An unlikely hero, Josh Grisetti has a face like a question mark. His raised eyebrows and nose are the curve and his often agape mouth forms the dot at its base. As the protagonist of “Enter Laughing,” he can mold that face like putty, looking doltish or debonair in the span of a second.

    While he ably carries the musical comedy based on the early life of Carl Reiner, at the Bay Street Theatre this month, he is supported by a cast of strong group and individual performers, among them Jill Eikenberry, Richard Kind, and Michael Tucker. Those names may be familiar from “L.A. Law” or “Spin City,” but the cast includes other great performers such as Ray DeMattis, Erick Devine, Gerry McIntyre, Kate Shindle, and Emily Shoolin.

    The play, set in the 1930s, takes place in a New York where the parents are all from the “old country” and radios and other electrical appliances are taken to a repair shop rather than recycled. It has the kind of old-style humor and musical numbers one might remember from television variety shows or reruns of Carol Burnett.

    Mr. Reiner was a TV fixture for many years in the 1950s and 1960s on “Your Show of Shows” and “The Dick Van Dyck Show,” which he created and wrote as well as acted in. His 1958 novel “Enter Laughing” was first adapted to the stage in 1964, with a book by Joseph Stein, whose credits include “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Zorba.”

    The show has had two successful runs off Broadway, with Mr. Grisetti earning much praise from critics and some awards. His ability to convince the audience of his gawkiness as well as his charm, in addition to his agility as a singer and dancer, make the show consistently engaging. Several of the actors who appeared with him in the earlier run at the York Theatre are in this production as well.

Bay Street’s presentation is a marvel of theatrical design and staging, once again demonstrating how so much can be done in such an intimate space. For musical numbers featuring the entire company of 14, the crowd may pack the small stage, but the players move agilely in and out of the wings and even the aisles.

For orchestration, the play makes do with a piano and bass at stage right and a drummer who provides other percussion but remains out of sight. It’s minimal, but plenty at the same time. Phil Reno, the pianist and musical director, takes the stage himself in one scene, adding another multitasking dimension.

The set design, by James Morgan, could not be simpler — design reduced to its essence. A window is the backdrop for Foreman’s Machine Shop, where David Kolowitz, the lead character, works as a delivery boy. The same window fronts a hat shop where he makes a delivery, and then a luncheonette where he has a date with his girl, Wanda. Chairs, counters, worktables, desks, a chaise longue and other elements are mostly brought in by cast members with a flourish and danced offstage when the scene changes.

    The musical numbers are all impressive. The women in particular do great work, together or solo. The biggest crowd-pleaser, though, was a number by Mr. Tucker and Mr. DeMattis, “Hot Cha-Cha.” The two veteran performers threw in a few flourishes that were both unexpected and delightful.

    The only sour note in the production comes from the story itself. The awkward and untalented David Kolowitz is a would-be actor who becomes a star despite himself, thanks to a dearth of talent in New York at that time. Although the situation is played for laughs and there’s a good-natured ending, David’s eventual acceptance is all too reminiscent of certain periods of prolonged mediocrity on the Great White Way in both production and playwriting. For this observer, the laughter, while often genuine, glossed over something sinister lurking beneath the cheerful veneer.

    Performances of “Enter Laughing” will continue through Sept. 4. Tickets can be purchased through the box office or at www.BayStreet.org. The show’s producer, Dan Whitten, has since announced that he will bring it to Broadway after it ends its Sag Harbor run.

    Guild Hall’s Red Carpet Film Series is welcoming one of its own next Thursday with the presentation of the film “The Art of Getting By” by Gavin Wiesen. Not only was the script written in East Hampton, but the writer and director also chose the films for the 2008 to 2010 summer series.

     If the title sounds familiar, it is because the film had a limited release in June, garnering positive reviews. It was also a selection of this year’s Sundance Festival, although under another title, “Homework.”

    The story is inspired by the filmmaker’s own childhood. He grew up in New York, spending summers and weekends in East Hampton. “My family owned a house in East Hampton since the late 1960s,” he said recently. “From the first couple of years of my life, my earliest memories are of East Hampton.” He described the house as “a modest old cottage, very East Hampton to its core. It’s a great place to be.”

    Like many children who grow up in the city or in Los Angeles, he was obsessed with film. “For me, movies were an escape and a connection to the outside world. I had the quintessential only-child-hood.” Although “nothing was tragically wrong,” he said, “movies were a friend to me and a way out of the bubble.” Seeing movies being made around him on the streets of Manhattan only fed the fantasy. “It was extremely meaningful to me while I was very young.”

    Attending film school was a “no-brainer,” but “realizing that it was something I could accomplish” took more time. A friend of the family introduced him to producers and directors and he found himself doing coverage on screenplays. “It’s definitely a privilege of growing up in New York. It’s no coincidence that the sons and nephews of filmmakers are filmmakers. It helped me start to believe that getting into that world was possible.”

