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.

Pollock-Krasner Benefit

    Stony Brook University will honor Ed Harris, an actor, writer, and director, at its 2012 Stars of Stony Brook Gala on April 25 at Chelsea Piers in New York City. The event will also honor the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which has issued a $1 million challenge grant to help the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs establish an endowment during this centennial anniversary year of Pollock’s birth.

    Mr. Harris played the title role in “Pollock,” a film he also directed, some of it filmed at the house where he did some research for the movie. He was most recently seen playing John McCain in the HBO movie “Game Change.” He and his wife, Amy Madigan, are starring in a Beth Henley play “The Jacksonian” in Los Angeles.

    The Pollock-Krasner Foundation aids artists of merit who demonstrate financial need and also provides money to the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center for general operations and scholarly programs.

    The evening begins with a cocktail reception at 6:30, followed by dinner at 7:30. Ticket prices start at $750. To reserve tickets or arrange for sponsorships, Tamara Leuchtenburg can be contacted at [email protected].

Bill Patton Show

    Bill Patton, a former Hampton Day School teacher, will star in a play he has written, “One for the Road” at the Payan Theatre @ Roy Arias Studios in New York City tomorrow through Sunday.

    In his one-man performance, Mr. Patton’s character Billy is contemplating suicide. His departed spirit, who is also played by Mr. Patton, refuses to go through the dark door to the other side until he is convinced that Billy has resolved all of his conflicts. The play is an examination of lifelong conflicts between lust and love, faith and doubt, racism and freedom.

    Tomorrow’s performance is at 6 p.m. The weekend performances are at 2:15 p.m. each day.

“American Gibraltar”

Henry Osmers

Outskirts Press, $21.95

   Few would guess that the 11,000 acres of scrub oak and pine that we call Montauk can boast a history as complex as a small country’s. In “American Gibraltar: Montauk and the Wars of America,” which covers 300 years, Henry Osmers chronicles the regional repercussions of eight conflicts, from the Indian wars to the cold war years. Owing to its strategic location, Montauk has intersected with our war history and made one of its own.

    The book is fully annotated, handsomely illustrated, and well written. It would be hard to find a more qualified historian. Mr. Osmers has written often of Montauk and the Montauk Point Lighthouse. His book “They Were All Strangers: The Wreck of the John Milton at Montauk, New York” came out in 2010. “American Gibraltar” is a goldmine of research, rich with anecdotes, quotations, and colorful detail. Its large paperback format nicely accommodates a host of archival photos and other artwork. There are 73 images in a book of 134 pages.

    These sometimes distant wars altered the landscape from afar and gave Montauk special purpose. Whether a tent city for quarantined soldiers or a yacht club converted to a Navy base, U.S. military actions had a variety of effects. Such a history for an isolated peninsula is as unlikely as it was transforming.

    We learn of a Montauk cleared of trees for a vast pastureland for 4,000 head of cattle and 2,000 sheep. The settlers who arrived in East Hampton in 1648 brought with them their farm life. The native Montaukett tribe not only accepted their neighbors but also taught them how to survive by hunting, fishing, and harvesting whales. It was a reciprocally protective coexistence.

    But the maritime tribe had something other tribes wanted: wampum, ornate, finely wrought beads made from seashells and used as currency in trade between tribes. Montaukett wampum was the most coveted of all. According to another Montauk historian, Richard J. White, “Montauk . . . was considered the ‘mint.’ ” The Narragansett and Niantic tribes across Long Island Sound would kill for wampum, and did. The Indian wars weakened the Montaukett nation. By 1659, an epidemic reduced the tribe by two-thirds.

    It was among the settlers of East Hampton that the Montauketts took refuge. As Jeannette Edwards Rattray wrote, “not a drop of blood was ever shed in anger between the Montauk Indians and their new white neighbors.”

    Montauk saw the construction of only four houses by 1796. The fourth house included the building of the Montauk Point Lighthouse, which has since spared countless ships from disaster. The celebrated Third House, reconstructed in 1806, would serve as headquarters for Col. Theodore Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War. Thereafter, Montauk was described as “a natural Gibraltar, on a small scale.” Soon after that war, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle declared Montauk to be “a natural stronghold.” The aptness of the title “American Gibraltar” gathers weight one war after another.

