Beethoven’s Beloved

    Guild Hall and the Hamptons International Film Festival will present “Immortal Beloved,” a film about Beethoven and his mystery love, to whom he wrote a letter just prior to his death. Alec Baldwin will host and will discuss the film with Bob Balaban after the screening.

    Bernard Rose brings the viewer into the mind of Beethoven with his masterful portrait of the deaf composer. Gary Oldman is the star and the music in the film was conducted by George Solti and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra with Yo-Yo Ma and Murray Perahia.

    The event will take place at Guild Hall on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $22 and $20 for Guild Hall members and may be purchased at GuildHall.org or at the box office three hours prior to curtain.

Concert at Watermill

    The Watermill Center will present “Congruence,” a work-in-progress concert tomorrow at 6:30 p.m.

    The piece was composed by Tristan Perich in residence with Argeo Ascani, a saxophonist. It is a new piece for baritone saxophone and electronic sound. Mr. Ascani will play the saxophone part.

    According to the center, “ ‘Congruence’ represents an evolution of Perich’s sound to the gritty lower frequencies, where tone breaks down and the electronics take on a visceral quality, complementing the physical presence of the saxophone’s guttural voice.”

    The event includes a talk on the science behind 1-bit audio, which is the electronic component of the concert, and will be followed by a Q and A and a reception with the artists. Reservations are required and can be made at tristanandargeo.eventbrite.com.

Seeking New Voices

    The Choral Society of the Hamptons is looking for new members to join up for its summer concert. Singers with experience in choral music or those who can read music and want to give choral singing a try have been invited to audition on May 7.

    Rehearsals for the summer concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Monday at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church. The concert will be on July 7 at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church’s Parish Hall. The program will feature the Haydn Lord Nelson Mass and include a Handel Coronation Anthem and an orchestral overture.

    Auditions can be scheduled through the society’s executive director, Veronika Semsakova, at execdir@choralsociety ofthehamptons.org. Interested singers are also welcome to attend the first rehearsal and schedule an audition at that time. Further information about auditions and general information can be obtained at choralsocietyofthehamptons.org.

Gatsby’s Long Island

    Natalie Naylor, a New York Humanities Council speaker in the humanities, will discuss “Gatsby’s West Egg and the ‘Slender Riotous Island’ in the 1920s”  at the Montauk Library at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday.

    F. Scott Fitzgerald began writing “The Great Gatsby” during the 18 months he lived in Great Neck, which became his West Egg. It was Nick Carraway, who called our landmass “that slender riotous island.” Fitzgerald immortalized the Gold Coast mansions on the North Shore, the Great Neck crowd, the old money in Sands Point, which was East Egg, and the Valley of Ashes in Corona.

    While much of Long Island was still farmland, its beaches and airstrips became major attractions, while rum-running and even Ku Klux Klan parades gave the festive atmosphere a dark side.

    Focusing on the historical reality, including aspects featured in “The Great Gatsby,” this presentation also examines the mythologizing of history and memory in Fitzgerald’s novel.

Hamptons Look Wanted

    Those who have the Hamptons look are invited to apply to join the cast of “Royal Pains,” which will begin filming soon on Long Island.

    Grant Wilfley Casting said it is searching for “people with the affluent look and the wardrobe to portray the high-society Hamptons elite.” The casting agent is encouraging those interested to send recent clear photos in their best “summer-fabulous Hamptons” look.

    Roles up for consideration include socialites, model types, ladies who lunch, beachgoers, yachtsmen, golfers, tennis players, owners of ultra high-end cars, bankers, brokers, doctors, nurses, orderlies, E.M.T.s, and attractive partygoers. Submissions are being accepted from Sag/Aftra union members and non-union new faces.

    Those interested should e-mail the photos and include in the body of the e-mail the name, best contact number, union status, height and weight, and age range (within five years of actual age), and which role is of interest. Those with high-end vehicles should include the color, year, make, and model of the car. All materials should go to this address: RPS4@gwcnyc.

‘Vagina Monologues’

    “The Vagina Monologues” will be presented on Sunday at 5 p.m. at Incarnation Lutheran Church of the Hamptons on Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton to benefit the Retreat women’s shelter.

    The play is based on Eve Ensler’s interviews with more than 200 women of all ages and stages of life. The piece celebrates women’s sexuality and strength.

     Tickets are $20. They can be purchased in advance by cash or check by contacting [email protected]. Limited tickets will be available at the door.

Latin Guitar Works

    “Works by Contemporary Latin American Composers,” a concert by Francisco Roldan, a guitarist, will take place on Saturday from 7:30 to 9 p.m. at the Montauk Library.

    Mr. Roldan, a Colombian musician educated at the Mannes School of Music who has performed widely abroad and in this country, will play for the first time at the library. A member of the ZigZag Quartet, he is on the faculty of the Mannes College of Music Extension and Preparatory Divisions and also teaches at Lehman College of the City University of New York.