    Mr. Wiesen’s more recent stint in East Hampton had much to do with making the movie happen. Even though he’d spent a good deal of time in movie production in Los Angeles before writing the film, “I realized I needed to write, to create. I needed time to build a body of work. So I pulled up stakes and moved to East Hampton for a couple of years.”

    It was at a time when he had reached a crossroads. “I was around 27, 28, becoming overly mature” for the work he was doing. “I was at the point where I thought I might have to give up and find a real job.”

    Mr. Wiesen, who is now 36, found himself “lucky to be able to save rent and write screenplays and not be tied to a weekly paycheck for a few years.” He invited a writing partner to come out and stay with him for a month. “It’s such an inspiring place to be. You feel the seasons so intensely.” He said he had fond memories of the summer turning into fall and the days when it became too cold for jogs after work. “How dark it would get. It’s just the loveliest place.”

    While he knew some year-round residents, he said he didn’t have much time to see them. “I would go to Rowdy Hall in January and eat at the bar. That was often the only option.” An icy driveway in winter made even that short jaunt precarious.

    When it warmed up he began surfing, “something to occupy myself with when I wasn’t working. I picked it up at 29, when the out-of-reach goal of getting good opened up. I spent six years going to Montauk every day. It became an obsession to wake up and go early.”

    He finished the screenplay in 2006 and was on the selection committee of the Hamptons International Film Festival the same year. He began trying to get the story made into a film. It took a year to find Gia Walsh, a producer, whose East Hampton house was practically in his backyard.

    It was during that time that Mr. Wiesen began working with Guild Hall. He was in Los Angeles, trying to get the movie off the ground and “casting about for work, writing TV pilots,” when, “one way or another, my name came up for programming a summer film series of older foreign films.” In film school he had focused as much on cinema studies as film production, so he was happy for the opportunity. He would “come up with a program of what the films would be and make sure to have enough reasons to be in East Hampton all summer long,” to do introductions and follow-up discussions.

    There were always some interesting surprises. One night, Mr. Wiesen presented Luis Bunuel’s “Viridiana” and the audience was treated to an extensive follow-up discussion with none other than Steven Spielberg, who knew Bunuel. Mr. Spielberg had brought his daughter to the screening. At the screening of Louis Malle’s “Au Revoir Les Enfants” were his widow, Candice Bergen, and their daughter, Chloe Malle.

    Mr. Wiesen and Ms. Walsh reworked the script in the fall of 2008 and decided it was ready. Then began “the long process to look for the cast and raising money in earnest,” which took about a year.

    “I got very lucky with Freddie Highmore,” the star of the film, said Mr. Wiesen. He had not thought of the actor for the part, even though he thought his performance some years ago as a 9-year-old in “Finding Neverland” was stunning. The typical “American-indie Sundance-y lead performance actor is often very good, but pretending to be a slacker when they’re actually going to bars and clubs in L.A. and doing work on TV. They all look familiar.” With Mr. Highmore, though, he said he had an Oscar-caliber actor who was still a 16-to-17-year-old kid. “He brings sweetness to the role.”

    The story revolves around a young man with a lot of promise and very little follow-through on the eve of his high school graduation. It is a tale of first love, finding oneself, and conquering the tyranny of trigonometry homework, among other assignments.

    Being accepted by Sundance, said Mr. Wiesen, was “an out-of-body experience, more so than any other thing. We went to Sundance with a very high amount of buzz that we didn’t create.”

    “The Art of Getting By” turned out to be one of those movies that caught the childhood experience of many people. “It made the financing justifiable. Sundance was the stamp of legitimacy.”

    While the distribution was limited, “It couldn’t have had a better journey for a movie this size,” said the writer. “We sold it the day we premiered. I was told that was a thing of the past . . . the producers recouped their investment and then some, something that would have kept me up at night” had it not happened.

    Although he said there might have been confusion about how to market the film, he was lucky it came out in any national way. “I thought it would only get released in art houses in New York and L.A.”

    Mr. Wiesen hopes his film will have a half-life in cable or DVD release. Meanwhile, he is adapting a book as his next project.

Pollock’s Politics

    Michael Leja will discuss Jackson Pollock’s political views on Sunday at the Fireplace Project, a gallery space across Springs-Fireplace  Road from the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs.

    The illustrated lecture, “The Pollock Brothers and the Politics of Art in the 1930s,” is based on Mr. Leja’s recent book about letters written by and to family members from 1927 to 1947. Three of five Pollock brothers became artists during the Depression years.

    Mr. Leja, a professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of “Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s,” which won the Charles Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The 5 p.m. lecture costs $5 but is free for Pollock-Krasner members.