    We find the royal English fleet bristling with cannon in Gardiner’s Bay not once but twice: during the American Revolution and again in the War of 1812. Livestock presented an irresistible food source for the British fleets. In the spring of 1776, a battle off Montauk Point aborted a British attempt to steal cattle and horses. In September 1780 the royal fleet anchored in Gardiner’s Bay included eight men-of-war carrying, collectively, nearly 400 guns and thousands of men to feed.

    The Spanish-American War brought both celebrity and compassion to Montauk. In Havana, the sinking of the battleship Maine triggered a war that would transform and publicize Montauk as never before. Tropical Cuban hostilities made for a bloody, disease-ridden conflict. If Spanish gunfire didn’t find American soldiers, malaria, typhoid, or yellow fever often did. Sick and wounded American combatants left Cuba by the shipload, bound for Montauk.

    Teddy Roosevelt was the inspiration for a hospital and vast quarantine facility named Camp Wikoff at Montauk. Even before it was completed, the camp began receiving the first of 30,000 casualties. Photos reveal a tent city infirmary and T.R. himself, astride a sturdy mount.

    This war extended the railroad and brought a new post office, a general store, the telegraph, and later the telephone. (When telephone service arrived, nine homing pigeons were also installed at the Montauk Lighthouse.) A power station and electric light came along, and so did two new restaurants. Local citizens, especially the women of East Hampton, took nourishment and much-needed supplies to the suffering men. Out of Camp Wikoff’s 30,000 wounded, only 263 died there.

    Between the world wars, a National Guard training ground known as Camp Welsh came to Montauk. “The reverberation of guns fired by the artillery units . . . could be felt as far as fifty miles away,” writes Mr. Osmers. “Almost every summer, the Navy conducted target practice in Gardiner’s Bay.” Great warships like the Pennsylvania, the Nevada, and the Arizona unleashed fusillades from 14-inch guns.

    During World War II, Mr. Osmers writes, “the majority of torpedoes that were sent to war ships, cruisers, and torpedo boats came from Sag Harbor.” Dirigibles occupied massive hangars at the Naval Air Station at Montauk. The area was considered an invasion point and was made part of the Eastern Coastal Defense Shield. These chapters of “American Gibraltar” are especially generous with old photos and revealing captions.

    Camp Hero at Montauk became the main facility, with posh Montauk Manor serving as barracks for G.I.s. The government appropriated 468 acres, and Montauk was suddenly a military town. The Montauk Yacht Club at Star Island became a Navy auxiliary base, and private yachts became patrol boats. The Coast Guard used the restaurant magnate Howard Johnson’s yacht to search for subs. Much of Camp Hero’s military presence was disguised behind the facade of a mock fishing village. Quaint clapboard siding was actually four-foot-thick cement. The gymnasium appeared to be a church.

    Boats, seaplanes, and lighter-than-air craft patrolled the coastline from Fire Island to Nantucket Shoals. Vulnerability of attack by sea demanded gun emplacements, better communications, new defenses, and men to man them.

    They would come none too soon. Germany invaded Poland in 1939. And only 14 months after Pearl Harbor, a German U-boat would torpedo a Panamanian tanker 60 miles off Montauk.

    By June 1943, huge 16-inch gun emplacements became part of Camp Hero. Vinnie Grimes, a lifelong resident, remembers the time well: “You had the Coast Guard up at the lighthouse, the Navy at Fort Pond, the Army at Camp Hero, the Signal Corps. . . .” From his house on Sandpiper Hill, Mr. Grimes remembers seeing “the flashes out in the ocean — it was German U-boats hitting tankers and cargo ships. . . .” Montauk’s new gun batteries could blast 2,240-pound projectiles across 30 miles of ocean with accuracy.

    With the cold war, Montauk was among the first early warning defense sites. The guns of Montauk were dismantled and radar domes for Norad, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, went up. You could track the sophistication of advancing military technology by watching its evolution at Montauk. Before long, satellite technology would make shore defenses obsolete.

