Holiday Show

    The Romany Kramoris Gallery has a holiday exhibit on view that includes the work of Shey Wolvek, Isabel Pavao, Jude Amsel, Christopher Engel, George Wazenegger, Laura Rozenberg, and Maria Orlova. It focuses on small works of art, and there will be special pricing on artists of the week. The show is up through Jan. 8 at the Sag Harbor gallery.

“Painter of Long Island”

    The Suffolk County Historical Society in Riverhead will show “Charles Henry Miller: Painter of Long Island” beginning with a reception tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. Organized by Geoffrey K. Fleming, the director of the Southold Historical Society, the exhibit will include paintings, sketchbooks, and other historical memorabilia relating to the life and career of the artist, who lived from 1842 to 1922. It can be seen through Feb. 11.

Drew Shiflett Talk

    On Sunday at 12:30 p.m., Drew Shiflett will discuss her work that is on view at Guild Hall. The artist’s “constructed drawings” resemble painted fabric and use handmade paper as their support. She applies graphite, ink, watercolor, and conté crayon to sections that she then layers and places together.

    Guild Hall is bringing back its “cafe” on Fridays, beginning tomorrow, with free admission to the museum, free coffee, and free Wi-Fi access. They will continue through March.

“Suddenly December”

    Photos from the East End Photographers Group will be at the 4 North Main Gallery in Southampton beginning Wednesday with a reception on Dec. 10 from 5 to 8 p.m. “Suddenly December” will include works by Virginia Aschmoneit, Gerry Giliberti, Pamela Grienke, Kathryn Odell-Hamilton, Joel Lefkowitz, George Mallis, Ron Nicoletta, Sean Noblett, Rosa Hanna Scott, Marilyn Stevenson, Christina Stow, Jarret Stretch, Nick Tarr, Mary Trentalange, and Alan Weinschel. It will remain on view through Dec. 14.

Trip to Crystal Bridges

    The LongHouse Reserve’s spring trip is to Bentonville, Ark., to visit the new Crystal Bridges Museum, founded by Alice Walton, the daughter of the founder of Wal-Mart, Sam Walton.

    Ms. Walton has caused some controversy with her recent acquisitions, which include a seminal Hudson River School painting from the New York Public Library. Nonetheless, the collection is a singular representation of American art from colonial times to the present.

    The trip, from May 3 to May 7, will also take in the Botanical Garden of the Ozarks, a chapel designed by a pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright, the Italianate Peel mansion, and Eureka Springs, an entire town listed on the National Register of Historic Places. More information is available at longhouse.org.

Whale Sculptures

    Wooden sculptures of whales by Randy Kolhoff of Sag Harbor will be on view at Black Swan Antiques in Bridgehampton through New Year’s. The artist uses local history, folklore, and nature as inspiration for his carving and painting. A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m.

    “Beautiful Tree, Severed Roots,” the cinematic journey Kenny Mann will offer viewers on Sunday at the Bay Street Theatre, is not strictly a memoir, although it is about her past. “It’s a story of identity,” she said, adding that others will be able to relate to the documentary. “So many people today are misplaced, it’s very relevant in today’s political climate.”

    Ms. Mann was born and raised in Kenya, the child of Jewish refugees who escaped the Holocaust. “It’s an unusual story,” she said. “My parents were incredibly charismatic.” Her mother, Erica Schonbaum, whose last name means “beautiful tree,” was from Romania, and met Igor Mann, who was Polish, in Bucharest. When the Nazis invaded, the couple escaped thanks to faked papers that were bought and paid for. “My mother had two birth certificates,” Ms. Mann said. “They had to tell so many lies to survive.”

    The couple ended up in an Israeli refugee camp for a year. “But the British were looking for educated people,” Ms. Mann said. Her father was a veterinarian and an animal husbandry expert, so her parents were sent by troop ship to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). “He became world famous for his ideas,” Ms. Mann said. “He was very, very far advanced, talking about ecology long before it was a buzzword.”

    Her parents settled on a cattle ranch on Masai land in Kenya, on the Athi River, where Ms. Mann was born and named for her parents’ adopted country. She lived in Kenya until she was 24, knowing very little about her ancestral past. “There were no family photos, no relatives except my grandmother,” Ms. Mann said. “There was a big vacuum.”

    It wasn’t until she started going through family documents that Ms. Mann realized how deeply her Eastern European roots ran, and her sense of identity was challenged.

    “I wasn’t tormented by it,” she said, but it did raise questions. “Who are we, really? I was a non-practicing Jewish person, but I didn’t feel Jewish. I wanted to find out more.” She was able to interview her mother extensively before she died in 2007.