Montauk Artists on the Green

    This weekend marks the 17th annual juried exhibit of Montauk artists on the green at the entrance to the hamlet.

    The exhibit, from tomorrow through Sunday, will include hundreds of art works — paintings, sculptures, fabric art, jewelry, photography, and other mediums.

    Some 90 artists and artisans will participate. The show is sponsored by the Montauk Artist Association and admission is free. Hours are from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., closing at 5 p.m. on Sunday.

Keszler to Feature Banksy

    Banksy’s street works will be shown at the Southampton Village Power Plant at 200 North Sea Road on Saturday from 6 to 11 p.m.

    The works, acquired by the Keszler Gallery, are literally taken from the street, with the walls that the artist painted on brought into an exhibit setting, one that is large and strong enough to hold them. According to the gallery, some pieces weigh several tons. The show includes “Out of Bed Rat” from 2006, which was featured, as it was being created, in the movie “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”

    Banksy is an anonymous English graffiti artist, active since the 1990s. This is the second show the gallery has devoted exclusively to his work, which is often political and humorous. He has been executing “subverted art attacks” since 2003, hanging his works next to prominent pieces in the collections of the world’s most famous museums.

Nightingale Presents Two

    Eric Dever and Alexis Martino will have shows at the Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill through Sept. 12, with an opening reception on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m.

    Mr. Dever uses a palette knife and a flat bristle brush to apply different compositions of black and white. “I work on linen, burlap, and canvas, sized or gessoed, all manifesting grades of absorbency and viscosity,” he has said.

   “My four-year investigation into the limits of titanium and zinc whites, and ivory black, has given me a sense of mixing light itself with paint.”

    The artist will exhibit his work in Paris in September.

    Ms. Martino will show “Wait,” a series of large-scale photographs of mostly single subjects, that almost appear to be film stills. According to the gallery, “A sense of unease underneath the beautiful polished surfaces provides these miniature, self-contained  dramas with a sense of longing and anticipation.” The artist lives and works on Shelter Island, using her students as models.

People, Places, and Dreams

    The Delaney Cooke Gallery in Sag Harbor will show “People, Places, and Dreams” from Friday through Tuesday. The show includes work by three Long Island artists who have explored the literal and figurative aspects of travel.

    Beryl Bernay, a photojournalist, will exhibit color and black-and-white photographs and collages representative of the many different villages and peoples she has encountered, including a visit to Bali with Margaret Mead.

    Ann Brandeis will show a photo-essay, “Drawn and Painted,” presenting individuals and couples who choose to use their bodies as a personal canvas. The images are sepia-toned and printed on a fine Japanese Kozo paper to make the tattoos look more subtle. The photographer

    Guy Pierno will exhibit images from his latest work, “California 101,” from Big Sur through Point Reyes.

    Saturday’s opening reception, beginning at 5 p.m., will include music from many cultures.

Drawings by Scarlett at Kalaher

    The Arthur Kalaher Galleries in Southampton and Sag Harbor are featuring drawings by Rolph Scarlett, an early abstractionist from Canada.

    The artist, who died in 1984, was a favorite of Hilla Rebay, whose museum of nonobjective painting became the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The artist was also a designer of stage sets, industrial products, and jewelry. He exhibited alongside early 20th-century European painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Rudolf Bauer, producing both realist and abstract compositions. He is best known, however, for abstract geometrical works.

    The Guggenheim still owns almost 60 of Mr. Scarlett’s paintings and monoprints. His work is also in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art.

Watermill to Shelter Island

    Tomorrow at 6 p.m., at Sylvestor Manor on Shelter Island, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center will present a work designed by participants in the center’s international summer program.

    The design of the work, called “Shelter,” is the result of a collaboration between the artists of Watermill and the staff of Sylvester Manor, who have carved out several “rooms” from the landscape, in which the artists’ performances will take place.

    This is the fourth such cooperative project between an East End institution and the Watermill International Summer Program. Past collaborators have included The Bridge golf club in Bridgehampton and East Hampton’s Guild Hall.

    Refreshments will be provided by Sunset Beach. Reservations, which are required, can be made through sylvester manor.eventbrite.com.

    And you be wise, alert for inconsistencies and tolerant of them and of all other caprices of growth, you will find that the garden at its core is inexhaustible and sparks off by day and by night curious independent tangents, little trills and flourishes that are boundless in their possibilities and endless in their ability to woo, cajole, and astonish. The sunflower on the southeast corner of the Inner (formerly Secret) Garden, for example. I didn’t plant it.

    I have never pruned the weeping pine that, year after year, has done its own merry topiary, at one time very definitely an Al Capp Shmoo, the year following an English sheepdog, and then the very same sheepdog but with puppies, and so on until this year, clearly something formidable but I don’t know which for it has gotten very large and, where it is, no room to step back and get an impression. So I leave it as one leaves a humming child bent on its own affairs no matter how strange or faraway.

