Booth Dreams of Summer

    The Tulla Booth Gallery is “Dreaming of Summer” this week, with photography featuring seascapes and images of the summer lifestyle by Anne Gabriele, Daniel Jones, John Margarites, Blair Seagram, and Bob Tabor. A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    Ms. Gabriele’s focus is on a foggy sea. She uses image transfers to achieve a luminous quality. Mr. Jones takes large-format black-and-white images that are richly detailed for digital work. Mr. Margarites likes taking close-up water views that celebrate summer beaches in vivid detail. Ms. Seagram’s “Surf Report” captures in large panoramic views the swells that come with storms. Mr. Tabor, known for his horse photography, also seeks out dramatic ocean views in all kinds of weather.

    The show will be on view in Sag Harbor through March 30.

Love Junkies at Vered

    The Vered Gallery in East Hampton is showing “Love Junkies” through March 19. The work is by Adam Hand­ler and features paintings and photographs that examine abstract ideas of relationships and sexuality. Flags, text, and splatters figure prominently, and the pieces often show suggestive poses and have intriguing language.

    Spending time in his youth at his grandmother’s framing business exposed him to work by modern masters such as Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns and instilled in him the passion to pursue art. He studied life drawing in Italy and went on to graduate from the State University at Purchase with a degree in art history and a minor in fine arts, which included painting, sculpture, photography, and graphic design. He has shown his work in New York City, Greenwich, Conn., Texas, and Canada.

Carone in the City

    The Washburn Gallery in New York City is showing the 1950s paintings of Nicolas Carone through March 31. Carone, who died in 2010, was one of the last survivors from the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. From 1953 to 1961, he lived on Three Mile Harbor, one of the artists who followed Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock out to the South Fork. The house he bought was rented to Willem de Kooning during 1961 and 1962 while de Kooning’s studio was being completed.

    The paintings on view are all from the time he lived in Springs and have the kind of color palette — blues, phosphorescent pinks, and golden browns — that often shows up in South Fork-inspired canvases.

    After 1962 he simply dropped out of the art world, according to Joan Washburn. “He just didn’t want to get involved in the gallery world anymore,” and didn’t have any major shows until recently, when his works from the 1950s as well as more recent compositions have been shown. He received the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.

Diversity on View

    On Saturday and Sunday at Ashawagh Hall in Springs, a group show of six artists, “Diversity,” will be on view. A reception with wines from Domaine Franey takes place on Saturday evening from 5 to 8.

    John Todaro will display photos of East Hampton and other places. Cynthia Loewen, a realist painter, will show interpretations of Mr. Todaro’s work and other acrylics and watercolors. Mary Milne, a glass artist, has multilayered fusion glass pieces. Phyllis Chillingworth will exhibit bold watercolors of Montauk, while Deborah Anderson will offer framed botanicals. Anahi DeCanio, a new artist to the area, will show abstract multimedia paintings.

“Ned Smyth: Reverence”

    Salomon Contemporary in West Chelsea will present an exhibit titled “Ned Smyth: Reverence” as part of the gallery’s series American Responses. The second of four solo shows and a musical performance, it examines the significance of American regionalism in the art of the early 1970s.

    The exhibit will include two concrete works, “Renaissance Plan” from 1973 and “Piazza Plan” from 1974. It will open this evening at 6 and run through March 17.

    Mr. Smyth is the son of Craig Hugh Smyth, who was a prominent Renaissance art historian and director of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. He grew up in a world of academic luminaries and major museums and churches where his father did his research in Europe. These buildings became enmeshed in his experience of art, and in his first works he made architectural spaces with historical references while still instilling the minimalist aesthetic of his postmodern tendencies at the time.

    Other artists in the series are Kim MacConnel, Dickie Landry, and Tina Girouard.

John Iversen, a jeweler and goldsmith, balks at being called an artist, but it’s impossible to look at the cuff-like bracelets, necklaces, earrings, and brooches he has made over the last 30 years and not see them as wearable sculptures. Apparently the curators of the Drawing Room agree, as they are showing his elegantly wrought jewelry and works on paper in the same gallery that has shown the artists Jennifer Bartlett, Robert Harms, and Costantino Nivola, among others.

    “John is deeply involved in the fresh use of his materials and is keenly sensitive to their tactile appeal,” Emily Goldstein, an owner of the Drawing Room, wrote in an e-mail. He “considers the ‘feel’ that his forms will have on the body of the wearer. . . . The brooches and bracelets all have a movement that is truly magical.”

    His designs start out on paper, he said recently at his studio on Springs-Fireplace Road in East Hampton. “The drawings are part inspiration, part guide. . . . A lot of drawings are made with jewelry in mind, but not every sketch becomes a piece of jewelry.” Sculpture, which he also does, comes from a totally different place, he said. “Does it make you feel like you want to pick it up?”