    Her father had died in 1986, but information about him is still coming down through several interesting pipelines. “I discovered that Dad’s niece was a well-known journalist in Holland. Before her parents were taken away by the Nazis, her mother had yelled out to her, ‘Don’t worry, you will survive. Your uncle in Africa will send you pineapples.’ ”

    Ms. Mann has been shooting this documentary, her seventh film, for the past six years. “Kenya is so incredibly photogenic,” she said. “But the film isn’t typically what you would see. It’s visually surreal. I wanted it to be more poetic and metaphorical. It’s built a great deal on memory and I wanted to avoid the usual, educational documentary.”

    Ms. Mann’s last film, “Walking With Life: The Birth of the Human Rights Movement in Africa,” won several awards.

    She heads up her own film company, rafIki Productions. “Rafiki is the Kiswahili word for friend,” Ms. Mann explained on her Web site. Her nickname as a child was “Iki,” and she chose to “name my company rafIki as a fun combination of my name and my roots.”

    The Bay Street Theatre program will begin with a performance by Masai dancers, courtesy of Association of Maa Abroad, followed by a screening of about 40 minutes of the unfinished documentary and a brief discussion about identity.

    “Because of the Internet, we are hearing that allegiances and nationhoods can change, without being geographically tied. But the more that happens, are we programmed to need that personal identity more than ever?” she asked.

    “For anyone who is curious, the journey, both physically and emotionally, has been necessary to see what I can choose to accept or reject. It’s led me to see that I am a global citizen. But knowing one’s roots adds a dimension to life, even if they are very distant roots.” And even if those roots, like Ms. Mann’s, have been severed and left behind.

    The theater’s box office will open at 1:15. The dance performance and the film begin at 2 p.m.

Two on the Rise

    Davenport and Shapiro Fine Arts in East Hampton will show the work of two artists, Eddie Rehm and Emanuel Buckyar, beginning tomorrow with a reception on Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m. Long Island painters, they are fresh to the scene but rising in reputation.

    “We were intrigued by the collaboration between two artists with distinct styles, one almost disturbingly energetic, and the other . . . calming for all its now almost classical allusions to the AbEx tradition,” said Leonard Davenport, a partner in the gallery.

    The exhibit is on view through Dec. 30.

A Holiday Salon

    Bridgehampton’s Silas Marder Gallery will hold a “Holiday Salon” show beginning tomorrow with a reception on Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m. The show includes, on the first floor, paintings and works on paper by gallery artists. An installation, “Architecture of a Bomb,” by Ben Butler and Michael Rosch remains in the loft through December.

    The Marders garden center will have its 38th annual open house, starting tomorrow at 8 a.m., also on Saturday and Sunday, with shopping, cookies, hot cider, and live music.

Thanksgiving Collective

    The Tripoli Gallery in Southampton will present a “Thanksgiving Collective 2011” show, with work by Michael Chiarello, Eric Freeman, Felix Bonilla Gerena, Melanie J. Moczarski, John Ross Rist, and Darius Yektai.

    Tripoli Patterson has been organizing the exhibits for seven years running. This year’s features old friends and welcomes new artists — Mr. Chiarello, a Bridgehampton sculptor, and Ms. Moczarski, a Brooklyn painter. The show will open with a reception for the artists on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m.

Landscape Award

    John Haubrich of East Hampton received the Alden Bryan Memorial Award for Traditional Landscape Painting in Oil from the American Artists Professional League at the group’s annual meeting on Nov. 6 in New York City. His work “Ice Flow” was selected from among 121 entries.

AbEx Meets Digital

    Beginning on Saturday, Andrew Hart Adler and Carolyn Beegan will show their collaborative work at the Arthur T. Kalaher Fine Art gallery on Job’s Lane in Southampton. Their work joins oil painting and digital photography.

    Mr. Adler, an Abstract Expressionist painter, worked with Willem de Kooning in the 1970s. Ms. Beegan is an oil painter but a specialist in digital imaging as well. Together their work becomes a hybrid that balances elements of each.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 4 to 8 p.m.

Death Talk in Bridge

    A gallery talk on the exhibit “In Memory of: An Exhibition on Death & Mourning in Victorian America” will be given on Saturday at 1 p.m. at the Bridgehampton Historical Society’s Corwith House.

    The exhibit and the talk by Julie Greene, the curator, focus on the effect that Queen Victoria’s extended period of mourning in the late-19th century had on this side of the Atlantic. According to the historical society, the queen’s popularity among her subjects and Americans led to a “cult of mourning” that continued even after her death.

    Ms. Greene’s talk will explore the customs and practices surrounding death and mourning during those years. The exhibit will remain open through February. Another talk will be given on Dec. 30 at 5 p.m.

    The Studio Playhouse’s latest production is “Four,” a group of four one-act plays written by Long Island playwrights. It will be performed from next Thursday through Dec. 3 at LTV’s Studio 3 in Wainscott.