    In pocked London, during the blitz and immediately after, flowers grew not seen for hundreds of years, flowers lost in memory, the seeds of which retained viability that long. Who could have considered the Luftwaffe to be inadvertent gardeners!

    I planted 100 Casa Blanca lilies in the aforementioned Inner Garden and, judging from the pink, picotee, sepia blooms what I put in was the growers’ grab bag, a farrago of flowers, awful on the page and in a sentence but an unplanned, unexpected boundary-stretcher wonderfully robust and welcome nonetheless and a scheme I just might employ elsewhere. It has certainly given my exquisite color sense a jolt. Something as amok and wise as a child with a brand-new box of crayons.

    If you care to be observant, all growing matter is continually exhibiting aberrations of leaf, of blossom, and of given form. A leaf edge lower in chlorophyll just might, if plucked and rooted, become a plant with fabulous foliage. A branch may become suddenly pendulous from out of an ordinary bush and be the parent of a whole line of weepers. The flower out of season may commence a race of autumn bloomers.

    The sunflower at my doorstep from where I do not know. A Russian sunflower calling up that wondrous Monet: doorway, sunflower, child. “The boy who runs with his eyes closed through a lovely garden is us” (Roberto Bolano).

    A single seed is what we are, its DNA life itself and we are but variations on this theme, as uncountable as sand or stars, as invisible as odor.

Springs Invitational at 44

    The Springs Improvement Society Art Committee’s invitational exhibit will open this week with two events. The first, this evening from 4 to 7, is a preview benefit to honor the contributions to the society by Ernestine Lassaw, Jean Hoffmann, and Abby Abrams, with a $25 donation collected at the door. Also, art sales during the three-week show will benefit the society, Ashawagh Hall, and the society’s scholarships. The regular opening reception will be held tomorrow from 4 to 7 p.m.

    The show will include the work of about 110 artists, some of whom are represented year after year, others who have not exhibited at the show in quite some time, if ever. Artworks are limited in size to 25 by 25 inches. Esperanza Leon, the guest curator, said last week that there will be many sculptors represented. What each artist will bring is still mostly a surprise, even to her. “How is it going to hang? It’s overwhelming to think about,” she said.

    Some of the artists to be exhibited this year are Bill King, Connie Fox, Hans Van de Bovenkamp, Grant Haffner, Eunice Golden, Carl Scorza, Roy Nicholson, Dalton Portella, and Natalie Edgar. Other events during the show include Ashawagh Speaks, “an evening of poetry and performance,” for a $10 donation at the door next Thursday beginning at 7 p.m. A tour led by Ms. Leon will take place on Aug. 20 from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. The show is on view through Aug. 21.

Pollock-Krasner’s 15 Minutes

    The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs will present “15 Minutes: Homage to Andy Warhol” beginning today. The exhibit “in sight and sound” was organized and produced by Jeff Gordon and Path Soong. It includes artwork and recordings from artists, writers, and performers such as Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Ivan Karp, Billy Name, Ultra Violet, Lawrence Weiner, Carter Ratcliff, John Giorno, Vincent Freemont, Alexander Heinrici, Brigid Berlin, Christopher Makos, Yura Adams, Nat Finkelstein, Connie Beckley, Susan Breen, and the organizers.

    Artworks consist of 12-by-12-inch screen prints with an audio work related to Warhol and those in his orbit. Mr. Gordon, who knew Warhol, has produced recordings and prints by visual artists and poets for 25 years. Ms. Soong is an abstract painter. This is their third collaboration related to the Pollock-Krasner House. The exhibit will be on view through Oct. 29.

Hanging Out to Dry

    Guild Hall’s annual Clothesline Art Sale will take place on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Artists from the East End will have an opportunity to hang their work at the museum, in mediums such as sculpture, prints, collage, photography, and paintings, at affordable prices — all under $2,000, with many as little as $50.

    The event is 65 years old this year and attracts the discerning eyes of seasoned collectors as well as curiosity seekers and first-timers. Guild Hall shares the proceeds with the artists, each of whom takes home half of a piece’s sales price. The show brings in some 350 artists and more than 1,000 attendees and potential purchasers. Each year 500 to 800 pieces are sold.

    Participating artists have been asked to call Guild Hall to register, and artwork should be delivered today and tomorrow.

Williams, Bright and Dark

    Derek Buckner, Janet Jennings, and Ken Robbins will be featured in a new show at the Pamela Williams Gallery in Amagansett from Saturday until Sept. 5.