The Academy at Kramoris

    Romany Kramoris in Sag Harbor will present “The Academy,” a group show, beginning today with a reception on Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m.

    Artists included in the show include Joan Tripp, Nancy Achenbach, Richard Udice, and Pingree Louchheim. The title is meant with jest, referring to a larger self-named group of painters the artists are members of on Long Island. Each has a particular style within the larger genre of Realism. The gallery describes the exhibit as a colorful and happy one.

Mourning Is Broken

    Tomorrow, from 6 to 8 p.m., the Suffolk County Historical Society will present an opening reception for a new exhibit, “Death Becomes Her: Objects and Art of Death and Mourning.”

    The show is a mix of contemporary art from East End Arts Council members with objects from the historical society such as Victorian-era mourning jewelry, memorial hair wreaths and hair jewelry, mourning veils, a tombstone, and coffins.

     The exhibit will run concurrently with the arts council’s multimedia exhibition “La Morte,” also opening the same evening with a reception from 5 to 7. The shows will be on view through May 26.

    The society will offer a number of programs in conjunction with the exhibit with an otherworldly theme such as “Transchanneling White Buffalo Womyn” with Liz Younghans on May 11, “The Spirits Among Us” with Metaphysical and Paranormal Investigations of New York on May 17, and “Reading in the Round” with Dawn Joly, a psychic who will draw on the energies of the society’s collection to discern hidden meanings and messages on May 24, all at 7 p.m.

Retreat Looking for Artists

    The fourth annual juried art show to benefit the Retreat, a nonprofit domestic violence agency, will take place this summer. The show benefits the Retreat’s domestic violence services and is open to all artists with work in photography, painting, or sculpture. No video art will be accepted. The work cannot be larger than 24 by 36 inches.

    Judges this year are Kathryn Markel of Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in Bridgehampton and Christina Mossaides Strassfield, the museum director of Guild Hall in East Hampton. The top 25 entries will be included in a group show at Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery from Oct. 27 to Nov. 5. The best in show will be chosen after the show is hung by the jurors and will win a solo exhibition at the gallery.

    The entry deadline is Aug. 1; the entry fee is $50 per entry with a limit of three entries per artist. Complete rules and an entry form are available at hamptonsjuriedartshow.com.

Getting to Know You . . .

    The Community Arts Project will hold a social gathering at the Springs Presbyterian Church on Saturday at 2 p.m. Artists are invited to take their friends, both artists and art lovers. The gathering will provide time to share ideas of what participants would like the Community Arts Project to be. Coffee, tea, and goodies will be served and contributions of finger food will be gratefully accepted.

Contemporary Narrative

    The Southampton Cultural Center will present “Contemporary Narrative: Painting and Sculpture,” organized by Arlene Bujese. The exhibition features art that tells a story either verbally or visually.

    Andrew Hart Adler and Carolyn A. Beegan juxtapose photography and oil painting in works that straddle modern and classical considerations, particularly with interactive animals as the subject.

    Marcel Bally’s photography captures places and people with emphasis on “geographical location and cultural expression” from his native Switzerland, and from Africa, Southeast Asia, Spain, Latin America, and the Middle East, according to Ms. Bujese.

    Ann Chwatsky, another photographer, will show her “Curtain” series, in which text messages are integrated with curtain forms, some more revealing than others. William King is represented by eight figurative wood sculptures, some with added paint often portraying human foibles. Kevin Teare will show four large paintings, and two from his “Beatles” series.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m. The exhibition will be on view through May 22.

Studio Sale at Ashawagh

    Sydney Albertini will take her work in ceramic, fabric, and paper to Ashawagh Hall on Saturday and Sunday.

    The artist, whose plates are featured at Barneys, also works in quilts, knits, and embroidery in addition to drawings. A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

Ian Hornak Show in California

    “Transparent Barricades: Ian Hornak: A Retrospective” will open next Thursday at the Forest Lawn Museum in Glendale, Calif., where it will be on view until Aug. 26.

    Mr. Hornak, who had a home and studio on Hand’s Creek Road in East Hampton for 32 years, was a representational painter who showed at Tibor de Nagy and Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery.

     The artist died in 2002 of complications resulting from an aortic aneurysm he had while working in his East Hampton studio. He was 58. His works are in the permanent collections in museums such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

    An opening reception will be held next Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition will travel to the Federal Reserve System building in Washington, D.C., in October and the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Md., where it will be on display next year from June 1 until Oct. 13.

    Farmer, winemaker, musician, “art worker,” editor, chef, and even artist, were some of the vocations represented last week at the Parrish Art Museum’s second “Lighting Round” presentation.

    Participants were asked to show 20 slides and speak for six minutes on who they are and what makes them tick.