    The community group, which was formed earlier this year in collaboration with LTV, performed “Destry Rides Again” in June. This time they have plays by Frank Tangredi, Michelle Murphy, and Hortense Carpentier.

    Mr. Tangredi’s “Extracurricular” and “Along the Fault Line” explore human relationships under unusual and imaginative circumstances. Colby Herbst and Deborah Marshall star in “Extracurricular.” Ms. Marshall also stars in “Along the Fault Line” with Sima Freierman. Mick Benderoth directs “Extracurricular” and Anita Sorel, the founder of the theater group, directs “Along the Fault Line.”

    Michelle Murphy has a one-act, two-scene play called “Still Here,” which has been adapted by Ms. Carpentier, who also directs. The story centers on a troubled man whose dysfunctional family visits him at a rehab center only to find he has checked out with an unnamed woman. The first act reveals the dynamics of the family, while the second centers on the man and his reconnection with an old flame who may or may not be just what he needs. The play stars Carolyn Feldshuh, Lee Michel, Elena Prohaska-Glinn, Jeff Sleed, and Stacie Selfe.

    “Ashes” is the fourth play and was written by Ms. Carpentier and directed by Mr. Benderoth. The play deals with guilt, regret, and ultimate forgiveness. It stars Robert Anthony, Rosalind Brenner, and Trish Kern.

    The producers noted that the plays they have chosen deal with weighty issues, but not without humor. Tickets can be purchased at ltveh.org and are $15 and $10 for students and those over 65. The casts include professional actors and those walking the boards for their very first time. The group holds workshops called the Actors’ Dojo on Monday evenings for those who want to hone their craft. New scripts from up-and-coming playwrights are being sought.

    The Studio Playhouse will return in February with “Valiently Vaudeville,” a showcase of local talent, and in May with “Lil’ Abner,” a musical based on Al Capp’s comic strip.

    The Italian poet Antonio Porchia once wrote, “Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life.” Geoffrey Nimmer and Jack deLashmet are no strangers to circuitous routes, in fact their journey to becoming master gardeners is one wrought with the sharp contours of change. The two men, who began as colleagues and have been romantic partners for the past eight years, not only share an affinity for the careful crafting of landscapes and gardens, but a wending life path that finally brought them together.

    The men first met at a dinner party about nine years ago. Mr. deLashmet says their first encounter was marked by “an immediate spark,” and he “knew instinctively that [they] were going to see one another again.” Mr. Nimmer laughed, explaining that their meeting pretty much eclipsed the rest of the evening. “There was an instant attraction. I don’t remember anything else that happened at the party.”

    Their initial conversation centered around a discussion of indigenous plants and gardens, particularly in regard to new project on Mr. deLashmet’s radar — a property on North Haven.

    Mr. deLashmet was dividing his time between East Hampton and Alabama, where his ailing mother was struggling with cancer. He had already defined the spaces of the soon-to-be garden, but gave Mr. Nimmer the plans, asking his thoughts on exactly which plants to use, explaining that “nothing should compete with the horizon.”

    The men worked together for months, first conceptualizing and finally creating a series of spaces crafted from “native-esque” plants, a term they coined to describe their focus on flora that actively channeled the look of the indigenous plants of the area. “There was a romantic tension in addition to a creative tension, and it just kept building,” recalled Mr. deLashmet.

     Hailing from Clinton, Miss., Mr. deLashmet was first introduced to gardening through his grandparents, who were both Garden Club of America members and had a large landscaped estate. He studied both English and urban planning at the University of Mississippi but held a slew of decidedly un-gardening-focused jobs including a long stint at Merrill Lynch and heading an AIDS/H.I.V. nonprofit.

    Following additional studies in landscape architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology as well as the Inchbald School of Design in London, Mr. deLashmet said he realized the timing was “just right” to devote himself to his longtime interest in landscaping, focusing especially on indigenous plantings and the historic restoration of gardens. “My family expected me to go into politics, and while I certainly do have an interest in being the governor of Mississippi,” he said with a laugh, “I think in the back of my mind [garden design] was always where I would end up.”

    Mr. Nimmer grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis and first discovered a love of gardening just as Mr. deLashmet did, as a small child beside his grandmother.

    “I would go and dig plants up from my her garden and bring them to my house and nurture them along.”

    He went on to study psychology at George Washington University, and while delving into the nature of the human mind, he discovered a passion for the body as well, and began to dance. Mortarboard in hand, Mr. Nimmer moved to New York City directly after graduation, launching a career as a dancer that would last more than 15 years.

    He said that somewhere along the way he “completely lost touch with gardening” and only rediscovered it during the tail end of his time in New York, trying to toggle between the spotlights of the stage and a burgeoning landscaping career.

