hollywood stars, among them Fred Astaire, Groucho Marx, and Charlie Chaplin.

    Confronting his own mortality made him sensitive to the effects of time and memory, and they are prevalent themes in these works. In the catalog essay, John Yau writes that Rivers “explored the pleasure and sorrow of memory, even as he acknowledged time would eventually erase them.”

    A jazz musician as well as an artist, Rivers began coming to Southampton in the 1940s and eventually bought a house on Little Plains Road, where he also kept a studio. His paintings are in the collections of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Gruen’s Photos in New York

    John Jonas Gruen’s photographs will be showcased in “Flying Point Beach: Photographs by John Jonas Gruen and the Artwork of the New York School” at (Art) Amalgamated at 317 10th Avenue in New York City beginning next Thursday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.

    His artist subjects included Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Jane Wilson, his wife. The couple has been summering on the South Fork since 1959 and bought a house in Water Mill in 1960. It was at Flying Point Beach that Mr. Gruen took many of his best-known pictures of Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, and Mary Abbott. The show will be on view through June 9.

Stein’s Sculpture

    “The Fluidity of Gender: Sculpture by Linda Stein,” which is on a five-year tour through 20 museums and colleges through 2015, will visit New York City at the Flomenhaft Gallery beginning with a reception next Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. and a dance performance and conversation at 6:45.

    The show is a further realization of Ms. Stein’s attempts through art and activism to eradicate gender stereotypes and prejudices, emphasizing the fluidity of gender. “My goal,” she has said, “is to use my art to transform social consciousness and promote activism for gender justice. With my androgynous forms I invite the viewer to seek out diversity in unpredictable ways.” Her wearable sculptures allow viewers to try out different identities and step inside someone else’s skin.

    The show will be up through June 23.

Call for Artists

    The Islip Art Museum is looking for submissions for its “Garbage Barge Revisited: Art From Dross” show organized by Karen Shaw, the senior curator at the museum.

    Islip was the town that launched the infamous garbage barge in 1987. It could not find a landfill to accept its waste, and the case led to a call for nationwide recycling. Artists have been invited to make use of cast-offs that might otherwise be considered waste.

    Submissions can be made by e-mail or in person. Only one work will be considered. Further information is available at Islipartmuseum.org.

   Toby Haynes is a representational artist whose work ranges from portraits of animals to portraits of people and to seascapes and plein-air landscapes. A man who divides his time between East Hampton and Launceston, Cornwall — where he has lived since 1978 with sheep and cows grazing outside his window and, for 17 years, without electricity — it is not surprising that he is inspired by nature and by the light in both places, which are surrounded by water. He moves easily among the traditional mediums, pen and ink, pastel, oil, acrylic, charcoal, pencil, and watercolor, and he sometimes mixes them.

    “The rot set in in the 19th century,” he said recently, discussing the estrangement of painters from their materials, “since the 1830s, when they invented the collapsible tube.”

    “Before that a painter would have made his own brushes and his own paints and would have first been an apprentice, doing the dirty job, making lead white (flake white), for example, which involved putting zinc plate over cow dung (for the heat) and leaving it in a shed for months and then collecting the lead in flakes.”

    Mr. Haynes didn’t develop a real interest in making art until finishing his university schooling. He started in watercolor and pastel, working on hard paper. Much as a Florentine artist would make detailed drawings for frescos, he said, he relies on preparatory drawings to minimize mistakes in watercolor, which he finds particularly challenging for his hyper-realist style. But he doesn’t want his work pigeonholed. “I rather prefer not being automatically identifiable; I don’t think it’s healthy. A variety of styles and techniques and mediums can only be good,” he said.

    “Pastels taught me to work with clean color. My oil painting has benefited from using them. Using pastels, it’s best to work with colored paper that has watercolor stained on it and then pastel over that.” He often stains his canvases that way, letting them dry before beginning the actual picture. Most recently, he has been using paints made by Vasari, a New Jersey company that grinds paint by hand and produces pure colors.

    He explained that he had used “student colors,” lower price paints that contain additives and fillers, but discovered he could not mix the shade he wanted. He now uses student colors to prime palettes. “That’s about all they’re good for,” he said. “I would advise young painters to use good materials, although the price differential can be extreme.”

    Having no electricity for 17 years was “interesting for the rhythm of the seasons and the quality of light,” he said, but it limited the amount of time he could paint, which also affected the colors he chose. “By oil lamp the colors came correct,” he said. “When it’s very cloudy, the gray intensifies the yellows and greens. . . . An oil lamp is yellower than electric light,” he said, adding that, with electricity, it is better to use daylight-balanced bulbs rather than those that seem blue.