    That, aside from any consideration of aesthetics or craftsmanship, is a strength of his work: Whether it is a Pebble River bracelet, or his berry cluster Double Jacks earrings made of pink and gray akoya pearls, pink coral, two black diamond beads, and 18-karat gold, or a cuff bracelet made of 14-karat red gold, 18-karat yellow gold, 14-karat green gold, and 14-karat white gold, the hand reaches for it.

    “Working in three dimensions is a different experience. . . . With the drawing it remains abstract. Working in three dimensions you get to a point that you can’t imagine when you’re drawing . . . it’s still a fantasy. You’re never quite sure it will really work, so seeing the final piece is always a thrill because you made it work.” He added that he usually makes a point of finishing a piece even if he hates it. “You can get too much of it and it’s like a constant bickering.”

    Mr. Iversen may have begun these ruminations in Hamburg, where he was born in the early 1950s. He and his family moved to Dusseldorf where, as a lad of 15, he enrolled at the College for Metal Industries. As a child, he said, he always liked making things. In Dusseldorf he learned to saw and file. He then had the good fortune at age 17 to pursue a jewelry making internship with an uncle, Karl H. Stittgen, in Vancouver, British Columbia.

    Mr. Stittgen, who had moved there as a watchmaker in 1952, at that point was a self-taught jeweler who at first translated what he saw in nature into jewelry. Mr. Iversen spent four years there, where, he said, “The awareness of nature came . . . mainly from living in Vancouver and all the Asian influences there. Coming from small-town Germany without any diversity, it hit me like some sort of shock — speechless.”

    The goal of his technique of nature casting, similar to lost wax casting, is not to recreate a hydrangea blossom or gingko leaf, however, but to produce his concept of that leaf or blossom as a jewel. In this way, the piece is imbued with the feeling of its maker, another distinction of Mr. Iversen’s work. “Jewelry in a way is an emotion. The instinct to wear something, put something on your body, is a deep-rooted feeling. It’s very human and one of the things that sets us apart from other animals.”

    After his stint in Canada, Mr. Iversen returned to Germany, where he spent three semesters at the Staatliche Zeichen Academy’s College for Jewelry Design and Manufacturing. In 1978 he moved to New York City, but felt unprepared to take the city by storm quite yet. “You start getting jobs but you don’t want to do that for the rest of your life,” he said, perhaps referring to his job cleaning castings in Midtown.

    At age 24 or 25, “you find yourself there thinking, what am I going to do now? Well, you say, this is what I’ve got.” The exigencies of making a living superseded his ambition to make jewelry, especially given his modesty about his own level of talent.

    “I learned jewelry making,” he said, “but part of me wasn’t that good at it. I had a little bit of an artistic bent . . . I didn’t really pursue art as a career and I didn’t really pursue jewelry as a career. It was more a twist of fate.”

    “Fine artists have always made jewelry,” he went on, “also, a few jewelers became artists. It’s all a continuum. Some of the earliest pieces found were pieces of jewelry. The Venus of Willendorf, for instance, was probably an amulet.”

    His fortunes began to change once he quit the job of making wedding rings and took the chance of going out on his own, eventually having his work accepted by Artwear, an international SoHo jewelry gallery that was considered a hub of innovation and inspiration. Not long after that his work was featured on the cover of Vogue and in Harper’s Bazaar and, the rest, as they say, is history. Toward the end of the 1990s, Mr. Iversen moved with his wife and son to the East End.

    Boxwood, oak, gingko, and maple leaves, pebbles, seeds, water, and petals — hydrangea and eucalyptus mainly — appear again and again in his pieces. He has also worked with enamel.

    He uses hardly any gemstones. “It’s basically metalwork — combination. He also uses semiprecious stones, both matte and shiny, especially in his berry cluster series: amber, lapis, tourmaline, coral, jade, lemon chrysoprase, pink coral, and labradorite.

    He and his assistants make everything in his studio, except for stone setting, gold plating, and metal casting. Molds are made in New York and what comes out is sent back for him to finish, which often involves manipulating the surface of the metal by grinding, filing, engraving, or oxidation.

    Some bracelets look either like a jigsaw puzzle, chain mail, or metal that has been shattered and reassembled. He uses a tiny jewelry saw to cut the gold, silver, brass, and nickel.

    The edges of each piece are different, jagged in different ways. After years of working on the engineering and design, Mr. Iversen developed small hinges made of gold affixed to the back of the bracelet that keep the pieces together. These give him great satisfaction, like knowing a secret. Thanks to the flexibility given the piece by these hinges, a bracelet made by Mr. Iversen often feels like a Slinky on the arm, he once remarked to Ms. Goldstein. What makes the pieces so persuasive, he said, is that “they live in your hand. They’re not so static.”