    Marilee Foster, a farmer and writer, shared her secret weapon for scaring away birds from her crops — blow-up dolls. Esperanza Leon, who owns the Solar Gallery in East Hampton, spoke about identity in herself and the artists she shows. Levy Mwanza spoke about his work bringing sports and music to local youth. Ada Potter described her efforts to create art and participate in the art world in whatever way she could. Jason Weiner, a chef and restaurateur, spoke about winning the best potato pancake contest and how he manages to divide his time between two Almond restaurants, one in Bridgehampton and one in New York.

    Even The Star’s editor, David E. Rattray, got involved, assembling a variety of slides showing how the paper is put together as well as some iconic images from its past, such as Jackson Pollock’s overturned car following his fatal accident in Springs.

    Other participants included Scott Chaskey, a poet and the director of the Peconic Land Trust’s Quail Hill Farm, Kareem Massoud, who is Paumanok Vineyard’s owner and winemaker, and Almond Zigmund, an artist.

Groovy in Springs

    Music and art will merge at Ashawagh Hall this weekend with the second annual presentation of “Art Groove,” an exhibition of work by 14 artists paired with music with a dance beat, including Motown, disco, and hip-hop styles.

    The show will include the artists Charles Waller, Tess Barbato, Michael Costello, Anahi DeCanio, Claudia Dunn, Brian Flynn, Eileen Hickey-Hulme, Geralyne Lewandowski, Cynthia Loewen, Ivi Navarrete, Michael McDowell, Joyce Riamondo, Robert Rosenbaum, and Sheila Rotner, among others, and will be on view beginning Saturday at noon with a reception that evening from 6 to 11. It will also be open on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Knigin’s Anne Frank

    Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor will present an exhibition of collages and photomontages by Michael Knigin in honor of Anne Frank, beginning on Sunday with a reception from 3 to 5 p.m.

    The pieces, chosen from Mr. Knigin’s series “Holocaust & Beyond” by the artist’s widow, Joan Kraisky Knigin, and Ann Chwatsky, have been assembled to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, which is next Thursday. The exhibition will remain on view on Friday evenings before and after services and by appointment through Memorial Day weekend.

    Mr. Knigin, who died last year, graduated from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and was awarded a Ford Foundation grant to study fine art lithography at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. He taught at Pratt Institute, had his own graphic publishing company, and was appointed to the NASA Art Team.

Pessino in New York

    Maria Pessino, an East Hampton artist, is having a solo exhibition of her work at Keyes Art Projects in West Chelsea through April 29.

    “Karma Kit Kaboodle” will include new wood and glass assemblage works and collaged poems dealing with emotional trauma. She will also perform with David Oquendo on guitar on April 26 at 6:30 p.m. in the gallery. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased through [email protected]

Spring Has Sprung at Kramoris

    In keeping with an early spring, Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor is holding its first annual spring flower show with South Fork artists such as Maryann Lucas, Muriel Hanson Falborn, Mary Milne, Alan Nevins, Pingree Loucheim, JoAnne Carter, Roxanne Panero, Barbara Pintauro-Lobosco, and Amy Fischman represented. They will interpret floral motifs in paintings and sculptures.

    The show will include a new collection of blown-glass vessels and containers to hold garden and cut flowers and a three-foot stained-glass amaryllis panel in antique European glass.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m. The show will remain on view through April 26.

Warhol Photographs

    “Warhol: Confections & Confessions” will be on view through May 5 at Affirmation Arts, on 37th Street in New York City.

    The show features fine art photography from an artist more associated with Pop Art and celebrity. The 53 unique vintage silver gelatin prints come from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and have not been on view outside of the museum. Although the bananas in the images might be familiar, there are other images of city streetscapes and a series called “Mother and Child” that depicts children held at their mother’s breast, similar to the religious icons that depict Mary and the Christ child.

Painting at Madoo

    The Madoo Conservancy will bring artists into the garden with “Madoo Paints,” a series of on-site painting classes beginning next Thursday and running weekly through May 24 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

    The classes will be taught by Eric Dever of Water Mill. Robert Dash, an artist and the founder of Madoo, will offer critiques. The classes are geared toward intermediate and advanced students seeking new challenges and looking to broaden their approaches to painting using acrylics.

    “The students will not be painting Madoo per se,” Mr. Dever said in a press release. “Rather they will be painting at Madoo and learning to paint their experience within the garden.” Mr. Dever has a master’s degree in painting from New York University.

    The classes are $350 ($300 for members), which includes preliminary materials. Registration can be made through Alejandro Saralegui at [email protected].

More California On

The South Fork

    Sara Nightingale Gallery will present “LA-X,” focusing on California artists born between 1960 and 1980, opening with a reception on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. and running through May 20.