    His collectors have remarked on his ability to capture the personality of his subjects, without anthropomorphizing them. The titles he chooses have a light touch, such as a watercolor called “Herd About a Cow” or, for one in which a cow looks as if she is about to touch her nose to the camera lens, “I’m Ready for My Close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

    “I always liked painting animals. I like anything where draftsmanship helps. Maybe being the son of a craftsman, I appreciate the craftsmanship element of it. And, with animals, it’s always nice to make people look more closely at them, especially farm animals. Anything is better if you stop and absorb it.” He did a drawing of a cat he had for many years using 20 grades of pencil, he said, from 9H, the hardest, to 9B, the softest and darkest. “One would almost never use the full 20 in one drawing, but Willow deserved them all,” he said.

    It is not just animals that draw the eye to his work, but even rocks, water, and sand, especially in pictures of Gerard Drive or Accabonac Harbor in Springs, which have a play of sunlight and shadow.

    Christened Richard John Haynes but called Toby as an adult, Mr. Haynes uses the initial T when he signs his work as RJTH. He grew up the youngest of three in Essex, 40 miles from London.

    “We were always encouraged by our parents, given boxes of paint at Christmas, that sort of thing.” His father, a sign painter, was “a bit of a frustrated artist,” he said. “My mother would have liked me to have a regular job, because my father didn’t. He was self-employed.”

    He read philosophy and German at Oxford, and worked part time for the National Trust for three years, moving footpaths, building bridges, and tending 1,000-year-old hedgerows. He called the work “Robinson Crusoe-type carpentry.” He continued to freelance for the trust and for other organizations for another five years, painting in his downtime until it took over.

    Since coming here first in spring 2010, Mr. Haynes has been in several group shows, including at the Pamela Williams Gallery in Amagansett in 2011, the first year he exhibited his work in this country, the Water Mill Museum, Ashawagh Hall, and Guild Hall. In the spring of last year he was awarded a prize at the juried East End Arts Council “East End Light” show for a large pastel study, “Evening Light, Gerard Drive II.” In the E.E.A.C. show on now until June 1, he has a painting, “Death of a House.” His “Amagansett Shed” will be in a show in that hamlet scheduled for August. An oil painting of a cow, “Maybelline,” was shown at the Southampton Cultural Center last fall. He has also won awards in Cornwall.

    Mr. Haynes said he particularly admires Jan Vermeer, the 17th-century Dutch painter, and is able to find abstraction in his meticulous interiors. “All art, even the most fastidiously realistic work by the surest classical technician, involves abstraction: In seeking ways to convey texture, light, mood, three-dimensional form, etc., one inevitably selects, alters, omits, and adds all manner of material, deliberately or unwittingly. . . . It’s impossible to paint a picture of nothing. We are all somewhere along the line that doesn’t separate, but connects, the two extremes.”

   There are certain prolific artists whose works always turn up at art fairs or secondary-market galleries. They may be widely popular, but with so much output they risk not always being seen in the best light. Even the best artists have their bad days, or at least their mediocre ones.

    John Chamberlain has always struck me as one of those artists. I have walked by his works so often at fairs in Miami or New York City and even in galleries out here, taking them in with a glance of recognition and then quickly moving on to the next thing, barely acknowledging their existence. I have been doing this for so long that I have even stopped noticing whether the example on view is worth a second glance.

    The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition “John Chamberlain: Choices,” which closes on Sunday, has forced me to reconsider my ambivalence. Just as seeing a great Picasso work at the Museum of Modern Art, such as “Desmoiselles d’Avignon” or one of his analytic or synthetic Cubist paintings, can startle one back into awed reverence, this blockbuster show and its consummate contents are a reminder that Chamberlain was one of the most influential and powerful voices of the 20th century and continues to be in this one.

    Sadly, it comes at a relevant moment. Chamberlain, a Shelter Island resident who had been ill for some time, died in December at the age of 84. While not planned as a memorial exhibition, the show serves as an apt tribute to the breadth of his achievement as an artist. According to the museum, the title acknowledges the “artist’s process of active selection, or choosing, that is fundamental to his practice.”

    His choices were particularly important in his role of bridging the tenets of Abstract Expressionism that he came of age with and the later schools of Neo-Dada, Pop, Assemblage, and even Minimalism into which his work can also be easily absorbed.

    It took a while for Chamberlain to find himself as an artist. He was attracted to music first, and then joined the Navy when he was 16, during World War II. After seeing Europe and Asia through his tours of duty, he returned to Chicago and went to beauty school before investigating art classes. Nothing really clicked until he attended the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an experimental liberal arts college with some of the most distinguished art faculty ever assembled in one place.