     Mr. Stittgen, Mr. Iversen’s uncle, abides by the Japanese tenet in his jewelry and now his ceramics of “the beauty of imperfection,” an idea that doubtless had an impact on his nephew while he was in Canada.

    “The whole idea of a perfect piece doesn’t really work,” he said. “You’re always sort of moving on; you realize in hindsight that a piece was really a good one or one that you were trying to aim for,” which is why he sometimes puts it away. “Internally you can mature and then you understand and can forgive yourself when you look at it again. The zeitgeist is be in the here and now, but that has become a cliché. Time does its own work by itself. It’s an important part of art.”

    Here’s how it went: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was at a posh Bastille Day brunch at an oceanfront East Hampton home. A young woman, newly arrived on the East End, trying to make conversation over the smoked salmon tray, offered: “Oh, I’m from Indianapolis, too.” Whereupon Vonnegut, of the rumpled face and sweet, bovine eyes, said: “My mother committed suicide. She should have done it a lot earlier.”

“And So It Goes”

Charles J. Shields

Henry Holt, $30

    If anything, what Charles J. Shields proves in his well-researched, well-reasoned biography is that Kurt Vonnegut’s life was a non sequitur. Nothing flowed logically.

    Take, for example, his name: Born in 1922, he was the third child. The oldest, Bernard, a scientific genius, didn’t get the appellation “Jr.” Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the least favored of the children, was once told point-blank: “You were an accident.”

    Vonnegut’s parents were among the richest in the Hoosier capital city. When the Depression hit, the family lost most of its money. But they went right on spending despite the fact that they were unable to sell their fancy house. His father was an architect and responsible for a truly remarkable engineering feat: He moved an entire office building, the Indiana Bell Building, with all the workers doing their job in it. The edifice was winched up and moved 52 feet forward from its foundation and then swung around. Even the elevators continued to operate during the incredible maneuvers. But despite a triumph that brought observers from all over the globe, Vonnegut Sr. couldn’t prosper as an architect or engineer.

“Kurt Vonnegut:

Novels & Stories,

1963-1973”

Edited by Sidney Offit

Library of America, $35

    Big brother Bernard insisted Vonnegut Jr. study science at Cornell, where he loved writing for the student paper. But in science classes things really weren’t going well. It was World War II. Vonnegut decided to enlist. By then his parents had finally moved to a smaller Indianapolis house, which his mother roamed, Lady MacBeth-like, all night long. He got a military pass to come home. But it was too late: On Mother’s Day when he was 21 the family found Edith dead from an overdose of sleeping pills. She had not left a note. He had not gotten to see her that weekend.

    As a P.O.W. Vonnegut’s experiences were devastating. And then came the bombing of Dresden. Coming up out of the bowels of the earth where he was imprisoned, he was forced to search shards of buildings for days to find and stack rotting corpses. He was barely alive himself. Some of his starving fellow soldiers were shot when they found and pocketed bits of food. The images, the horrors, were indelible. Masterfully Mr. Shields uses a Dostoyevsky phrase that Jane, Vonnegut’s first wife, provided him: “One sacred memory from childhood is perhaps the best education.”

    Upon Vonnegut’s return from war, Bernard, a puppet master, finagled a job for his brother with his own employer, G.E. Vonnegut, newly wedded, was thrilled with the job as a flack for a scientific concern. But soon he earned the dismay of his employers because he was too busy writing his own stories. Some of which were published. Many not. He quit his cushy job anyway. Editors such as Knox Burger nurtured him enormously.

    “Harrison Bergeron” (get it?), originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, appeared in “Welcome to the Monkey House” in 1968. The story centers on a constitutional stipulation that each American is completely equal — no one is weaker, slower, uglier, or less intelligent than anyone else. The story takes place in the year 2081. There’s even a Handicapper General and a swat team of agents. The problem is a beautiful, graceful ballerina. She has to wear a mask as well as weights around her ankles, which is figuratively what Vonnegut had to do his entire life.

    Vonnegut once provided a list of rules for aspiring writers that were, of course, contradictory — and these rules carry both the sweetness occasionally manifested in him as well as his orneriness. Here are a few: Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on that they could finish the story themselves should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

    Mr. Shields is the author of “Mockingbird,” a biography of Harper Lee, who is a very different type of writer and whose personality, although feisty, can’t be more different from Vonnegut’s. It is clear that Vonnegut’s widow, the photographer Jill Krementz, did not cooperate with this biographer. That she is depicted as a harridan is putting it mildly. And perhaps as a result the photograph albums included in the book are not particularly interesting or revelatory. Indeed, Vonnegut is barely recognizable in most of the photos. Another nitpick: Mr. Shields misspells the name of the town of Southampton — surprising given the fact that much of Vonnegut’s later story takes place in Sagaponack.