    Montauk the geographic anomaly was made remarkable by people who coped with extremes. Real-life characters give this book heart because of the author’s humanistic style in the relaying of countless events. He shows how the consequences of war were answered with strength, intelligence, compassion, and invention.    

    As if nothing ever happened, Montauk has returned to a relatively pristine state. But its imprint on America’s military history remains indelible. War is about courage, resourcefulness, and nationhood. Patriots propel Mr. Osmers’s narrative from the beginning, and patriotism infuses it to the end.

    Henry Osmers is the tour director and historian at the Montauk Point Lighthouse. He lives in Shirley.

    Jeane Bice, who lives in Springs, is writing a book about life and death in small-town New York.

    “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” the 18th-century French novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos about aristocratic power games and the lives they affect, has been adapted into every form imaginable. It can boast of at least seven versions on film, including two set in Korea, an opera, a radio series, and even a ballet. But it is the Christopher Hampton stage adaptation that has garnered the most attention in the Western world, first as a successful Broadway production and then as a successful Hollywood film in the 1980s.

    And it is a version of Hampton’s “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” that can be seen at the Southampton Cultural Center through April 1.

    Michael Disher’s production is set at some vague time in the 1920s or ’30s, and features Brooke Alexander as la Marquise de Merteuil and Seth Hendricks as le Vicomte de Valmont, ex and future lovers in a sexual game of chess using hapless innocents as pawns for their amusement. Originally intended as an indictment of the French nobility’s deviant ways, this production demonstrates that it works just as well in tuxedos and evening gowns as it did with powdered wigs and buckles.

    The set features a simple system of white pillars and pedestals that the servants move for the scene changes. A ruched swag hangs in the background, effectively lit in purple, orange, and other bright colors to signify the change from place to place. All in all, the minimal set gives the production an airy elegance.

    Mr. Disher’s decision to start each scene with the actors in silhouette is reminiscent of the traditional silhouette portraits of French nobility in the 18th century, subliminally tying this production to its roots.

    Ms. Alexander gives a powerful performance as Merteuil, gliding around the stage in lovely backless gowns and speaking over her shoulder at Valmont. When she says, “Love is something you use, not something you fall into like quicksand,” she means it. Her objective, to ruin the intended nuptials of a lover by having Valmont seduce the bride before the wedding, never falters.

    Mr. Hendricks is onstage in almost every scene, and his energy is unwavering until the end. He plays Valmont as a jaded upper crust gadabout whose spark is rekindled only during his repartee with Merteuil or during the thrill of the chase. Having seen Mr. Hendricks in three very different productions in the past year, it is clear that he is one of the most versatile actors in the East End’s theater community, and this role is his strongest so far. Having said that, he seemed to lose focus during the last few scenes but it was opening night and his performance has no doubt tightened up since then.

    The rest of the cast is also very good: Barbara-Jo Howard as Madame de Volanges and Julie King as her daughter, the innocent Cecile; Kasia Klimiuk as Madame la Présidente de Tourvel, the tragic and unwilling object of Valmont’s affection, Bonnie Grice as the sensual Emilie, and Adam Fronc as the fresh-faced and guileless Danceny. Vincent Carbone, Charles Parshley, and Susan Cincotta round out the ensemble.

    There are a few minor strikes against the show, including unnecessary British accents that come and go as easily as Valmont’s affections, but none of them noticeably detract from what is essentially a strong production of a timeless tale.

   “Balzac’s Omelette”

Anka Muhlstein

Other Press, $19.95

    While walking past the New Books table you see a small, square, butter-colored book with an irresistible title — “Balzac’s Omelette.” Don’t tell me you can pass by without picking it up for a look, even if it is just in mute tribute to the correct spelling of omelette.

    The subtitle reads, “A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture With Honoré de Balzac.” You flick through the pages, admiring the charming illustrations. Your eye falls on a few words, telling you that the great writer worked 18-hour days, drinking only water and coffee and eating fruit. Surely not! Balzac was one fat guy!