    Two of Chamberlain’s chief Abstract Expressionist influences, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, taught there, but he was also exposed to them through frequenting the Cedar Tavern after he moved to New York in 1956.

    Things happened quickly after that. He had a pivotal trip, for him and for local lore, when he traveled to Southampton in 1957. A rusting wreck of a 1929 Ford on Larry Rivers’s property inspired his first sculpture using found car parts. Two fenders, flattened, bent, and then intertwined, became “Shortstop,” one of the earliest works in the show.

    While that piece’s sober blackness would fit well with any of Kline’s structural black-and-white paintings, it was Chamberlain’s attraction to de Kooning’s use of color that would dominate his sculpture in the years to come. He was fond of naming the early works after women — “Trixie Dee,” for example, which looks like a big blond Southern belle, or “Miss Lucy Pink,” a voluptuous pink cloud with the sharp-edged menace of one of de Kooning’s “Women.” Even Marilyn Monroe received an homage, buxom and sleek in black and chrome.

    He didn’t always work in scrap metal. He might incorporate different materials such as fabric, plastic, portions of a tin ceiling, and staples into a work as if he were composing a collage. It may have seemed as though he was always doing one thing, but there was so much variety in that thing. Then there were also his paintings in high-gloss enamel, filmmaking, foam sculptures, and late photography works. Other materials that got his attention were aluminum foil, paper bags, and Plexiglas.

    While each offers a break from the repetition of Chamberlain’s preferred medium, it is almost a relief when he finds his way back to scrap metal, a true love that never really left him. The fact that he continued to find new ways to express himself with it, cutting the metal and lightening up his compositions, demonstrates that he did not tire of it throughout the decades.

    In the 1980s his work became more monumental and more expressionistic in its brushwork and forms. Then, more recently, his sculpture changed radically at first, as the Guggenheim describes it, becoming more volumetric and baroque, and then back again to earlier concerns. The last few years of his life brought him back to a supply of 1940s and 1950s automobiles, the metal of which he crushed and stacked vertically and horizontally in large conglomerations, some with the scale and presence of a sculpture such as Auguste Rodin’s “Burghers of Calais.” Working up through his last days, it is tempting to think about the artist grappling with his legacy in those pieces, reaching out once more to the vessel for his grand vision.

    The show runs up through the Guggenheim’s spiral, starting early and ending with the latest and last works. At the top of the spiral, as the skylight brings down rays of sun and opens up into the heavens, one can almost sense a risen soul, smiling down on his creation.

Guild Hall’s Members Show

    On Saturday from 5 to 6 p.m., Guild Hall will have a free opening reception for its 74th annual artist members exhibition. The show will remain on view through June 9.

    Lilly Wei, an independent curator, essayist, and critic who writes regularly for Art in America and is a contributing editor at ARTnews, will serve as guest juror. She will award prizes such as best in show, best representational painting, best abstract painting, best sculpture, best work on paper, best mixed media, best photograph, and numerous honorable mention citations.

    Michelle Klein, a curatorial assistant at Guild Hall, organized the show, Christina Mossaides Strassfield, the museum’s director and chief curator, will supervise the installation. Select works will be available for sale.

Harnicks Outside

     “The Outdoor Museum” is a group of photographs taken by Margery Harnick and included in a book of the same title with poems by Sheldon Harnick, a selection of which will be on view at Guild Hall’s Boots Lamb Education Center opening Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m. through July 29.

     The couple, who have had a second home in East Hampton for decades are typically known for other mediums. Margery is a painter and actress who has taken up photography relatively recently. Sheldon is a famous Broadway lyricist, who received a Pulitzer Prize for the musical “Fiorello!” and a Tony Awards for such musicals  as “Fiddler on the Roof.”

   The exhibit will feature, as the book’s subtitle states, “not your usual images of New York” and will include some 15 works with accompanying verse. It is an unexamined view of the city that is by turns gritty, graceful, melancholy, and romantic.

Birth of Feminist Art

    Gail Levin, a scholar and curator whose most recent book was a well-received biography of Lee Krasner, will speak about “1960s Los Angeles and the Birth of Feminist Art” on Saturday at 6:30 p.m. at the Parrish Art Museum.

    Ms. Levin will discuss how the all-male scene at the Ferus Gallery, antiwar protests, demonstrations against a curator who showed no women’s work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and conflicts over the expression of sexuality in art gave rise to the feminist art movement in Los Angeles. The author of “Becoming Judy Chicago,” Ms. Levin will draw upon conversations with those who were there, such as Eleanor Antin, Chuck Arnoldi, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Vija Celmins, Mark di Suvero, Henry Hopkins, Allan Kaprow, Arlene Raven, and Judy Chicago.