    Inspired by a huge multivenue retrospective of Los Angeles regional art on the West Coast and the Parrish Art Museum’s own exhibition with a similar subject, focusing on art made between 1945 to 1980, Ms. Nightingale aims to pick up where the Parrish’s exhibition leaves off.

    Artists featured will be Sophia Allison, Leon Benn, Michael Blasi, Colin Burns, Karen Chu, Stephanie Farr, J. Bennet Fitts, Alexa Gerrity, Karl Hahn, Joshua Levine, Devon Oder, Josh Peters, Colin Roberts, Cole Sternberg, Nicola Vruwink, and Annie Wharton.

Party at the Parrish

    It’s time again for the Parrish Art Museum’s annual Spring Fling. This year’s event will take place on April 21 from 7:30 to 11 p.m.

    Todd Barrie Music will provide the live entertainment and Sant Ambroeus the creative hors d’oeuvres. There will also be Glacier Potato Vodka martinis, fine wines from Niche Import Co., and Southampton Publick House ales from an open bar. A silent auction will offer a selection of splurges and indulgences such as designer accessories and merchandise and services from various South Fork vendors. The co-chairwomen are Susan Davis and Nancy Hardy.

    Tickets for Spring Fling are $150, or $100 for members in advance. All tickets are $175 at the door. Tickets can be purchased at parrishart.org.

Concert for Concerts

    Three of the East End’s most popular local bands will perform at Gurney’s Inn on Sunday from 3 to 7 p.m. in the fourth annual Concert for the Concerts to benefit the Montauk Chamber of Commerce’s free Monday night Concerts on the Green series. 

    Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks, Caroline Doctorow and the Steamrollers, and Nancy Atlas with Johnny Blood will entertain for the cause, with a $10 admission fee. A discounted menu will be available for hungry listeners.

    And for children, who will be admitted free of charge, Miss Melody will perform stories and songs from 4:30 to 6 p.m.

    The concert series is scheduled to begin on July 2 and will include the above-listed bands, as well as Ray Red, the Blue Collar Band, the 3 Bs, the Realm, Third Estate, and Vivian and the Merrymakers.

Pianist From Zimbabwe

    Jeanette Micklem, a pianist from Zimbabwe, will perform on Sunday at 4 p.m. at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church.

    Ms. Micklem will open with Beethoven, play works by Maurice Ravel and Franz Liszt, and close with an Alexander Scriabin piece that is said to be one of the most difficult in the piano repertory.

    Ms. Micklem has studied at London University, the British Royal Schools of Music, and the Royal College of Music in London. She has toured in Bulgaria, Russia, the Czech Republic, Australia, and New Zealand, and is in the midst now of a North American tour.

    The program is part of the Music at the Old Town Church series, which takes place in the church’s Session House. There is a suggested donation of $15.

A Rising Star

    Gilles Vonsattel, a Pianofest distinguished artist and former first-prize winner at the Geneva International Piano Competition, will perform classical piano works on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center’s Levitas Center for the Arts at 25 Pond Lane in Southampton.

    General admission to the event, which is part of the Rising Stars Piano Recital series, is $15, with no charge for students under 21. Tickets are available online at scc-arts.org or at the door 40 minutes prior to the performance.

Cider House Session

    The last of the East Hampton Historical Society’s Cider House Sessions, at 7 p.m., will bring Rev 7, an East End gospel group, to the Clinton Academy Museum on Saturday evening.

    Started as a husband-and-wife duo, Alan and Leah Cuffey were mentored by Alvin Darling, a pastor, and became recording artists while singing in their church choir in Center Moriches. The couple has won many awards for their work.

    The concert will begin at 7 p.m., with a $12 adult admission fee, reduced to $10 for senior citizens and $8 for students. The academy will offer beverages and snacks at the event, which welcomes all ages.

Seeks Volunteers

    The Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor has issued a call for “reliable volunteers” for its 2012 mainstage season, with varied duties to include assisting in the administrative office as well as many other projects. Volunteer days and times are flexible, with a regular, scheduled time preferred. Those with the ability to work in a busy office environment have been asked to e-mail Barbara Oldak, the volunteer coordinator, at Barbara@ baystreet.org.

   Sometimes a play needs a grand vision. Sometimes it needs a minimal touch. But sometimes, it needs both. Josh Perl and Peter-Tolin Baker have brought both to bear on a late Tennessee Williams play “In the Bar of a Toyko Hotel,” which opens next Thursday in Bridgehampton.

    Mr. Perl is the artistic director of Hamptons Independent Theater Festival or HITFest, a theater company housed in a black-box space, also known as the Naked Stage, that he created in the Bridgehampton Community House. Mr. Baker is a designer with an impressive roster of commercial and creative credits to his name.