    Then Anka Muhlstein continues, “Once the proofs were passed for press, he sped to a restaurant, downed a hundred oysters for a starter, washing them down with four bottles of white wine, then ordered the rest of the meal: twelve salt meadow lamb cutlets with no sauce, a duckling with turnips, a brace of roast partridges, a Normandy sole. . . . Once sated, he usually sent the bill to his publishers.”

    That’s more like it. Balzac was obviously a man to whom food was of paramount importance, to the extent that it is a connecting thread through his novels, revealing his characters’ nature and class through what they eat, when they eat, and where they eat.

    “You need only a whiff of the appalling, watery bean soup made by Madame Marneffe’s maid in ‘Cousin Bette’ to gauge how negligent she is in her role as mistress of the house, while the aroma from the hearty limpid stock that Jacquotte serves her master in ‘The Country Doctor’ implies a perfectly run household.”

    Considering that Balzac lived in the time of photography, it is strange to learn that when he was born Paris had no restaurants. If you did not eat at home or with friends, you had only the option of dining at an inn or a boarding house, neither of which offered choices or good food. Once the excesses of the Revolution were over, and legal restrictions relaxed, restaurants emerged and at once became an essential of Paris life.

    “Balzac takes us all over Paris . . . sending his characters off into the most refined establishments and the most lowly, and through his succession of novels gives us a real social and gastronomic report on the capital. Some forty restaurants are referred to in ‘The Human Comedy,’ because he is not satisfied with mentioning only the biggest names.”

    Balzac could certainly put it back with the best — while briefly in jail for the equivalent of draft-dodging, his cell “was piled high, groaning with patés, stuffed poultry, glazed game, baskets of different wines” — but he was a gourmet not a glutton, preferring food of excellent quality, simply prepared with the freshest ingredients. In his books he is as tough on those who eat greedily and indiscriminately as on misers who eat meanly.

    Restaurants provide a convenient setting for a novelist to have his characters meet, but it is around the family dining table that they reveal their true natures. Here Balzac reveals his misers — their bread sliced wafer-thin, their meager salads scarcely touched by oil, their tasteless gruels — and the greedy, whose greed he invariably associates with unhappiness in love and life. His most virtuous characters are invariably abstemious. Considering how he liked food himself, it seems a little hard that he doesn’t appear to have portrayed any happy hearty eaters.

    “Balzac’s Omelette” is perhaps less of an omelette than a light and charming soufflé. Or perhaps a meze, where you can pick and choose among choice bits of information or anecdote at will. And ultimately it has the effect of awakening your appetite for more than food (which one likes to think is Ms. Muhlstein’s intention), sending you back to the bookshelf to reread Balzac’s novels themselves.

    Anka Muhlstein’s books include “Baron James: The Rise of the French Rothschilds” and “La Salle: Explorer of the North American Frontier.” She has a house in Sagaponack.

    Sheridan Sansegundo, a former arts editor at The Star, lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

New Work at Vered

    “Ray Caesar: Selected Works” will open at the Vered Gallery in East Hampton tomorrow. The exhibition features the artist’s work in Maya, a three-dimensional modeling software used for digital animation effects in film and games.

    Digital models are made and posed, clothing and hair are added, and then they are placed in fully realized environments incorporating drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture. Mr. Caesar uses these to then make two-dimensional prints, similar to capturing stills from video or film. The work addresses subconscious elements of his life and the way he experiences the world around him, according to a release.

    The show will be on display through April 30. Also on view are works by Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning, David Hockney, Wolf Kahn, Yves Klein, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Fairfield Porter, Hunt Slonem, Frank Stella, and Bert Stern, among others.

“Spring Quintet”

    Arlene Bujese has organized another show at the Southampton Cultural Center on Pond Lane in Southampton. “Spring Quintet,” featuring the work of Deborah Black, Pamela Focarino, Margery Gosnell-Qua, Jane Johnson, and Ronnie Chalif, will open today, and a reception for the artists will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. All five regional artists explore nature through personal perspectives. They move through representation and abstraction, with an emphasis on light, mood, and gesture.