    Ms. Levin is a distinguished professor of art history, American studies, and women’s studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is the acknowledged authority on the American realist painter Edward Hopper.

    The lecture is presented in conjunction with the Southampton museum’s show “EST-3: Southern California in New York — Los Angeles Art From the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection.” Tickets cost $5 for members, $10 for nonmembers.

“Realism/Abstraction”

    The Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett will present the work of Beth Barry and Joyce Silver in “Realism/Abstraction,” opening tomorrow.

    Ms. Barry will supply the abstraction. She studied painting at Connecticut College and the Pratt Institute and works as an art therapist. Her landscapes have been likened to Milton Avery’s. Ms. Silver, who has been a psychotherapist and a fabric designer, attended Cooper Union and the University of New Mexico. She paints in a figurative style.

    Artwork by Lance Corey, Jim Hayden, Jana Hayden, Wilhelmina Howe, Cathy Hunter, June Kaplan, Diane Marxe, Daniel Schoenheimer, Ellyn Tucker, and Mark E. Zimmerman will also be on view.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. The show will be on view through May 28.

“Seven Deadly Sins”

    The Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor will open “Tonalism, Trompe l’Oeil, and the Seven Deadly Sins” on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. It features the art of Kevin Sanders, Colin Berry, and Chad Fisher along with Stephen Bauman, Melissa Franklin, Jimmy Sanders, and Thomas Shelford.

    According to the gallery, the show continues a long American fascination with tonalism, which often depicts landscapes at dawn or twilight with some evidence of human presence, and trompe-l’oeil paintings while showcasing Mr. Fisher’s bronze sculptures, “The Seven Deadly Sins.”

    The beauty of nature will contrast with the beastliness of humanity in this show, which is on view through June 3.

   Is it possible that someone born a century ago could have upended the conventions of painting so much that his work is just as relevant to today’s artists as it was some 65 years ago when it was first painted?

    Few can claim such an impact, but one artist who continues to challenge, confound, and set the benchmark for absolute expressive abstraction well after his death is Springs’s own Jackson Pollock. Whether he is ignored, contemplated, aped, mocked, or appropriated, artists who have followed him have had no choice but to react in some way to his work.

    “The Persistence of Pollock,” opening today at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, addresses the ways in which artists of his time and after have reckoned with his legacy.

    Bobbi Coller, the chairwoman of the Pollock-Krasner House advisory board, and Helen A. Harrison, the director of the house and study center, served as co-curators of the show. Ms. Coller writes in the catalogue essay that “when Pollock first started to exhibit his singular and revolutionary poured paintings, he caused an earthquake that shattered the syntax of visual language, destabilized fundamental expectations of how a painting should be made, and liberated future generations of artists.”

    It wasn’t just the work that made him an intractable part of the American artistic imagination, but his persona as well. The swashbuckling, womanizing, fireplace-pissing, cantankerous drunkard, who was tamed for a time by his wife, Lee Krasner — who brought him the sobriety and space to have the breakthroughs we so celebrate — is still the Pollock legend most prevalent in people’s memories. While Krasner tried to quell the myths in the legend, they were in the end too powerfully irresistible to anyone who wanted to believe the tortured-artist stereotype was true.

    As the curators point out, both art and persona combined to inspire “numerous creative responses in many forms: musical compositions, poems, novels, choreography, performance art, a superb film with Ed Harris, and a one-act play by his friend B.H. Friedman.”

    For the purposes of this show, it is the visual artists of this and the prior century who will be presented. Expected names like Pollock’s friend Alfonso Ossorio and artists known for appropriation or transgression such as Mike Bidlo and Vic Muniz join the unexpected. Some of the more surprising artists include Janine Antoni, whose work typically involves elements of performance that can, in this instance, be likened to action painting, and Norman Rockwell, surely one of the most conservative artists of his day. In 1962, Rockwell transformed his studio into a space where he too could crouch over a canvas and splatter his paint for a Saturday Evening Post cover called “The Connoisseur.”

    The inclusion of Lee Ufan, a Korean who moved to Japan in 1956, is indicative of how Pollock’s work infiltrated even Eastern cultures, influencing both the Japanese Gutai Art Association and Mr. Lee’s Mono-ha movement. Ms. Coller noted in the essay that Mr. Lee’s piece in the show “Pushed-Up Ink” is the result of pressing an ink-filled brush against paper in a way that “creates a rhythm that is both intoxicating and expansive.”

    Others who join in the homages and challenges to the Oedipal father figure include Robert Arneson, Lynda Benglis, Arnold Chang, Francois Fiedler, Joe Fig, Red Grooms, and Ray Johnson.

    The exhibition will be on view through July 28.