    “I really have closed the door on dance and I’ll never forget when it happened,” he said. “I was in New York and had started working for a landscaper but was also speaking with a choreographer I had worked with before, trying to reconstitute a piece I had been in previously.” Mr. Nimmer said he was slowly confronted with a series of scheduling conflicts between landscaping and dance rehearsals.

    “It was just a natural break,” he said. “I felt so lucky that I had something else I was passionate about. So many people have said, ‘Dancing to gardening?’ They think they’re very different but really they’re both creative, physical, and really center on time and space.”

    The two men were drawn to East Hampton by career opportunity and the natural beauty of the area. Mr. deLashmet first fell in love with Southampton through a few seasons of summering with colleagues from Merrill Lynch in the 1980s; he moved here full time about 11 years ago and launched his company deLashmet and Associates.

    “It’s a beautiful place, but all of my reasons for being here were career-driven,” Mr. deLashmet explained. “As they say, for gardening you need money, manpower, and manure. [The South Fork] has people who have the resources for gardens and is full of an increasingly environmentally conscious group of people with whom you are designing.”

    Mr. deLashmet was particulary drawn to what he calls “American country houses,” agrarian, turn-of-the-century houses that are typical of the East End. “The Hamptons are part and parcel of that whole movement,” he said.

    Mr. Nimmer is perhaps most fond of East Hampton’s proximity to the ocean — he says he plunges into the surf every day. In addition to his penchant for swimming, Mr. Nimmer also came to the Hamptons to pursue work, although his journey was marked by a sense of serendipity.

    While he was in Los Angeles finishing horticulture school, he came across Robert Wilson, with whom he had worked before in New York. He told him about a performance arts space he had founded, the Watermill Center. Mr. Nimmer worked there for two summers as an intern before becoming the estate gardener for three years. He then launched his own company, East End Garden Design, which has now been in full swing for eight years.

    The couple, who now make their home in Springs, both insist their relationship is devoid of competition; they collaborate fairly consistently and draw on their differing strengths, both professionally and personally, to meet the challenges at hand.

    “Even when we’re not officially working together we quite often cross-pollinate,” said Mr. deLashmet. “I’m not the person to hire for an instant landscape — I’m interested in mass and scale and lines. I’m doing the underpainting in an oil. Geoffrey’s innate nature is understanding how plants interact and move, which goes back to his dancing.”

    Winter is a time of rejuvenation, both for the gardens and the men’s relationship. Mr. Nimmer is still busy cutting back plants and placing “copious amounts of bulbs,” but once the frigid months creep in, he will practice and teach yoga with more intensity, as well as take a trip with Mr. deLashmet to Costa Rica come February.

    “It’s the time of the year when we re-energize our personal relationship too,” Mr. deLashmet said. “I am not any more outgoing than Geoffrey really, but people tend to think so. I guess because I’m more out and about. Geoffrey is much more the person who keeps the home fire burning. I do think we were both introspective and quiet kids, but I’ve developed a gregariousness. I guess I’ve developed a new true self, and Geoffrey has kept his old true self.”

    Mr. deLashmet is out and about indeed. Since the launch of his book, “Hamptons Gardens,” this past May, he is already on his second book tour. He says his newfound notoriety is a double-edged sword, some people merely want his work because his designs have been published. “You really have to wean out the crazies,” he said, laughing.

    In Mr. deLashmet’s recent absence — the latest book tour that which took him from Louisiana to California — Mr. Nimmer visited a sculpture exhibit by Richard Serra in New York and discovered a quote that he loved, not only because it speaks to the essence of garden design but to Mr. deLashmet’s work in particular: “Space is a medium.”

Fall Showing of the Alliance

    The Artists Alliance of East Hampton will present its fall art exhibit beginning tomorrow at Ashawagh Hall in Springs. The exhibit of work by 46 of its members will continue through Sunday.

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

New Art at Demato

    The Richard Demato Gallery in Sag Harbor will open a new show of work by Kyla Zoe Rafert on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.

    Ms. Rafert uses a variety of mediums to create a staged world of young women and adolescent girls caught in old-fashioned notions of history and the feminine. In a work such as “Duel” two bucks fight over a hoopskirt-clad girl in a richly patterned and artificial background and setting.

    Also on view will be a several limited edition prints by Andrea Kowch.

Early Holiday Shopping

    The Grenning Gallery is showing “Gems,” a collection of smaller works by gallery artists perfect for the season of gift giving.

    Among the paintings is Marc Dalessio’s “Lake in Connecticut,” a mid-summer New England lake scene, and a new painting of Main Street, Sag Harbor, by James Daga Albinson.