    “Of Dark and Bright” emphasizes the use of light and shadow by each of these artists, whether it is Mr. Buckner’s paintings of the South Fork and New York City, Ms. Jennings’s paintings of Gardiner’s Bay, or Mr. Robbins’s photographs of South Fork landscapes.

New at Halsey McKay

    Rachel Uffner will serve as the guest curator for the Halsey McKay Gallery’s first group exhibit in East Hampton, “The Idea of the Thing That It Isn’t.” The show includes art that defines itself by its foils or opposites, using contrast to offer a better understanding of given standards or traditional properties of art objects. Although some of the examples provoke just slight shifts in practiced perceptions, others can be more revolutionary in their challenge to the norm.

    The artists will include Michele Abeles, Martin Soto Climent, Jess Fuller, Tom Holmes, Anya Kielar, Pam Lins, Sam Moyer, Marlo Pascual, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Roger White, and Amy Yao. The show opens tomorrow and will have a reception on Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m.

Frank Stella at Vered

    Frank Stella’s wall sculptures will be on view at the Vered Gallery in East Hampton beginning on Saturday with a reception from 9 to 11 p.m. The gallery’s “Modern Masters” show will remain on view in Gallery II.

    Mr. Stella is known for his early minimalist paintings that evolved into three-dimensional cutout works. His paintings have become more sculptural with time. The works in this show are inspired by Neolithic archaeological sites in ancient Anatolia in Turkey. According to the artist, “a sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.”

    The modern masters exhibited include Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning, Barbara Kruger, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jules Olitski, Man Ray, Wayne Thiebaud, Jack Tworkov, Amedeo Modigliani, Larry Rivers, and Andy Warhol. Both shows will remain on view through Aug. 30.

LongHouse Highlights Esherick

    Design aficionados should appreciate the opportunity to see a collection of Wharton Esherick pieces at the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton through Oct. 8.

    Esherick has been called “the dean of American Craftsman,” after the style also known as the American Arts and Crafts movement. Five new publications about the artist, including a biography, have recently been issued. Pieces from the collection of LongHouse’s Jack Lenor Larsen as well as from the Wharton Esherick Museum in Paoli, Pa., will be in the exhibit.

    LongHouse’s collection is the most important one after the museum’s and includes tables from the 1940 New York World’s Fair, a monumental arch, a painted softwood bench, a music stand, and a Cubist mirror. Esherick was also an artist in woodblock prints, and some of these will also be displayed, along with his sculpture and other pieces from the museum.

On the Trail of Potters

    Five working ceramists will open their studios in East Hampton, Springs, and Sag Harbor on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Those participating in Sag Harbor are Nancy Robbins at 51 Round Pond Lane and Beverly Granger at 24 Soundview Drive. In East Hampton the studios are those of Karen Lissack at 85 Old Northwest Road and Phyllis Spiegel at 15 Springwood Way, and in Springs it’s Joel Kaplan’s at 28 Cedar Ridge Drive.

    Those who visit all five studios will receive a free gift. Details will be available at the first stop. The tour is free.

Hidden Nature at Sylvester

    Vivian Polak of East Hampton will exhibit a series of photographs in “Nature: Unseen” at Sylvester & Co. at Home in Amagansett beginning on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.

    The artist said the work’s focus is on the beauty of nature that goes unnoticed or avoided — the underside of leaves, weeds, tree stumps, roots, and storm clouds. “There are many things in life that go unseen, ignored, or even disdained that, upon a fresh re-examination, can be found to be interesting and maybe even quite beautiful.” The show will be on view through Sept. 12.

Dalessio at Grenning

    Marc Dalessio’s “Recent Paintings” will be shown at the Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor beginning today with a reception on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    The exhibit is anchored by two monumental landscape paintings. They will be joined by Sag Harbor scenes and works from the late spring, when Mr. Dalessio painted in Montalcino, Italy. The gallery has likened his style to that of a contemporary Hudson River School painter.

    The artist has a studio in Florence, Italy, where he paints portraits and other works, but he is also a devoted plein-air painter. Although he has explored a variety of international locations, he has been painting on the East End for 11 years.

    The works will remain on view through Aug. 21.

Two Parrish Talks

    Dorothea Rockburne, who is the subject of a retrospective exhibit at the Parrish Art Museum, will speak about her work on Saturday at 6 p.m. at the museum. Titled “Foundations,” her talk will cover the inspirations and motifs that lie at the heart of her work. These include mathematics, astronomy, and architecture, as well as ancient and Renaissance art.

    Next Thursday, Patricia Albers will speak about Joan Mitchell, one of the second generation of Abstract Expressionist painters who found their way to the South Fork during the 1950s. Ms. Albers is the author of a new biography of Mitchell, who was married to Barney Rosset Jr. of the Grove Press and known for knockout paintings that stood up to the rigorous, male-centric aesthetic of action painting.