    The play is centered on Mark, played by Seth Hendricks, an alcoholic artist who is trying to revive his career with a new style of painting focused on color. “It kind of sounds ridiculous, but it’s a new discovery the way artists do. Like the Impressionists who were first laughed at, Mark is entering a new exploratory phase,” Mr. Perl said. Other characters are played by Terrence Fiore, Licia James-Zegar, and Glenn L. Cruz.

    At first, Mr. Perl, who has been doing text-driven productions and readings for both HITFest and Naked Stage, thought the play would benefit from a more high-tech interpretation with moving images projected on screens as well as still images to provide atmosphere and context. At the time, he noted that the play was “probably Williams’s most honest work.” The added bells and whistles, still minimal but glitzy by Naked Stage and HITFest standards, were intended to create some magic for the piece. Now, it is the honesty that remains.

    “We’re trying to realize the vision of the original piece. Kind of looking between the lines to take what is virtual and make it real,” Mr. Perl said. “It is a bit of a risk — certainly there are safer projects out there — but one well worth taking in our estimation. Art has to challenge, doesn’t it?”

    Although the choreography and visual display would have been great to have, Mr. Perl said, “most often it comes down to simplify, simplify, simplify. We’re best just sticking to the text.”

    It is a raw and minimal space and a “very tight, 40-page short play that runs about 70 minutes.” Mr. Perl said reviews of previous productions of the Williams play had been negative about the staging. “It is a drama with a lot of nuance and other stuff going on. These are characters who are bitter and angry from love. I don’t think people have tried to bring that out as much.”

    Mr. Baker, a designer of sets, store windows, and special events for clients such as Tiffany & Co. and Henri Bendel, among other endeavors, also did display designs for Guild Hall’s “Art of Fashion” summer exhibition a few years ago. He had carried a clipping about Mr. Perl and the Naked Stage in his Jitney travel bag for three years with the intention of possibly working with him on a production design. He finally met Mr. Perl serendipitously at a dinner party in Sag Harbor less than a year ago. “I put two and two together and said ‘You’re the Naked Stage guy! What do you have going on?’ ”

    The two hit it off and Mr. Perl contacted Mr. Baker a few months ago about “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel.” He signed on as a volunteer for this and for the outdoor production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” planned for August.

    Speaking at the community house on Friday, where they were beginning the construction, Mr. Baker said the design process for this project, which uses a minimal set with walls and screens in differing shades of gray, was typical. “I pulled from the script the psychological expression of the show. It’s a rather abstract environment creating elements of a little bit of the place and time of late 1960s Tokyo. The shapes and the forms are a nod to that. It’s not literal or realistic. That would be another production.”

    According to Mr. Baker, there are elements of the design that play off of what would be the artist’s canvases. Sheer fabric is incorporated to evoke Japanese shoji screens. “The script itself calls for a spare staging. As with any play by Tennessee Williams, you can go really realistic if you thought that was mportant. For me, it’s not important. It’s too much of a distraction to get into what a Japanese hotel might look like in the late ’60s.”

    He and Mr. Perl discussed the location, however, and why it was important to the story. “At the time it was written, Japan was a place of interest and in the process of changing. Intellectual bohemian sophisticates at the time would have been drawn to a place like Toyko.” He said the nod to Japan was there in subtle shapes. “It’s enough; it’s not heavy.”

    In a way it is a perfect play for the Naked Stage aesthetic. “With the Naked Stage and HITFest, we have always tried to engage the audience and have faith that in the ability to act well the audience can imagine all the things we don’t present. For that to happen,” he said, “you have to be confident in the text.”

    Rather than looking at Mark as a “demented and chemically poisoned ecstatic who was on the verge of finding a new way of doing color had he lived, we are having faith in the humanity that Tennessee Williams is showing us,” Mr. Perl said. Dialogue previously emphasized for being bitter and outlandish, will be treated in this production as coming from the struggles associated with creativity and from the playwright’s deep well of passion.

    Mr. Baker also used the dialogue as the inspiration for his sets. “The fragmentation of the sets is supported by the fragmented style of dialogue in the script. It’s not typical realistic dialogue, but choppy banter. . . . The sets will be a further expression of that.

    The plays Williams is best known for — “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “The Glass Menagerie,” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” — were written in the 1940s and early 1950s, but he didn’t die until 1983. “He had been having comebacks since 1962, but audiences always wanted the same turgid, roiling dramas,” said Mr. Perl, adding that “Mark has gone off and been the artist that Tom talked about being in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ and it’s not a triumphant journey.” It is, however, a journey of “passion, vision, and commitment, all those things we say we want people to be.”

    The play will be presented in 10 performances from next Thursday through April 29. Tickets are $20 and available at Tokyo-hitfest.eventbrite.com. A production in New York City may follow.

   The Parrish Art Museum will celebrate Anne Porter’s life and her contributions to the arts and letters of the East End on Saturday at 3 p.m.