    Daniela Astone will be exhibiting “Smelly Pigs” and “White Chairs” with “Val D’Allos,” an alpine scene, by Leo Mancini-Hresko. Also on view will be works by Joe Altwer, Jimmy Sanders, Melissa Franklin Sanchez, and Stephen Bauman. There will also be more sizable works upstairs by Ramiro, Ben Fenske, and Marc Dalessio.

Ray Parker at Washburn

    Ray Parker’s “Simple Paintings From the 1960s” are on view at the Washburn Gallery in New York City beginning today.

    According to an essay by Klaus Kertess, an East Hampton critic and curator, Parker, who died in 1990, was among artists such as Morris Louis, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, and Jack Youngerman who “sought to create abstract paintings that filtered out the highly wrought drawing and emotional pyrotechnics of Abstract Expressionism, while retaining the scale and directness introduced by [Jackson] Pollock and his peers.”

    The paintings on view feature simple ovoid or rectangular shapes in subdued tones that may be brooding but often cede very little emotional content. Their ponderous stillness offers a challenge to earlier work that featured more gestural and balletic brush work.

    The show is on view through Jan. 28.

Staller Shows Nicholson

    The Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University is showing Roy Nicholson’s paintings as part of a show called “Re-Natured,” which pairs Mr. Nicholson, who lives in Sag Harbor, with the artist Cui Fei.

    Mr. Nicholson, who was born and raised in Britain, often takes the English-style garden as his inspiration. From this he creates forms both literal and more intuitive to populate his canvases. Time and the passage of seasons are important themes and the garden forms he paints reflect those changes, although rarely with an absence of saturated color.

    The exhibit will be on view through Dec. 17.

Gail Levin to Speak

    Tomorrow, Gail Levin, author of many books and most recently of “Lee Krasner: A Biography,” will speak about Krasner and the book as part of Molly Barnes’s Brown Bag Lunches at the Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington Avenue in New York City. The talk begins promptly at noon.

Vered Unveils Winter Show

    The Vered Gallery in East Hampton will open a winter group exhibit tomorrow with a variety of landscape and seascape paintings. Modern and traditional landscapes by artists such as Thomas Moran, Milton Avery, and Oscar Bluemner will be shown with more contemporary paintings by Wolf Kahn, Jules Olitski, Robert Dash, Balcomb Greene, and Grant Haffner. Works by Hunt Slonem, Steven Klein, Larry Rivers, Bert Stern, Man Ray, and Pablo Picasso will be on view as well.

    The exhibit will remain on view through Jan. 30.

Face Off at Booth

    “About Face: Portraits + Personalities + Documentary” will open at the Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor on Saturday. The show will feature work by Burt Glinn, Barbara Macklowe, Steve McCurry, Costa Peterson, and Bert Stern.

    The exhibit includes recognizable faces as well as the more anonymous among us. What attracts Ms. Booth to the portrait, according to a release, is “the seductive moment between the photographer and what the subject is willing to reveal.”

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. The show will remain on view through Dec. 15.

    The Drawing Room gallery, which was opened by Emily Goldtein and Victoria Munroe in an allée off the north side of Newtown Lane in East Hampton Village in 2004, has moved to a temporary spot farther west on the same street, next to Mecox Gardens and across from Waldbaum’s.

    “We outgrew the space two or three years ago,” said Ms. Munroe recently. Between that and knowing a year ago that they would have to leave their nook, they had been looking around and feel lucky to have found the space at 66 Newtown Lane.

    “We wanted to be able to have more art storage on site and to be able to show larger works. We love sculpture and painting, but haven’t been able to have it in the gallery as much as we want to.”

    They also need a more private back room to talk to clients, and more desk space.

    “We loved the first space and felt happy to be there; it had lovely natural light . . . it was a good time to move.”

    Ms. Goldstein and Ms. Munroe have shown postwar and contemporary painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, and installations, as well as drawings from the gallery’s inventory of 18th and 19th-century European works on paper in the fields of Beaux Arts architecture, garden design, engineering, natural history, and the decorative arts.

    “We have lots of studio visits planned and now we have the time to look for new work and plan some ideas for shows, to do research,” said Ms. Munroe. They plan to be in their temporary quarters until early spring, when they hope to move into a permanent gallery designed by Fred Stelle.

    Ms. Munroe was enthusiastic about the show on view now in the temporary space. “The fact that everyone is from out here who’s in this show is so wonderful. There are so many painters, sculptors, and photographers who all have studios out here or live out here. It’s incredible that they’re all here.”

    The Autumn salon has paintings, sculpture, drawings, photographs, ceramics, and jewelry in it and will be up through Dec. 31. It includes works by Jennifer Bartlett, Caio Fonseca, Robert Harms, John Iversen, Robert Jakob, Mel Kendrick, Diane Mayo, Dorothea Rockburne, Drew Shiflett, and Jane Wilson, as well as sculptures by Costantino Nivola.