    The lectures cost $10 each, free for members of the Southampton museum.

Licht Solo at Markel

    Beginning tomorrow, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts will show “Recent Still Lives” by Sydney Licht. Ms. Licht focuses on the overlooked objects one might encounter every day and makes them monumental. A candy box, a shopping bag, and other ho-hum containers are her subjects, and she transforms them by fashioning towering structures built from them and then painting the resulting colorful edifices.

    The artist lives and works in New York City and has exhibited in galleries around the country. She has recently completed a Yaddo residency and was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7:30 p.m. The show is on view through Aug. 22.

Ross Benefit at Valentine

    Gallery Valentine in East Hampton will hold a reception for the Ross School on Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m. Tommy Mottola and Ryan Ross, who own the gallery, will host the free event. A portion of the evening’s sales will benefit the Ross School Chamberlain-Fairweather Scholarship Fund for the Arts. Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres will be served.

    Art on view includes work by Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, George Condo, Alex Katz, and Tom Wesselmann. Alexandra Fairweather, the director of the gallery and a Ross School graduate, created the Chamberlain-Fairweather Scholarship Fund with John Chamberlain and her mother, Prudence Fairweather, in 2006 to benefit students at Ross interested in the arts and in need of financial aid.

    Those who would like to attend the reception have been asked to respond to events@galleryvalentine.com.

Botanical Art in Southampton

    “Garden to Field: An International Exhibition of Contemporary Botanical Art” is on view at the Southampton Cultural Center through Aug. 30 with a reception next Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    The show features more than 60 works by contemporary botanical artists organized by Ursus Prints in New York. The artists use various mediums, such as colored pencil on paper and watercolor on vellum, “to capture the essence of each specimen and generate a new perspective on traditional European nature studies,” according to the organizers. Images will include cultivated and uncultivated plants.

Calvert at Canio’s

    Rob Calvert, an artist who lives in Sag Harbor, has work on view at Canio’s Books in that village through the end of the month.

    Mr. Calvert works in a variety of mediums. His work is abstract and often brightly colored. “An important formal quality I seek is for a drawing or painting to be both something and nothing,” the artist said in a statement. “Parts recombine to create different wholes, scales, places to be, rest, feel, and reflect. The observer is grounded and adrift. Only then am I on the right track.” He studied at the Vermont Studio Center and Harvard. 

    Canio’s will also offer a photography workshop with Kathryn Szoka. In a four-week course, three weeks will be devoted to shooting in the field, with the fourth and final class focused on critique. A basic knowledge of the camera is required. Further information and

    Music by three composers was linked together by a common theme at a Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival concert on Sunday.

    Called “Historic Firsts,” the program, at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, consisted of Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G Minor, considered the first major piece written for the combination of piano and three strings; Kenji Bunch’s “Changes of Phase” for woodwind quintet, which was commissioned by the festival and premiered in 1999, and Louis Spohr’s Nonet in F, the first-ever work to call itself a nonet.

    Apart from this commonality, each piece was quite different and came about under varied circumstances.

    Mozart wrote the Piano Quartet in G Minor for a commission from the publisher Hoffmeister. The publisher feared, however, that the work was too difficult for amateurs (indeed it was) and admonished Mozart to “write more popularly or else I can neither print nor pay for anything of yours.” Of course Mozart would not write otherwise, or could not; the contract was canceled. Fortunately, another publisher later issued the quartet.

    The quartet is significant not only because of the use of the then-unusual combination of instruments (featuring the piano as an equal solo voice rather than a mere accompaniment), but because it marked a new maturity in Mozart’s style. The musicologist Alfred Einstein called the key of G minor Mozart’s “key of fate,” and you knew from the beginning that the music would be intense, agitated, and unsettling.

    With Ani Kavafian on violin, Nicholas Cords on viola, Edward Arron on cello, and Jeewon Park on piano, the playing was stirring and flawless and the interplay of the instruments was captivating.

    The facial expressions and body language of Ms. Park and Mr. Arron were especially engaging. They showed their complete immersion in the moment.

    The third movement was a rondo, which is typically a lighter, vivacious movement. But in this quartet one could hear more seriousness, at most a carefully qualified joy rather than the more usual jocularity.

    We may not know much about what prompted Mozart to write the quartet. We know more about the ideas that prompted Mr. Bunch to write “Changes of Phase.”

    Mr. Bunch, a native of Portland, Ore.,  is a violist as well as a composer. He has been commissioned by the English Chamber Orchestra, the Phoenix Symphony, Wolf Trap, and the New Juilliard Ensemble. He was about 26 years old at the time of the premiere of “Changes of Phase” 12 seasons ago, when that term from his high school chemistry class was still in his head.