    Ms. Black of East Hampton will show a new series of acrylic-on-paper works. Ms. Focarino, also of East Hampton, has a new series of oil-on-canvas paintings featuring the play of light. Ms. Gosnell-Qua, who lives in Remsenburg, will show a selection of oil-on-canvas and watercolor paintings. Ms. Johnson, from Sag Harbor, reduces the elements of nature to large, colorful, rounded biomorphic forms. Ms. Chalif, a longtime resident of the East End who now lives in New York City, makes abstract sculpture into stone landscapes of African wonderstone and Carrara marble.

    The show is on view through April 25.

Larsen to be Honored

    The New York School of Interior Design will honor Jack Lenor Larsen with a Lifetime Achievement Award at its spring benefit on April 18 at the Metropolitan Club in New York.

    Mr. Larsen, the founder and owner-occupant of the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, is an authority on traditional and contemporary crafts. As a fabric designer, he has created thousands of hand-woven patterns and textiles in natural yarns, many of which are associated with modernist architecture and furnishings and are in collections of major international museums. He also introduced batik and ikat to the American public in the 1970s.

    He will be recognized for his designs as well as for establishing the LongHouse residence and gardens, which were inspired by the Ise Shrine in Japan. More information about the event is available at the school’s Web site, nysid.edu.

From Europa to Heidi

    On Sunday at 2 p.m., Guild Hall will screen in HD the Berliner Philharmoniker’s “Europa Konzert” from Moscow in its North American premiere. The concert will feature Vadim Repin, a violinist, with Sir Simon Rattle conducting. The program will include Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, Bruch’s Concerto for Violin No. 1 (Op. 26), and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A major (Op. 92). Tickets cost $20, $18 for members. Students under 21 are free with identification.

    Guild Hall and the Naked Stage will present a reading of “The Heidi Chronicles” by Wendy Wasserstein on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., with Josh Gladstone as the lead. The 1988 play, a comedy that touches on deeper themes, traces Heidi Holland’s progress from high school in the 1960s through the 1980s, focusing on how feminism shaped her personal development and career as an art historian.

Spontaneous Poetry

    The Parrish Art Museum in South­ampton will provide an interactive way to view the “EST-3” exhibition on Sunday with “spontaneous acts of poetry” happening through the galleries from 2 to 4 p.m. The event is free with museum admission.

    Five poets from the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Stony Brook Southampton will provide intriguing ways to tour the show, such as instant portraits taken by Phebe Szatmari, who will also write a flash poem commemorating the interaction. In Gallery Two, Holly Weinberg’s piece “Demagogue” can be viewed on videotape. Gallery Three will have the Poem-a-Tron, a human poem-generating machine conceived by Sarah Azzara. It can be activated by cellphone. Then, in the concert hall, Matthew Miranda will perform original piano pieces using musical theory to make sound patterns. There, the audience will also find Ashleigh Smith’s “multiplicity poem” hanging from the ceiling.

    All through April, National Poetry Month, visitors can take a poetry audio tour of the show.

‘On the Beach’

    The Baryshnikov Arts Center and the Watermill Center will present “On the Beach” next Thursday through April 7 at 8 p.m. in the Jerome Robbins Theater in New York City. The program was inspired by the opera “Einstein on the Beach” by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass on the occasion of its 35th anniversary.

    Mr. Wilson selected teams of artists who have completed residencies at the Watermill Center to reinterpret sections of the piece. The artists are Jonah Bokaer, a choreographer and dancer from New York City; Davide Balliano, a visual and performance artist from Italy; the Degenerate Art Ensemble, a Seattle performance company; Manuela Infante, a Chilean theater director; Santiago Tacetti, a visual artist from Argentina; Steven Reker, a New York choreographer, dancer, and musician, with People Get Ready; Egil Saebjornsson, a visual artist from Iceland, and Marcia Moraes, a Brazilian performer.

    Each team focused on different sections of the opera — the four scenes and the “Knee Plays.” Tickets cost $20. More information is at bacnyc.org.

Land Trust Doings

    The Peconic Land Trust will hold several events at various locations this weekend, including the opening of Bridge Gardens on Mitchell Lane in Bridgehampton on Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. The gardens have been reconfigured and in some cases redesigned by Rick Bogusch to expand the vegetable beds.