    Fall and winter hours are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and by appointment Sunday through Wednesday. The gallery will be closed Thanksgiving and on Dec. 24 and 25.

    Birds have twigs and branches, and accommodate on lordly grasses. When in gardens we employ benches and chairs and, at times, a grounded tree trunk, our obliging constructs of metal, modified wicker, concrete and stone, as well as wood.

    Madoo has a multitude of such ingratiations, just how many may be clear by the end of this writing, and I expect the tally will be large. Although I may now collapse with wounded knees or back, sitting is not in the physical vocabulary of the gardener. No matter how brief, a downtime will supply his eyes with an infinitude of chores overlooked or undone, many he had not been aware of until his goodly sit. And then there is that fell interruption in his rhythm, difficult to regain, like a marathon runner forced to a halt, losing time and the synchronous all at once. Perches may be part of the ingratiations of a good garden whether they are used or not, desserts on a menu that comfort the diner whether or not they are ordered. Oh look, they have creme brulée with marrons! A courtesy. So is the bench near you as you write in your notebook or take more photos.

    In front of its Matisse, a seated nude, Madoo has two iron chairs French in origin circa the same year as the bronze. The original pair disintegrated and our replicas were crafted by an iron monger in Wainscott exactly so. Sheet iron over metal tubing. Gray, good to the eye, not quite comfortable. None of the apparatus of sitting have cushions and few have backs. Their livery is utility pure and simple. All resist wind and drain quickly and dry after a storm.

    There are two wheel-away benches suitable for two or a cozy three, the first of which was a farmyard purchase some 30 years ago. Quite lovely, almost unique, but considerably derelicted (so much history, its back was spavined) and had to be reproduced. And was. In plantation teak (oh prove it) and then there was this large iron wheel in the old barn and two hickory ax handles and, voila, a bench to be wheeled for the easily bored.

    And two Rietveld Adirondack chairs made friendlier by arms large enough for a sandwich and a book and a drink and, only a few years ago, that curious fabrication, an ashtray. The original Rietvelds held only stick arms, hardly apt for getting up gracefully. Chairs in Dutch portraits, you will notice, have no armrests at all. Arms get folded and hands lost in fabric.

    We have a low little Lloyd Loom stool whose wire weave is the only wicker to endure out of doors, water hyacinth and plastic threads to the side. And there is a howdah, straight from an Indian elephant’s back, that seats two grudgingly. And two strap metal benches circa mid-19th century from an upstate cemetery and two redoubtably elaborate wrought-iron chairs hailing from some brick-azalea-rhododendron Charleston garden. And Carlos has made of two logs benches in the exedra and I am losing count and have forgotten the audience chair I designed for Open Days where Barnsley and I sit and I read and read and do not see what needs doing.

    In his new book depicting aspects of the history of the Town of Southampton, David Goddard, a sociologist, sets out to trace the “colonization of the village” in the late-19th century and to document “efforts at outside economic development.” These processes, he maintains, brought the town into the “modern age” and transformed it.

    Geographically, the author concentrates on the Village of Southampton, Mecox Bay in Water Mill, and the Shinnecock Hills, that strip of “hills and valleys” east of Canoe Place and the Shinnecock Canal, between Peconic Bay to the north and Shinnecock Bay to the south. While the subtitle of “Colonizing Southampton” — “The Transformation of a Long Island Community, 1870-1900” — sets the scope in time, nearly a third of this study deals with periods prior to 1870 in an effort to establish the context for specific topics. Among them are two trials that pitted members of the “summer colony” and the town trustees against each other over issues that, the author points out, resonate today.

“Colonizing Southampton”

David Goddard

Excelsior Editions, $34.95

    For background, Mr. Goddard tackles the complexity in the evolution of local government, beginning with the town trustees, a corporate entity. It is instructive to follow him. Legitimized by the colonial government of New York as an elective body by the Dongan Patent in 1686, the trustees held jurisdiction over the town’s common lands and its waters. In 1818, New York State legislation specifically required another, pre-existing group, the “proprietors,” to rely on the trustees to manage its material resources.

    Numbering about 250 men by 1800, proprietors were either heirs of the first white settler-owners of the town’s land in the 1640s or subsequent buyers of rights in the undivided lands. Throughout the 19th century, some among this wealthy and powerful group took actions to reassert their authority, selling seasonal rights to cut grasses, collect seaweed, or harvest oysters, with the profits accruing to proprietor accounts, not the town coffers. In 1882, unbeknownst to the town trustees or to residents, the group took the bold step of selling the waters and the 1,200 acres of land beneath Mecox Bay to “outside capitalist interests.”