    He wrote, “I always liked the idea of something changing its physical appearance while keeping its chemical integrity (i.e., water to ice to vapor). . . . There are so many ways to musically illustrate a change of phase . . . like metric modulation, reharmonizations, minimalism, and melodic development.”

    The quintet was made up of Marya Martin, the artistic director of the festival, on flute, John Snow on oboe, Jose French-Ballester on clarinet, Peter Kolkay on bassoon, and Stewart Rose on horn.

    I can’t say I could pick out which of the methods that Mr. Bunch described applied to which of the four resulting movements, or, quite honestly, that it mattered to the listener, but the results were satisfying.

    Though the music seemed to be more about textures and rhythms, there were also some touching moments of melody, especially in the second movement (the movements are unnamed) in the flute and horn.

    One interesting effect was produced in several instruments by a technique called flutter-tonguing, made when the player adds a rolled R to the breath, resulting in a light, breathy, trilled sound.

    Mr. Bunch cites varied influences in his music in general: Shostakovich and Metallica, Ravel and Sondheim, Ligeti and Stevie Wonder. I was aware of eclectic influences being brought together successfully without any one of them standing out. The music had playful, irregular rhythms with urban humor, and was sonorous, vivid, and sophisticated.

    Although Louis Spohr is not a well-known composer today, he was in his time considered more famous than Beethoven, and his music was regarded as equal to Mozart’s. He is known largely by a violin concerto, and by the historical tidbits that he invented — the chin rest for the violin as well as rehearsal numbers on the written score — and was the first major conductor to use a baton.

    His nonet was the first piece of music to use that title, some say the first piece ever written specifically for nine instruments, and the first to use the combination of four strings and woodwind quintet. This claim to fame, however, seems to be more because of the request for this instrumentation by his benefactor, Johann von Tost, than Spohr’s originality.

    Von Tost specified that any scores written by Spohr under his contract would become von Tost’s property for three years and had to be borrowed from him for each performance, which should happen as often as possible and only in his presence. His stated goal thereby was to meet music lovers who he hoped would then become business partners!

    Spohr’s desire to satisfy his benefactor might explain in part some general qualities of the nonet: pleasant, inoffensive, and predictably happy. Spohr was a skilled composer, but the music was not profound or impassioned, nor was it intended to be. In fact, if it were given a less than satisfactory performance, it could sound quite banal.

    The case on Sunday was quite the opposite. With great attention to expression and ensemble, the nonet was brought alive by Arnaud Sussman on violin, Mr. Cords on viola, Mr. Arron on cello, Jeffrey Beecher on double bass, and the same quintet as in the previous piece.

    Even the somewhat darker moments in the music were just temporary clouds before sunshine broke out again. The audience was uplifted with a feeling that all was right with the world. Where else can we find that these days?

    The Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival continues through Aug. 21; more information is at bcmf.org. It should be noted that this season’s concerts are being recorded for broadcast on American Public Media’s “Performance Today.”

    A new feature of the festival’s Web site this year is that you can listen to a short sound file of each work from every concert, just enough to whet your appetite or perhaps help you choose from among the offerings.

    It’s one thing to play the music of the Allman Brothers, but quite another to have a member of the legendary Southern rock ensemble sit in with you when you do. That’s what will happen at Guild Hall when the drummer Butch Trucks, a founding member of the group, joins Great Caesar’s Ghost onstage for shows on Monday and Tuesday starting at 7:30 p.m.

    Great Caesar’s Ghost is a seven-piece band out of Bridgehampton known for extended instrumental jams, particularly when covering Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers tunes. Long Islanders all, they’ve been around since 2004, with players familiar to the music scene here: Peter (Bosco) Michne and Larry Schmid, both on guitar and vocals, and Larry Hunter on bass. (Jerry Weldon, who plays sax with Harry Connick Jr., will be sitting in, too.)

    Their latest release, the two-disc “What’s Done Is Done,” much of it recorded live, is number four on the jam bands chart (jambands.com).

    The concerts benefit the food pantries of East Hampton and Sag Harbor. The cost ranges from $69 to $99, with V.I.P. seats available for $225, which includes sushi from Sen, an open bar, and a meet-and-greet with Mr. Trucks after the show. Tickets can be bought online at greatcg.com or by calling 866-811-4111.

    By the end of 2009, it seemed all print media companies were on the verge of collapse. Bankruptcies and layoffs were the common headlines generated by activities happening in the very newsrooms reporting them. Although most of the giants of the daily newspaper game survive to this day, with so much happening that changed the media landscape during the next year, it was a great time to have a camera handy.

    Andrew Rossi did. His film “Page One: Inside The New York Times” was the result of a year’s worth of unprecedented access to what is widely considered “the paper of record” at a time of enormous turmoil and change in the newspaper industry. It will be shown tomorrow night at 8 at Guild Hall as part of the Hamptons International Film Festival’s SummerDocs series. Alec Baldwin will host the screening and a question-and-answer session will follow with Mr. Rossi, David Carr, a Times media reporter and columnist, and Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor.