   Ms. Porter, a poet who was a National Book Award finalist, was married to Fairfield Porter, an artist with whom she raised a family on South Main Street in Southampton. She died in October, just shy of her 100th birthday.

    Andrea Grover, a curator of special programs at the Parrish, said last week that the museum had begun plans to honor Ms. Porter last spring. “She was reluctant to be celebrated. It took a lot of asking. What convinced her was that it would be a tribute to her and Fairfield, and not just her alone.”

   On Saturday, artists, writers, family, and friends will read her poetry. The 1953 Rudy Burchardt film “A Day in the Life of a Cleaning Woman,” which stars Anne and Fairfield Porter and Larry Rivers, will be screened along with a segment of a video interview between Alicia Longwell and Ms. Porter that Ms. Grover recorded last June.

Although an hour and a half of footage was shot, Ms. Grover is condensing it down to 15 minutes for the event. The full interview will be available in the future as part of the museum’s East End Stories Web site. “At 99 years old, her wit still really comes through.” She speaks about her childhood, siblings, life with her husband in Greenwich Village in the Great Depression, and the writers who influenced her, among other things.

    Those whose lives she touched have been giving the Parrish an overwhelming response “from across the region and all over the country,” Ms. Grover said. “She had close friends and ties on the Shinnecock Reservation, the West Coast, and through her church. Everyone has been calling to share a fond memory of Anne. They all want to celebrate her life, hear her poetry, and stand up and say what she meant to them.”

    In “A Day in the Life of a Cleaning Woman,” Ms. Porter plays a cleaning lady who drinks almond essence and takes a nap under a tree. “There’s a surrealistic quality to it. She has a magic duster and the dishes put themselves away. The humor in it is that Anne was not at all a housekeeper,” Ms. Grover said.

    Although Ms. Porter wrote poetry her entire life, her recognition did not come until later in life. A friend essentially tricked her into gathering up her poetry as a birthday present to him and took her work to a publisher without telling her. It was likely the only way a publisher would have ever seen her work, since she was known to be so modest. That collection became “An Altogether Different Language,” which was a National Book Award finalist.

    The Porters, who settled in Southampton in 1949, were instrumental in attracting artists and poets to Southampton in the 1950s and 1960s the way Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock brought artists to East Hampton. Among the readers at the tribute will be Ms. Porter’s children Laurence Porter and Liz Porter, her granddaughter Sarah Porter, and Paton Miller, a painter. The poets reading include Susan Baran, Marc Cohen, Lily Middleman, Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, and Mark Statman.

    According to Ms. Grover, having an event devoted to Ms. Porter and her poetry “makes perfect sense for us. East End Stories is now a catalog of artists and writers, composers, dancers, and poets who have come out here and stayed or came for a shorter period but had influence. Poets like Anne or Frank O’Hara or Kenneth Koch are part of the larger narrative of East End artists.”

    As the Parrish plans its move to a new home in Water Mill with space for permanent collection displays, temporary exhibitions, and other programming, it will take an interdisciplinary approach to all of the creative endeavors that have occurred and continue to happen here.

    The event is free with museum admission and will include a reception.

   The story of the building known as the E. and C. Bennett Blacksmith Shop at the South­ampton Historical Museum began and ended with a tree.

    The shop building, complete with a functioning forge, was originally built from local oaks in about 1790, moved to the museum from Hampton Road in the 1970s, and was restored in the 1990s. There it stood until Aug. 28

when winds from Tropical Storm Irene blew through Southampton Village and toppled a large tree, which came crashing down on the shop. Then, its story began anew.     Robert Strada, who along with Dick Baxter led the team that brought the blacksmith shop back to life, said recently that the tree could not have hit the building in a more damaging place, striking it right at the roof’s ridge. “Any slight difference in the angle and the building would have stood, but the sides fell in like a pancake.”

    A month later, Mr. Baxter and Mr. Strada were onsite, leading a cleanup and reclamation effort. The aim was not just to rebuild the structure as it originally looked, but to use as much of the original materials as possible.

    Many of the timbers and boards were destroyed by the storm. Others were weakened through rot or insect damage over the years and could not be used again safely. Still, the team was able to isolate, identify, and tag many pieces, both interior and exterior, in order to place them in the refurbished structure where they were originally used.

    Mr. Strada said the effort at reconstruction adhered strictly to the Secretary of the Interior’s standards and guidelines for historic preservation, established in 1983, which provide technical advice “about archeological and historic preservation activities and methods,” according to the National Parks Service, which administers them.

    The guidelines allow for some interpretation in reconstruction and renovation as long as it is in keeping with the original and integrates as much as is worth saving from the original structure.

    In the case of the beyond-repair curved door frame, the original structure used a system of cuts in the wood that allowed it to be bent and shaped. In replacing it, Mr. Strada said steaming the wood in order to shape it was a more modern and preferable technique that made the frame stronger while still executing a faithful reproduction.