    The Shields biography could perhaps have benefited from a more intense examination of Vonnegut’s novels and short stories. However, the recently issued Library of America omnibus contains many of Vonnegut’s finest works in a handsome collection, and it’s perhaps best for readers to return to the original. In Vonnegut’s case there’s a great deal of prescience. In “Breakfast of Champions,” also titled by Vonnegut as “Goodbye Blue Monday,” his famed Kilgore Trout (the author’s alter ego) makes an appearance. The book, which takes place in Midland City (hmm, wonder how the Indiana author thought that one up), involves “two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.”

    In “Cat’s Cradle,” Vonnegut’s fourth novel, a satire of the arms race, Felix Hoenikker is the fictional co-creator of the atomic bomb.

    Then there’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” and Billy Pilgrim, the alien from Tralfamadore, who witnesses the bombing of Dresden. The book’s succinct subtitle? “The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance With Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too Much], Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed the Fire Bombing of Dresden, Germany, ‘The Florence of the Elbe,’ a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale. This Is a Novel Somewhat in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, Where the Flying Saucers Come From. Peace.”

    Is there any wonder why this author who was made to feel apart from the heartland, apart from his parental home, his marital homes, his children, from everything, would not be alien-obsessed? Mr. Shields points out that Vonnegut often felt dismissed as just a sci-fi writer by the literary establishment. But of course “Slaughterhouse-Five” was named the 18th greatest novel in English of the 20th century by the Modern Library. That’s how it went.

—

    Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

    Laura Wells is an editor and writer who lives in Sag Harbor.

Photo Show at Ashawagh

    Hampton Photo, Arts and Framing will present a photo exhibit at Ashawagh Hall this weekend, beginning on Saturday with a reception from 5:30 to 11 p.m. The show will feature more than 50 South Fork photographers.

    The images have been chosen and organized by Laurie Barone-Schaefer, a photographer. Among those included are Kate Petrone, Ellen Watson, Evelyn O’Doherty, Kristina Gale, Diana Frank, L. Marie Jones, Hailey Kohlus, Dan Ritzler, Lacy Jane, and many more. The show will close on Sunday at 4 p.m.

Twelve Months at Four Seasons

    Roy Nicholson’s “52 Weeks II” series of paintings is on view at the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan through 2012.

    Each of the 52 small panels represents a week over the course of a year, beginning with the summer solstice of 2008 and ending with the summer of 2009.  Each painting is inspired by the artist’s garden in Sag Harbor, as it changes week by week. It is the second such series Mr. Nicholson has done. The paintings may be abstract evocations or more literal representations of flowers such as columbines or elements of the landscape such as pitch-pine trees.

    John Woodward, the director of the Woodward Gallery, who was once a Four Seasons chef, has organized the installation. The restaurant has a long history of presenting works by artists, including  Joan Miró, Frank Stella, James Rosenquist, and Robert Indiana.

Isham in Southampton

    Sheila Isham’s “The Beast in Art,” paintings and works on paper depicting animals, will be shown at the Southampton Cultural Center from next Thursday through March 28.

    The artist, whose studio is in South­ampton, strives to portray the spiritual connection between humans and animals. Her modern influences, she has said, are Kandinsky, Chagall, and Franz Marc. She explores both the abstract and the figurative in her work, with references to the art of ancient Egypt, China, and the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux, France.

    Ms. Isham, who has had many museum and gallery exhibits in the course of her career, won the best in show award at the cultural center’s first juried exhibit in October. A reception will be held on March 3 from 4 to 7 p.m.

Guggenheim To

Present Chamberlain

    Beginning tomorrow, the Guggenheim  Museum will present “John Cham­berlain: Choices,” a retrospective of the artist’s 60-year career. It is the first retrospective in the United States since 1986 and the first at the Guggenheim since 1971. Chamberlain, who had a house on Shelter Island, died in December.

    On display will be selections from the early iron sculptures, work in foam, Plexiglas, and paper, and his final large-scale foil pieces, which will be seen publicly for the first time in this country. The exhibit will reflect the artist’s shifts in scale, materials, and techniques.

    It will be on view through May 13. A review will appear in an upcoming issue. A number of programs, including a March 13 discussion of his work with Susan Davidson, the curator, Dave Hickey, and Donna De Salvo, are scheduled and can be found online at guggenheim.org/publicprograms.