    At 1 p.m. there will be a lecture there: “Green Garden, Green City: Modeling Environmental Sustainability and Stewardship at Brooklyn Botanic Garden,” with Scot Medbury, the president of that garden. Mr. Medbury is also co-author of “San Francisco Botanical Garden: An Introduction to a World of Plants.” The cost is $15, free to members. Reservations have been suggested through [email protected].

    On Saturday at Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett from 10 a.m. to noon, volunteers can take part in a seed-and-seedlings workshop. Scott Chaskey will demonstrate how to seed trays using compost from home and yard scraps. On May 19, another workshop will show how to transplant those seedlings into fields. The program is free and will be held regardless of weather. Parking is available on Deep Lane.

    On March 18,  a beautiful early Sunday evening just turning toward spring, the birds were still twittering as we hustled into the big, white East Hampton Presbyterian Church, built in 1648, a year after the settling of the town, to hear the Choral Society of the Hamptons present a concert of sacred music written by composers of the past three centuries. Inside, the choristers filed in to take their places on tiered benches, followed by the South Fork Chamber Ensemble players. Thomas Bohlert, the church’s music director, played piano and organ, Linda Wetherill was on flute, Terry Keevil, oboe, Rebecca Perea, cello, Margery Fitts, harp, Alec Massaro, timpani, and Peter DeSalvo, glockenspiel.

    The guest conductor, Jesse Mark Peckham, greeted us enthusiastically, then turned to his musicians, and the musical feast began with Gabriel Fauré’s famous “Cantique de Jean Racine,” written in 1865 when he was 20 and in his last year of music school, where he studied with Camille Saint-Saens. It is a choir director’s dream, written for mixed chorus and piano or organ. Maestro Peckham led the choristers’ entrances and exits with subtlety and precision, one of his many talents that was to continue throughout the evening, illuminating the music and making it such a joy to listen to.

    Fauré used dynamics, color, and harmony to achieve the sound he wanted and his music follows the central points of interest in the text by the 17th-century dramatist and poet Jean Racine. As in his Requiem to follow, Fauré treats this prayer with restraint and charm, seeing death as a happy deliverance rather than a painful passing.

    Maestro Peckham has emerged as one of the most versatile and accomplished young conductors of his generation. At 18, he was asked to conduct a Bee­thoven Chamber Orchestra in Hradec. He stayed on to conduct leading orchestras in the Czech Republic and to serve as artistic director of the Czech World Orchestra. In 2005, he returned to this country to found Khorikos, an ensemble of singers whose unique expressivity make even the most complex harmonies sound sweet and clear. His wife, Vanessa Hylande, a dancer with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and a singer with the Khorikos ensemble, is theyir chief executive officer. His conducting is physical. He moved and danced as, like a ventriloquist, he elicited precisely the sound he wanted to hear from his singers.

    “I must leave the podium now as I want to video my wife and my son, Emmett Schwartzman, who will sing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Pie Jesu,’ ” he announced at one point. Ms. Hylande and 8-year-old Emmett, already a member of the Metropolitan Opera’s professional children’s choir, stood up, side by side, and sang, her mezzo-soprano voice meshing and intermingling with his treble voice as they sang the only classical piece Webber has written, one he describes as his most personal work — a child’s view of the divine. I’m told that Emmett wrote each chorister a thank-you note. What good manners — and I hear he’s crazy about gymnastics, especially the trampoline. Quite a talented family.

    Silvie Jensen is a mezzo-soprano with a wide range of vocal accomplishments, both as a chamber musician and as a soloist who has appeared in everything from opera to guest performances with Ornette Coleman and Meredith Monk. She sang two cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach, whose music she loves, in perfect German, accompanied by Ms. Perea on cello and Mr. Keevil on oboe on Cantata No. 110. The instrumentalists had one day to rehearse but Ms. Jensen’s collaborative skills pulled them through beautifully. Cantata No. 94, accompanied by Mr. Bohlert on organ, Ms. Wetherill on flute, and Ms. Perea on cello, was as smooth as glass (or Glass, with whom Ms. Jensen has also performed!). She appeared again as soloist on Mozart’s “Laudate Dominum.” I’m not a particular fan of Mozart, but this work contained one of the loveliest arias, sacred or secular, I’ve ever heard. I can’t deny Mozart’s melodic genius.