    The doors, which survived, retain the original hardware and hinges “probably made by the person who built the shop,” he said. While the blue-green paint was most likely a later addition, they decided to keep it on the doors as a remnant of the building’s most recent incarnation. The facade, however, constructed out of new wood, has not been painted to match as it was previously. The shop’s one window (to keep it relatively dark so the blacksmith could gauge the temperature of the metal through its color) had to be reconstructed on the building’s south side.

    The new structure has incorporated some of the original siding and posts, and much of the original floor joists and planks. The posts and beams were blended into the structure with new oak using mortise and tenon, or tongue and groove, joints, strengthened by wooden pegs, also known as trunnels, just as the original had been built. The siding was attached using spline joints, which are consistent with late 18th-century building practices. Except for the hardware in the shop’s doors, which had been there previously, no nails were used in the new building. Mr. Strada said the resulting structure is closer to an art form, like sculpture, than a building, although just as sound.

    The forge was first reconstructed in the 1970s with brick from that time.  The base still stood in the wreckage but the chimney had to be reconstructed. “We found older bricks and used them instead,” Mr. Strada said. Once the shop is officially open, John Battle, a blacksmith who also operates a shop on the Bridgehampton Historical Society property, will return to do demonstrations as he had previously.

    The early history of the shop is sketchy. The museum named it after another shop from the 19th century, the E. and C. Bennett Practical Horse Shoers. Mr. Strada said he had a photograph in his files from about 1911 of Robert S. Hildreth standing in front of the building with a young boy, possibly Edward Hildreth. He added that the shop was purchased by James Burnett from Hildreth in 1958 and used as a blacksmith shop until 1973.

    Tom Edmonds, the director of the museum, said in its final state before coming to the museum it was used as a stable and then to house taxis. It was moved to the Meeting House Lane site in 1976. Mr. Strada said the building came with the original equipment from Burnett’s shop when he went out of business.

    Mr. Strada described preservation efforts like these as important in an area with a rich historical heritage. He is in the process of registering a new nonprofit organization “to promote, protect, and preserve the historic built environment of the North and South Forks” and will announce the effort formally once it is approved.

    The museum will offer a “hard hat tour” of the shop next Thursday at 6 p.m. after its annual meeting at 5. The public has been invited for the tour.

   On a temperate spring day last week, works of art from Audrey Flack’s light and airy studio in East Hampton were being gently borne to the Gary Snyder Gallery in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, where they will be on view from next Thursday through May 19. They range from tabletop size to flat-out enormous, and they all showcase Ms. Flack’s passion for the “sacred feminine” — the women heroes of mythology and religious iconography.

     Ms. Flack herself is in high demand these days. She lectured on Tuesday at Rutgers University, where some of her works on paper will be exhibited from May 19 through June 30, she will be honored at a Rutgers gala on June 3, and she will deliver the commencement address and receive an honorary doctorate at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on May 11.

    The Gary Snyder exhibit will include a recent colossal sculpture of a woman’s head, constructed in clay and then transferred to fiberglass, of the artist herself — as St. Teresa.

    Ms. Flack said she had been taken by Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa” and the way it portrayed “that beautiful moment between agony and ecstasy, between pain and joy.” Her desire was to capture that in the sculpture, which shows St. Teresa with a gun to her head, shooting out different ribbons of acrylic paint while tears stream down her face. “It’s a consummation of 80 years of pain and sorrow and joy,” she said.

    Ms. Flack’s mythological yet modern women have evolved over her long art world career. After studying at Cooper Union, Yale, and New York City’s Institute of Fine Arts, Ms. Flack found herself at the center of the Abstract Expressionist movement, and one of the few females welcomed at the now legendary Artists Club founded by Philip Pavia, Jackson Pollock, and Willem and Elaine de Kooning, among others.

    “Pavia made the coffee,” she said. “It was always thick and syrupy.”

    “I was in love with Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline,” she said. “Pollock was my mentor, my idol. We all talked about art. We didn’t care if anything sold. The point was simply to make a great work of art.”

    “Franz Kline came to a show I was in at the Tanager Gallery,” she said. “I had done a transitional painting in black and white, and he told me that he liked it. I can’t explain how much that meant to me. It was just thrilling.”

    Ms. Flack was to move on, however, becoming one of the pioneers of photorealism in the late 1960s, a dramatic contrast to minimalist and Abstract Expressionist art. She was the first photorealist to be featured at the Museum of Modern Art, and her works — which brought her commercial and critical success — are now in major museum collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

    “It was like a camera coming into focus,” she said. “I think I’m the only photorealist who came from Abstract Expressionism.”

    In the early 1980s, Ms. Flack shifted to sculpture, a process that she had to learn from the ground up. Her inspiration, she said, comes from “hyper-baroque” works, like those of Carlo Crivelli, Luisa Roldan, and the 17th-century “passionists.” “It has an intensity of feeling,” she said.