Sherman Retrospective

At MoMA

    Cindy Sherman’s work from the 1970s to the present will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art beginning on Sunday through June 11.

    More than 180 photographs will be on view, covering a variety of the artist’s bodies of work of constructed characters and tableaus. This is the first comprehensive survey of her career in the United States since 1997 and will draw widely from public and private collections, including MoMA’s own collection. The museum owns the entire “Untitled Film Stills” series.

    The exhibit has been organized by Eva Respini, an associate curator in the department of photography, with Lucy Gallun assisting. The exhibit will explore such themes as artifice and fiction, cinema and performance, horror and the grotesque, myth, carnival, and fairy tale, as well as gender and class identity. It will also include photographic murals from 2010.

   With our first winter storm behind us, some South Fork denizens may find themselves hunkered down in front of the fire, Wii, DVR or DVD player, or all of the above. Kate Mueth has other ideas though, for her and for us, if we are so inclined.

    On Friday, Feb. 10, from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m., she and the Neo-Political Cowgirls company she founded will mount “Zima,” an interactive winter “experience of mystery, poetry, theater, and exploration” set along the path at Pussy’s Pond in Springs. Those familiar with Ms. Mueth’s events in other seasons, such as the Mulford Repertory Theater’s outdoor productions at the Mulford Farm in East Hampton in the summer and the haunted Mulford Farm Halloween theatrical happening, no doubt notice her appreciation for the outdoors, which she said goes hand in hand with theater.

    “My job is very seasonal that way in terms of visuals,” she said last week at the Star offices, where she shared her storyboards and ideas for the new event. “All this summer I was visualizing winter in my daydreams.”

    Rather than hide from the outdoors, she would rather celebrate the season and enjoy its unique qualities. “I really like winter here. It’s a unique time. I want to invite people into the elements, embrace the cold, and maybe open up their imaginations to some new ideas and ways to think about winter and enjoy winter.”

    “Zima” means winter in Polish. She got the name from Sebastien Paczynski, who does the lighting design for her plays and the projects she conceives for the Neo-Political Cowgirls, a company of dancers and actors that performs in various venues throughout the year.

    “Zima” will run in a continuous cycle along the path. The program will begin at the entrance to the path with a classic journeyman character from folklore and myth — someone on a quest — inviting spectators into a “world of self-entertaining imagination.” Along the path, a series of mythical and fantastical characters and vignettes will further a love story that has a mystery and riddle at its core. For those paying attention, its solution will become apparent, but this is not a passive venture for the viewer, or for its producer.

    “You’re never quite sure if the characters are part of a fantasy or dreamscape, but each plays a part in the journey to find his lost love.” The idea was to keep it simple. “I’m a fan of basic, heartfelt stories.” The Hollywood model of action all of the time was not her objective. “I’m a fan of work that brings a story so that you have to pay attention and to listen and it absorbs you, hopefully. And simplicity is a goal, because winter is simple. The leaves are gone. The color is gone. It’s more provocative inwardly than externally.”

    In all, she imagines 10 to 14 tableaus, “dreamscapes of mystery” with fairies dancing, a sprite playing handbells, snow babies in frozen poses, and a glamorous couple dining at a table full of appetizing food. Brian Leaver and Yuka Silvera have brought what she described as her vague ideas to life in sets and costumes. “I don’t want people to be too comfortable. It’s about . . . a new sense of magic rather than the easily defined balletic ‘Nutcracker’ thing of winter.” At the end of the story and the path, she hopes to greet visitors with more surprises, such as comforting and warm refreshments and other visual and aural diversions.

    On Feb. 11, she will mount a similarly themed event in Sag Harbor Village as part of its Harborfrost weekend. Instead of a path in nature, however, the characters will direct spectators on a quest for clues through a route of participating merchants and businesses, more like a scavenger hunt than a narrative but with a similar intention and outcome. Still later, on March 3, she will mount it again in the relative wilderness of the Quogue Wildlife Refuge, this time employing real animals as part of the scenes as a fund-raising event for the organization.

    According to Ms. Mueth, for inspiration she thought, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” meets snow globes. She did not want the common visuals of nature, but rather a mixture of myth, New York fashion runways, imagination, dreams, and story. Pussy’s Pond, where she spends a lot of time with her dog, seemed a natural site to her. “It’s a quiet thing, it’s meant to be simple and evocative on a quiet level.”

    Another part of her inspiration was bringing something to the community in the off-season. “So much comes to us in the summertime that is not tenable in a lot of ways for people who live here. It’s not affordable or it’s not for them necessarily. It’s for the tourists. I wanted to create something that was our own ritual, a yearly event that people can look forward to as a community.”