    The private sale by the proprietors of the bay to the Mecox Bay Oyster Company galvanized opposition from the town trustees, and from baymen and farmers in particular, whose livelihoods, in part, depended on the bay. Intending to cultivate oysters from seed, the company’s president, Richard Esterbrook Jr., a lawyer, the son of the founder of the fountain pen company, and a summer resident of Bridgehampton, had married the daughter of Suffolk County Judge Abraham T. Rose, a member of a leading proprietor family. It is an example of the relationships profiled so well in this book. The marriage almost guaranteed Esterbrook knowledge of the proprietors’ intent to sell.

    In 1885, the town trustees, under the group’s president, George White, a farmer and former whaling captain, took the company to court, charging that the proprietors had sold property that belonged to the public. They won the case and two subsequent appeals. The judge found that the proprietors held no ownership interest in the waters, the lands beneath them, or their products. In 1890, with no more land to sell, the proprietors disbanded, enabling the town trustees to gain “greater support and legitimacy” in exercising their responsibilities.

    The second case occurred shortly thereafter. The emboldened town trustees took Frederick Betts, a corporate lawyer and resident of Southampton’s summer colony, to court. The long-simmering conflict at hand addressed the use of a small portion of beach owned by Betts between the ocean and Lake Agawam in Southampton Village. It was a place where locals launched fishing boats, mended nets, and cut up the occasional whale that drifted ashore. That is, it was a “work space” that year-round residents came to view as public land. To Betts and his city friends, however, it was a “restful zone of contemplation.” Betts had even threatened to fence it off.

    In 1892, the case was heard at the State Supreme Court in session in Riverhead. Trustee George White’s testimony summarized the acrimony: “the city people . . . didn’t think it suitable to bathe with the country people.” The court, however, ruled against the town trustees and affirmed Betts’s ownership of the beach, but only as far toward the ocean as the mean high water mark. The court also recognized the beach as a “highway” that the public had the right to pass over. The decision survived appeals and was settled in 1897.

    On these issues, namely ownership and use of bay bottoms and public rights of way on the beach, the final case decisions in 1885 and 1897 appear, in Mr. Goddard’s recounting, to be the understandings that govern the town today. Challenges have abounded. Readers of this newspaper will recall the photograph of a fence erected recently on Georgica Beach. One hundred and thirty years after the court decision, Betts’s threat became a reality in an adjacent town.

    Besides the trials, Mr. Goddard describes the many efforts by investors, largely from New York City, to develop large-scale real estate projects in Shinnecock Hills during the period of 1880 to 1930. The groundwork was laid in 1859, when the proprietors bargained with the Indians to divide the area between the tribe and the proprietors. Subsequent private sales allowed the Long Island Rail Road to come through in 1870. Sales in the 1880s resulted in the building of a hotel, a depot, summer cottages, a golf course (in 1891), a yacht club, an Episcopal church, and other projects. By the end of the Roaring Twenties, however, the vision of transforming Shinnecock Hills with “hotels and villas” had failed — except for the golf clubs.

    In this history, Mr. Goddard has reached beyond the local to produce an analytic study of business interests and conflict. He has deciphered the multiple strands of activity at play and provided judicious explanations of behavior. Yet his broad categories — “traditional community” on the one hand, and on the other the “summer colony,” “upper-class newcomers,” and “an entrenched upper-status group” (by 1930) — may not accurately describe the two entities or the tensions between them. In the author’s own narrative, conflicts engross smaller groupings or their subsets. In certain instances of economic strife, only some baymen participate, rather than whole groups such as Mr. Goddard’s “poorer social classes” or his “marginal class” of baymen, blacks, and Indians.

    While “marked class and status divisions” surely characterized portions of society by the 1880s, I’m not convinced that a goodly portion of the year-round residents were conscious of occupying the lower rungs on the social ladder or of being colonized. Again, Mr. Goddard seems to me to dismiss the complexity in his narrative when he suggests that the “transformation” in the subtitle was from a community with a unique past to one that had become the “history of the summer colony.”

    These reservations aside, this detailed book makes significant contributions to our historical understanding by tracing the development of governmental institutions, elaborating on the meanings of key colonial laws, placing legal cases in their social contexts, summarizing the history of Shinnecock Hills land transactions (as well as those of Montauk), and identifying the roles played by prominent figures among the Shinnecock Indians, provincial officials, the early English settlers, the proprietors, town trustees, administrative officers, and members of the summer colony.

    Relying, in the main, on published government documents, newspapers, and secondary studies, Mr. Goddard has forged the often disparate pieces of Southampton history into an interpretive whole, and he has made sense out of the dramas in the town’s legal, business, and social history.

—

    David Goddard, the author of “The Maidstone Links,” is a former professor of sociology at the City University of New York. He lives in Plattsburgh, N.Y.

    Ann Sandford is the author of “Grandfather Lived Here: The Transformation of Bridgehampton, New York, 1870-1970.” She lives in Sagaponack.