    One of Ms. Flack’s massive female sculptures, of Queen Catherine of Braganza for whom the Borough of Queens is said to be named, would have been second only to the Statue of Liberty in height. In 1993, Ms. Flack created the 35-foot sculpture to adorn Queens Harbor. Controversy surrounded the project, however, when it came to light that Catherine’s family probably benefited from the slave trade. The project was scrapped, even after the finished Catherine had been cast.

    “She was melted down,” Ms. Flack said sadly last week. “All that’s left is a 10-foot plaster in a warehouse.”

    Today, Ms. Flack said, “We’ve come out of minimalism and the sarcasm of Post-Modernism. When I first painted tears on my Madonnas, the critics thought I had added them as a joke. Once they found out it wasn’t a joke, they didn’t like it. But who doesn’t cry in their life?”

    The switch from photorealism to neo-classical sculpture happened organically, she said. “I found that I wanted to show women as they are. You go and see a sculpture by Lachaise, she’s wearing a 42XX bra, with a tiny waist, huge hips, and tiny feet. It’s a great sculpture, but it’s not healthy.”

    “I started creating figures which were Greco-Roman classical but contemporary — my women work out, they do yoga, they have children,” she said. “They’re real.” The heroic pieces often feature other symbols of modern times — guns, airplanes, soldiers in battle — in contrast to the classical lines of the female form.

    Ms. Flack said she felt kinship with mythical women. “Their stories have been distorted,” she said, mentioning Medusa. “The myth says she’s hideously ugly, but she’s not. I looked up the myth — she was raped by Poseidon on the floor of Athena’s temple, and Athena was so upset she turned her head to snakes.” Medea was also maligned, Ms. Flack said. “She didn’t kill her children. The Corinthians killed her children, and then hired Euripides to write the play and put the spin on it,” she said. So her sculpture, she said, is about redemption.

    Ms. Flack does not receive the appreciation one might expect from feminists, however. “I’ve been told by radical feminists that my sculpture is too feminine,” she said with a laugh. “But you can be a strong, powerful woman who still likes men.”

     Ms. Flack said her work was not only for the women she brings out of the clay, but for herself as a woman. Art history, she said, “was based on male perceptions. The work had to be brutal and violent and big. It was aggressive and totally male — not that all men are like that.”

    “I don’t know how I did it,” she said. She has been married to Bob (H. Robert) Marcus for over 40 years, and has two daughters, Hannah, a singer-songwriter, and Melissa, who is autistic. “I remember painting ‘Kennedy Motorcade’ when Melissa was 4, and Hannah was 2. They were running around my feet. I had no help,” she said. “And I signed my works ‘A. Flack,’ so as not to be known as a woman.”

    One of Ms. Flack’s passions, aside from art, is the banjo. “I love it. I take it everywhere with me,” she said. She performs with her History of Art string band and writes most of the songs, which focus on art and artists. The group will play at the Rutgers party on June 3. The event will raise money for autism research and also for a fledgling Flack idea — a 24-hour hotline for stressed-out parents of autisic children. “It’s so necessary and there’s nothing like it in this country yet,” she said.

    Musing on the talk she is to give at the commencement in May, she asked, “What am I going to tell these young people who are going out into this crazy world?” Then she answered herself, and her expression changed from concerned to peaceful: “Art is magic. Art is important for the survival of the planet and everybody on it.”

New at the Monkey

    The Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett will feature work by three members of its artists cooperative — Barbara Bilotta, Lance Corey, and Wilhelmina Howe — beginning tomorrow.

    Ms. Bilotta attended the fine arts program at the State University at Stony Brook. An “abstract impressionist,” she said she uses “the flow of colors and their relationship to trigger the imagination.”

    Mr. Corey’s background includes some Irish, Iroquois, and French-Canadian stock. “I paint with my gut, my heart, and my mind. I’m not interested in refining my skills as a technician. I am a neo-primitive. What inspires my work never ceases to surprise me,” he said in a statement.

    Ms. Howe grew up in East Hampton and is studying photography at Stony Brook, where she is a psychology major with a studio art minor. Her paintings explore emotions and movement though color.

    A reception will take place on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m., and the show will be on view through April 30.

Bayscapes at Grenning

    The Grenning Gallery is showing “Peconic and Maine Bayscapes” through April 29. The artists on view are Michael Kotasek, Ben Fenske, and a new painter for the gallery, Thomas Cardone.

    Mr. Kotasek is showing egg tempera and watercolor paintings of Maine, as well as drawings. Mr. Fenske is also showing Maine landscapes. Mr. Cardone, an Amagansett resident, has contributed scenes of Peconic Bay and Long Island Sound. Although he is new to the Sag Harbor gallery, he has been painting in the region for years.