    So far the people she has described the event to, from the East Hampton Town Board, which provided a permit allowing her to use the nature preserve, to the actors, dancers, and designers she has approached to participate, have been very receptive. “This is one idea people get. People seem to be in a different mental space now and that just proves that this is a great time to propose something new for the outdoors.”

    The Quogue benefit will carry its own price, which is still being determined. At Pussy’s Pond, admission will be a suggested donation and at Harborfrost it will be free. Ms. Mueth is looking for sponsorships to help meet costs.

   Up a creaky flight of stairs in a brightly painted orange room, Scott Chaskey, director of the Peconic Land Trust’s Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett, sat down two weeks ago behind his orderly desk for an interview about the farm and its winter share. “I just cleaned a week ago,” Mr. Chaskey joked, explaining his tidy desk, on which he had a jar of pens and a long, elegant feather, and a bowl of small pinecones.

    Mr. Chaskey has been an integral part of the organic farm since 1990, when the community supported agriculture project (commonly known now by the initials C.S.A.) moved to Quail Hill as a project of the Peconic Land Trust. The experiment became “a perfect marriage; a conservation organization and community farming,” said Mr. Chaskey.

    In the spring, summer, and fall, members pay a set price for the season and can harvest their own produce two days a week. And for the past 16 years, the farm has also offered winter shares, giving members access to locally-grown crops after the growing season ends.

    “We built a root cellar and saved crops. People used to do that,” Mr. Chaskey said. There are also unheated greenhouses for lettuce and a variety of oriental greens. “It costs too much to heat them. In this climate, if it drops below 20 degrees, we can cover them with a blanket as long as the roots don’t freeze,” he explained.

    From late November through the end of February, members collect their shares of produce in the same shop on the farm that holds Mr. Chaskey’s office, the root cellar, and a 1948 Ford 8N tractor. Potatoes, squash, beets, garlic, carrots, and a variety of other heartier vegetables are set out on a table every other week for pickup. Members can also visit the greenhouses once a week.

    The first winter share had 20 families. “We bought fancy wooden boxes from Vermont and boxed it all up. Then people didn’t come pick it up, so we decided it was too much work. We had people pick it up like they do now,” Mr. Chaskey said.

    Now there are 85 winter shareholders who pay $340 per family or $215 for a single person.

    Quail Hill, now in its 23rd season, was one of the first C.S.A.s in New York. In the summer, 250 member families pay $825 per family, and $415 per single from June through November, and harvest their own produce two days a week.

    “We used to include eggs, but organic feed is so expensive that we have members pay separately for eggs,” he said. A dozen cost $6.

    There are two other full-time employees in addition to Mr. Chaskey, and they all receive a salary and health insurance through the Peconic Land Trust. An ample volunteer force, including members of the Quail Hill Farm apprenticeship program, worked together to harvest this year’s crop. “Any farm in the summer is an intense period. You do what you can with the amount of hands you have — 30 acres, we do it with six people,” Mr. Chaskey said.

    Although the staff is small, it is efficient. This year the crew managed to stock away 3,000 pounds of potatoes, 1,000 pounds of carrots, and 750 pounds of beets to dole out through the colder months. Other winter produce includes cabbage, turnips, daikon radishes, burdock, garlic, and rutabagas. There are leeks in the early part of the winter, and onions and shallots, too. 

   “This was a great year to be a winter share member,” said Mr. Chaskey, “The weather has been unbelievable. We were harvesting in January. We have until the ground is frozen.”

    In addition to its healthy produce, Quail Hill also teaches its members about farming, and is a resource for the community. “We’re part of the fabric of the town and the village. It welcomes people back to the land,” Mr. Chaskey said. Many winter share members expressed this same sentiment and spoke of the impact Quail Hill has on their lives.

    “Just walking in there, the smell of the root cellar is a relief to me. It’s like coming home,” said Karin Auwaerter of Sag Harbor. “I love the farm. I love the winter share. Simply walking into the greenhouse or picking the greens, it’s absolutely wonderful. That’s one of my big draws for the winter share.”

    “The carrots are out of this world, so sweet and fresh,” Ms. Auwaerter said. The crop fluctuates year to year, and she enjoys the change of produce. “You go with the ebb and the flow of what the farm can produce.”

    Kevin Coffey and his wife, Kathleen Masters, of East Hampton have been members for 14 years. “It’s a way to stay connected with the farm through the winter months,” Mr. Coffey said. The couple has learned to adjust their cooking and eating habits with the seasons. “We look forward to certain things in the year. There are different recipes that we try that we wouldn’t have done before we joined the farm,” hesaid. 