    Charles David Osborne, born in 1949, is perhaps the least well known of the composers presented. He began his career as a singer, but changed to enter the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he trained to become a cantor and discovered his passion for composing. His motet, “Whosoever Saves a Single Life,” was written for the Songs of Life Festival. It received a world premiere in 2011 at the Kennedy Center, performed by the ensemble Khorikos and conducted by Mr. Peckham. The text is from the Talmud and, in the composer’s words, “The motet is meant as a musical benediction, a way for the Jewish people (and a Jewish composer) to say ‘Thank you.’ ”

    John Rutter, born in 1945, founder of the Cambridge Singers and a composer of choral music, is also one of England’s finest choral conductors. His magnificent Requiem was written for his father, who, although never knowledgeable in music himself, avidly supported his son’s musical passion and determination. Rutter was also inspired to write the piece upon his discovery of Fauré’s Requiem. As in Fauré’s masterpiece, Rutter’s Requiem is not set in its entirety in traditional form. The seven movements are full of vernacular texts, interwoven with Latin and full of rich harmonies illustrative of the texts, inclusive, as Rutter desired, and available to all people.

    Each setting has an important part for solo instruments, depending on whether it’s a psalm, a prayer, a folk song, or a Gregorian chant sound. The sixth movement is the 23rd Psalm. Harp and chorus with oboe illustrate the words “My cup runneth over,” at which Maestro Peckham leapt up, and the final setting, Lux Aeterna, with timpani and organ accompaniment, began. “I heard a voice from heaven saying unto thee . . . bless them, bless them. . . .” Ms. Jenson finished the movement on a high B flat, “they rest, they rest, they rest. . . .” Ms. Perea, whose cello began the Requiem, brought the concert to an end.

    Bursts of bravos and a standing ovation followed the thrilling show, a concert of joy and light, with melody the source that unified and synchronized this interesting and diverse program. We left the church singing.

     Elizabeth Rogers, a pianist and Sagaponack resident, has reviewed concerts for The Star occasionally for more than a decade.

   Purists may sniff at giving up an entire museum show to a single private collector and — in the Parrish Art Museum’s case — putting art on the wall that is from an entirely different region of the country. Yet there is an argument to be made for the “EST-3: Southern California in New York-Los Angeles Art from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection” exhibition, and the museum and its curator have made it well.

    Ms. DeWoody has been a longtime resident of the Southampton art colony in Shinnecock Hills and has been active in the South Fork arts community during that time, organizing shows for galleries such as Salomon Contemporary and the Fireplace Project. Her visits to art fairs during the summer always attract notice and the giddy excitement of local dealers whose inventory she has examined and in some cases even purchased.

    David Pagel, who has served as an adjunct curator for the Parrish for several years and who organized two previous exhibitions for the museum, is based in Southern California and has an impressive curriculum vitae of accomplishments. He is a critic for The Los Angeles Times and received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in contemporary art criticism in 1990. He is also the chairman of the art department at Claremont Graduate University in Pomona.

    The exhibition was conceived as an East Coast contribution to the dialogue started last year in Southern California with the multi-venue juggernaut, “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.” The exhibitions and associated events have been going on since October and continue in some of the 60 places that once participated from Santa Barbara to San Diego and out to Palm Springs.

    Too eclectic to be taken as an actual survey, Mr. Pagel has taken the disparate styles, subjects, and mediums of the four decades of art culled from this collection and attempted to make visual sense of them through a loose confederation of categories: “People,” “Places,” and “Things.” It works. There is a liveliness in the installation that would be lacking or watered down if presented more linearly. The way ideas cross-reference one another and multiply across the years produces an apt context for the art, which was unfettered by things like the more rigorous European practices of modernism such as Cubism and more traditional academic concerns in the first place.

Sometimes a familiar construct, such as a regional notion of art history, benefits from being defined by what it is not. This show does that and allows for questions to be raised about why things happened the way they did here and what impact, if any, they had anywhere else, allowing us to see the more familiar styles and predilections from the East Coast anew from their own different and defining influences.