    The fourth annual Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival, which highlights work by local filmmakers, will open on Friday, Nov. 18, with a tribute to the filmmaker Richard Leacock at Guild Hall from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m.

    The evening begins with a cocktail reception, and then features two of Mr. Leacock’s documentaries, “Happy Mother’s Day,” and “Crisis.” D.A. Pennebaker, a fellow filmmaker, will lead a panel discussion on Mr. Leacock’s work afterward along with his children, Victoria Leacock Hoffman and Robert Leacock, also filmmakers, and Pam Wise.

    On Nov. 19, the festival moves to the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, where screenings will run from 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. and on Sunday, the whole thing will be repeated at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center.

    The Bay Street schedule offers a marathon of screenings beginning with Student Circle Films, three shorts by Long Island high school students at 11 a.m. “Happy Mother’s Day” will be shown again from 11:30 a.m. to noon, followed by “Inside the Perfect Circle: The Odyssey of Joel Thome” by Chris Pepino from noon to 1:15 p.m. The afternoon brings Cat Del Buono’s short “Take My Hair” at 1:15; Richard Kotuk’s “Travis,” about a 10-year-old boy with AIDS, at 1:45; “Rescued Twice: The History and Revival of the Amagansett Life-Saving Station” by Eileen Torpey at 3, Madeline Amgott’s “Esteban Vicente: Portrait of an Artist,” at 3:30 p.m., and “Suzanne Farrell: Elusive Muse” by Anne Belle, from 4:30 to 6:30.

    “Quarry” by Richard P. Rogers, a brief look at teenagers who hung around the Quincy Quarry in the early 1970s, will be shown at 8 p.m., and finally, “The Windmill Movie” by Alexander Olchs, about Richard P. Rogers of Wainscott, who was working on a film of his life when he died in 2001, will be shown from 8:15 to 9:45. 

    Ms. Del Buono, a part-time East Hampton resident, talked last week about “Take My Hair,” about growing her hair and cutting it off for her cousin’s wife, who was undergoing chemotherapy. “Hair to her is incredibly important. I figured I could do something for her by giving her my hair,” she said. She followed the hair from her head to a wigmaker’s shop. “I’d heard lots of the hair people donated gets thrown out, and then I heard that my cousin’s wife had cancer,” she said. “I found a wigmaker, which is hard in the U.S. It’s about $5,000 to make a wig. I found a guy who did these wigs for $500, specifically for chemo patients.”

    While interviewing the wigmaker, Ms. Del Buono found out he had cancer, and that making wigs for other people helped sustain him. “He kept the price down because of his chemo patients; no one else was doing that,” she said. The film took a turn when the wigmaker fell ill. “I wasn’t sure what to do with the film; it didn’t have an ending. But it is an ending. You can’t ever guess what will happen when it comes to cancer. It’s unpredictable. It’s not always the happy ending,” Ms. Del Buono said.

    In “Inside the Perfect Circle,” Chris Pepino explored the work of the Grammy-winning modern composer Joel Thome and his return to music following a stroke in 1991 that left him paralyzed on the left side of his body. Mr. Thome collaborated with Frank Zappa for many years, and composed for the guitarist Steve Vai, and for Pablo Picasso.

    Mr. Pepino followed him to therapy sessions and interviewed his music therapist. “The concert depicted in the film is his first concert in America after several years of working toward rehabilitation,” he said. “It was filmed in New York, and Joel has lived there for years. We’re excited to bring things full circle to show to a New York audience,” he said. Mr. Thome, Mr. Pepino, and Martha Mooke, who performed with the Scorchio Quartet, a string ensemble put together by David Bowie for Mr. Thome’s first return to performing in New York, will field questions after the screening.

    Anne Belle’s “Suzanne Farrell: Elusive Muse” traces another aristic life, that of Ms. Farrell, a ballerina who worked with George Balanchine. The film, which premiered at the New York Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award, was the third in a trilogy of dance films by the late filmmaker. “Anne was very proud of the film, rightfully so,” said Catherine Tambini, co-producer of the film.

    Those who keep up with local news are likely to know something of the background of “Rescued Twice: The History and Revival of the Amagansett Life-Saving Station.” In 1966, the late Joel Carmichael purchased the station for $1 to save it from demolition and to live in. It was donated to East Hampton Town after his death in 2006 and has since been returned to its original 1902 location on Atlantic Avenue. The film interviews the adult Carmichael children, who gave the building to the town, and explores the station’s East End and national significance.

    A day pass for the festival costs $35 and can be purchased at the Bay Street Theatre box office, at baystreet.org, or at the door. An evening pass is $20, for films from 8 to 10 p.m., and is available only at the door. Tickets for the tribute at Guild Hall are $75 and can be had in advance at HT2FF.com, or at the door.