    In her third season as a member, Jenny Landey of Springs has become quite innovative in her kitchen. “The winter share is such an undiscovered gem. It really surprises you with food that you learn how to use all the time: celery root, rutabaga, beets, shallots, fresh rosemary, delicious carrots that come in great dark colors that aren’t orange,” she said. 

    Ms. Landy has found new ways to use vegetables that she ordinarily wouldn’t buy. “I even bought a dehydrator this winter,” she said. “Kind of crazy, but fun. You can make your own sweet potato chips. People think I’m insane.” When she leaves the farm with a “huge shopping bag with fresh vegetables” she feels an obligation to cook responsibly. “I’m eating much healthier than I used to,” she added.

    “This is one of the best things we’ve ever done since moving out here. I wish we’d done it earlier,” said Anita Wright of Springs. She and her family have been Quail Hill members for two years, and she especially enjoys the fresh greens like arugula, Swiss chard, and baby spinach during the winter. “The land itself is beautiful. It’s peaceful to go there and to know that you’re getting organic food that’s grown locally and hasn’t been sitting in the grocery store for God knows how long,” she said.

    Ms. Wright finds a commonality with other members in their discovery of new foods. “It takes a little time for me to investigate ways to cook things. I’ve found five different ways to cook sweet potatoes,” she added.

    Eileen Roaman of Springs claims that Quail Hill has changed her life. After taking care of the chickens at the farm for Mr. Chaskey while he was away, she realized she needed to have her own. She joined the farm a few years after it started, and learned how to grow food in her garden. “It expanded my palate, celeriac was not in my vocabulary, kohlrabi, or the variations of winter squash,” Ms. Roaman said. “Quail Hill is awesome.  It’s the Garden of Eden.”

Story Slam at the Goat

    The Goat on a Boat Puppet Theatre in Sag Harbor has invited adults to step away from their computer and television screens and connect with one another offline during a “story slam” beginning tomorrow night at 8.

    With her first storytelling event, Liz Joyce, the theater’s founder, will offer what she feels is a “new wave happening” with props stripped away and stories told simply.

    Attendees will put their names into a hat, and once drawn, have five minutes to tell a true and original story, with the theme of the evening being winter in the Hamptons. Ms. Joyce invites tall tales or exaggerations, but not children to this event, at which adult beverages will be available with a donation. Freshly popped organic corn will also be on offer.

    The theater, a nonprofit endeavor that normally features puppet shows and play groups for kids, is on East Union Street behind Christ Episcopal Church.

Carlin at Clinton

    The East Hampton Historical Society continues its tuneful Cider House series with Stephanie Carlin on Saturday at 7 p.m. Ms. Carlin, whom the society describes as a vocal diva, will entertain with “rock and rap interpretations” and song stylings featuring “emotion, lyrical substance, and endless depths of intricacy fused with intensely layered harmonies.”

    Admission is $12 for adults, $10 for senior citizens, and $8 for students. Complimentary hot mulled cider and snacks will be provided. Concerts in March and April will feature Doug Dwyer and Susan King.

Piano by Mei Rui

    Mei Rui, a prizewinning pianist, will give two concerts on the South Fork this week: on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Montauk Library and on Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton. In Montauk, she will perform works by Beethoven, Chopin, Ravel, and Liszt. In Southampton, added to Beethoven and Liszt will be works by Damon Ferrente.

    Born in Shanghai in 1983, Ms. Mei has performed in Beijing, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Brussels, Vienna, and San Francisco. She has won awards in several international competitions and at Yale’s Friends of Music Recital Competition. In addition to her musical pursuits, Ms. Rui is an adjunct professor at the City University of New York, where she lectures in organic and general chemistry.

Madoo’s Talking

    The Madoo Conservancy in Saga­ponack has announced its winter lecture series, and it will feature Leslie Close, Paula Deitz, and Judith Tankard. Each will present an illustrated talk on one Sunday over the next few weeks, beginning on Feb. 26 with Ms. Deitz, who will speak about “A Garden Writer’s Journey.” The talks will take place in Madoo’s winter house studio.

    Ms. Tankard will discuss “Gertrude Jekyll and the Country House Garden” on March 11, and Ms. Close will cover “The History of Gardens and Photography” on March 26. The talks begin at noon. Admission is $30, $20 for members, and reservations can be made through [email protected].

Winter Film Fest

    The East Hampton Library will continue its free winter film festival at Guild Hall this weekend with a screening of “How I Ended This Summer” at 4 p.m. on Sunday. Directed by Alexei Popogrebsky in Russian with English subtitles, it won awards for best actor and best cinematography at the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival. The psychological thriller is set on a remote island in the Arctic Circle where two men work at a meteorological station in a brutal climate.v

Ashawagh Heats Up

    Karyn Mannix Contemporary will present the seventh annual iteration of its “Love and Passion” series at Asha­wagh Hall in Springs this weekend. Opening on Saturday, the show this year has the theme “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” More than 60 national and regional artists working in a variety of mediums will participate.