While Los Angeles and its environs are now known as centers for fine art study, much of its growth has happened fairly recently. Art making in Southern California was historically seen as independent from schools or academies. Early abstract artists there also bypassed a lot of influences that gave New York its distinctive style. Instead of aping that, California artists found heir own modes of expression through “hard-edge” abstraction and assemblage sculpture in the 1950s, interpretations of Pop and Minimalism, conceptual, performance art, and feminist art. Post-minimalism and the intermingling of art and science had their own unique interpretations there as well, through artists such as Bruce Nauman and James Turrell.

    In fact, two longtime East Hampton artists, Paul Brach, who died in 2007, and his wife, Miriam Shapiro, were instrumental in shaping nascent arts programs at the University of California at San Diego and the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Brach was the head of both programs. Ms. Shapiro established the feminist art program at CalArts with Judy Chicago. The couple moved back east in 1975 and relocated to East Hampton full time in 1998. One of the other first faculty members of CalArts and an early Conceptualist, John Baldessari, is featured in “EST-3” with a series of lithographs and other printed matter.

    It is not just the issues that the exhibition raises that make it worthwhile viewing, but the curator and the collector. It would be one thing to have a show of work that was amassed purely through the efforts of insider art world consultants, looking cookie-cutter and accessible enough so that even the most dim-witted collector could relate to it. But Ms. DeWoody is not that collector. She is an insider, serving on the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art and always in attendance at any important art world gathering. Yet, her personal interactions with art make her the tastemaker, guiding other collectors and museums, and not the other way around.

    During a discussion of the exhibition while it was being installed, Mr. Pagel noted that the show was as much a portrait of the collector as of the time and place during which the art was made. So many contemporary collections have no personality, he said. “As a critic, if I don’t have something to say that doesn’t sound like someone else, I shut up.” He said it should be the same for collecting. “The point of a collection is to realize a vision. If you hire someone to form it for you, it is like hiring someone to eat and drink for you or have sex for you.”

    Ms. DeWoody said in a talk with Mr. Pagel at the opening that her eye was shaped by her mother, who moved to California when she was growing up, and by her collection of California art. Ms. DeWoody did some art study of her own and lived in TriBeCa during her first marriage, where she met early settlers such as Richard Prince and Andy Spence. She also came into contact with curators such as David Kiehl, a longtime curator of prints at the Whitney, and through him, Lisa Phillips, Richard Armstrong, and Richard Marshall, who all worked at the museum in the 1980s and early 1990s.

    While Mr. Pagel calls himself an anti-intellectual, he has a strong academic background and his installations have always had a free hand guided by an intrinsic understanding of why something talks to something else on a wall. That is why the thematic installation works and creates moments that few are likely to see in any other examination of these artists, this period, or even within Ms. DeWoody’s collection.

    The installation begins with “People,” and Don Bachardy’s 30-some portraits of many of the most influential artists of the region serve as an engaging introduction to the specific aesthetics of the region. It is filled out with other figurative work by David Hockney, Robert Colescott, Beatrice Wood, and others.

    The “Places” are literal and suggestive, interior and exterior, and can encompass work by Karl Benjamin, Ed Ruscha, or a house-shaped sculpture by Tony Berlandt. Those pieces regarded as “Things” tend to cross over with Places at the rear of the gallery, whether they are Edward and Nancy Kienholz’s “The Block Head,” a cinderblock refitted to resemble a portable television or Mike Kelley’s silk parade banners hung festively from the ceiling in a way that belies their more sinister undertones.

    “Things” tend to be completely abstract objects such as a fur-lined box by Vija Celmins (another West Coast-associated artist who found her way to the South Fork), Craig Kauffman’s colorful Plexiglas sculptures, or a number of paintings by Frederick Hammersley.

    It all hangs together rather nicely, and walking through it one is likely to forget that it is the collection of one person. There is enough variety and eccentricity to keep viewers engaged and the overall quality is fine, including the multiples.

    The exhibition will be on view through June 17.