    At the Saturday evening reception from 5 to 8, Alfredo Merat will provide music, and the Neo-Political Cowgirls will make an appearance. The evening also features a 50-50 raffle to benefit Ashawagh Hall.

    On Sunday, Teri Kennedy will mount Rock My Heart, a poetry and performance open-microphone event that begins at 11:30 a.m. Readers have been asked to sign up at 11. Julie Sheehan will be the featured poet.

Flavin Drawings

    The Morgan Library in New York City will hold a retrospective exhibit of Dan Flavin’s drawings beginning on Friday, Feb. 17. The show will feature his drawings from the 1950s up to his late works. The artist, who died in 1996, divided his time between Wainscott and Garrison, N.Y., for much of his career.

    Flavin is best known for his fluorescent light sculptures, which employed the white lights we are used to seeing today as well as colored lights that were commonly available when flourescents first came into use. Although his work had an improvisational feel, he actually plotted out many of them on paper first. These preparatory schemes will be on view in addition to very early watercolors in an Abstract Expressionist style, text pieces to later landscapes, and sails inspired by South Fork vistas.

    Also included will be other artists’ drawings that were in Flavin’s collection, such as 19th-century American landscapes by Hudson River School painters, Japanese drawings, and modern works by the likes of Piet Mondrian, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt. The exhibit will be on view through July 1.

    The new year has brought new gifts to the Parrish Art Museum in South­ampton, with both significant contributions to its capital campaign and boosts to its permanent collection.

    At the end of January, the museum announced that it had received significant gifts from Dorothy Lichtenstein, the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, and the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation for the financing of its new building in Water Mill, scheduled to open in the fall. The museum has raised some 85 percent of the $26.2 million budgeted for the project. The contractors are continuing both interior and exterior construction through the winter.

    Key to the new building’s significance will be the dedication of galleries to a permanent installation of selected works from the Parrish’s 2,600-piece collection, which spans more than a century of art production in the region. The museum has received grants for the installation of works by artists such as William Merritt Chase, Fairfield Porter, and Esteban Vicente from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Henry Luce Foundation.

    In 2011, the museum’s Campaign for Art received more than 30 works, most of them by East End artists. Those gifts included Louise Nevelson’s “Untitled” from the late 1970s, donated by Arne and Milly Glimcher, and Michelle Stuart’s “Islas Encantadas Series: Materia Prima II” from 1981, a gift of Jacqueline Brody. The museum also received gifts of work by Keith Sonnier, Gertrude Greene, Paul Jenkins, Frederick Kies­ler, Philip Pavia, Gary Falk, Lucio Pozzi, Robert Ryman, Leon Polk Smith, Por­ter, and Vicente.

    In addition, the museum has acquired work by Michael Combs and Eric Freeman through a number of financial gifts. Artists who donated their own work in 2011 include Linda K. Alpern, Connie Fox, Sheila Isham, Bill King, Roy Nicholson, and Lucy Winton.  

    In addition to a number of recorded and simulcast offerings of opera-related performances this year, the Southampton Cultural Center will present a live performance of “La Tragedie de Carmen” by the Stony Brook Opera next Thursday at 7 p.m.

    Based on the opera by Bizet, it will be directed by Joachim Schamberger and conducted by Timothy Long. This adaptation, by Marius Constant, Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carriere, won a 1984 Tony Award for outstanding achievement in musical theater. It promises a more intense and immediate story of the doomed heroine. Tickets cost $20, $10 for students, and can be reserved through southamptonculturalcenter.org.

    At Guild Hall, the last opera in Wagner’s Ring Cycle will be shown on Saturday at noon as part of the Met: Live in HD series. “Gotterdammerung,” starring Deborah Voigt as Brunnhilde and Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried, promises a cataclysmic climax to the story of the two lovers doomed by fate. Fabio Luisi will conduct. The simulcast screen­ing costs $22, $20 for Guild Hall members. Tickets are available through the Guild Hall Web site or at the box office up to three hours before curtain.

    Back in Southampton, the Parrish Art Museum will continue its Opera and Ballet in Cinema series with the Royal Opera’s production of “Il Trittico” by Puccini on Sunday at 2 p.m. It is a collection of three brief operas and includes both heart-wrenching drama and madcap farce. Terrie Sultan, the director of the Parrish and an opera enthusiast who worked with Sarah Caldwell, the conductor, will introduce the program. Tickets cost $17, or $14 for Parrish members.