    Mr. Rossi said on Monday that he had decided from the beginning to focus on Mr. Carr. “I envisioned it as a road movie with vignettes on the writers.” Mr. Carr, through his determined championing of the newspaper and his past as a drug addict, made a compelling subject. According to Mr. Rossi, however, “he felt the spotlight too hot on him, so we began to feature more of the writers on the media desk.” These included Brian Stelter, a blogger hired by The Times at age 21, Bruce Headlam, the media desk editor, and Tim Arango, a media reporter who ships off mid-film to cover Baghdad. “David’s role is instructive, but he’s not the exclusive focus.”

    According to Mr. Carr, he was happy to talk to Mr. Rossi, “but interviewing other people was challenging because you’re going to get your story, but I won’t get mine.” The glare of the lights had an effect of taming his more impertinent side. There was also the attention it attracted when he went to cover public events. “When someone is following you with a camera, everybody will look and think ‘Who is that jerk?’ ” Covering the interactive portion of the South by Southwest Festival in Austin last year, for instance, was difficult, Mr. Carr said. “It feels dorky after a while.”

    He added that the film also shows “editors actually doing their job. I’m a person with a lot of ideas. Some of them are good, but I never know which ones.” He said an editor, and in his case Mr. Headlam, lets him know which stories to tell or more precisely, not to tell.

    “The message of the film is the importance of putting out a daily newspaper and the teamwork of many writers and editors coming to work on a daily basis.” Mr. Rossi said Mr. Carr provided continuity and his own backstory acts as a metaphor for the adversity the industry is dealing with and its ability to reinvent itself and survive.

    While Mr. Rossi was present when 10 percent of the Times staff were laid off, there were other things happening that caused traditional journalists to take pause, including the advent of Wikileaks and the introduction of the iPad.

    Despite the inherent threat in these developments, as it turns out they may have only made the old model stronger. While filming, “We were in the middle of ‘Could this all go away?’ ” Mr. Carr said. That has been replaced by a certainty that the newspaper industry will continue, he said. “We’re not the buggy whip.”

    The latest confirmation that good journalism matters has come in the past few weeks, as The Guardian continues  to reveal misdeeds by News of the World and British officials, a story the paper had followed over several years despite pressure to stop even by those who are charged with investigating such wrongdoings.

    Mr. Carr said it was a demonstration that “the remedy for bad journalism is more journalism.”

    New hybrids that offer the investigative journalism that newspapers under financial duress cannot always afford these days are allowing the important investigative work to continue.

    Paywalls for Internet content have been shown to be effective, too, and not just because of subscriber revenue. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have shown “there’s a new class of Internet advertisers who believe in paying a premium to sell to premium subscribers,” Mr. Carr said.

    Both Mr. Carr and Mr. Rossi said that traditional news media was important in making sense of and providing structure for the hundreds of documents released by Wikileaks, to the point where Julian Assange chose to collaborate with The Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel in later releases. “It’s all a bunch of text when not organized by a journalist,” Mr. Rossi said.

    The title “Page One” has many different meanings, the director said. “It refers to the room where the page one meetings take place, to decide or curate those six or seven stories on the front page. It’s also the evocation that we are on page one and there are many pages to go.” It also recognizes that the idea of a page one, where a package of information is chosen by group of people sitting in a room, is fading away with so many other outlets for those same stories.

    With so much footage of daily activity and interviews with journalists in the newsroom, outside media watchers, and industry insiders, Mr. Rossi said it took three people to edit “Page One.” “We pursued a strategy that would elucidate the media’s disruption at the time and tried to make sure we had signposts along the road” to tie it all together.

    “Ultimately, I hope the movie will connect with people as a portrait of professionals fighting to do their jobs under the most extraordinary circumstances,” Mr. Rossi said. “I wanted to push past some of the mythologies of journalism.”

    Tonight is the first of what Kathy Zeiger hopes will be many Thursday night “art walks.”                          

    Ms. Zeiger, an East Hampton resident, has convinced 11 of the some 16 galleries in East Hampton to stay open until 8 tonight, and every Thursday thereafter this summer, so that diners, moviegoers, and others who stroll in the village business district can stop in and see fine art.     

Balloons will indicate the participating galleries, as will fliers that can be obtained at each.

Ms. Zeiger is basing the East Hampton art walk on the Chelsea Pier Thursday night art walks in Manhattan. She said Thursdays had been chosen because they kick off the weekend on evenings when there are fewer parties and other events.

“It brings the art community together,” Ms. Zeiger said, remarking that new galleries, along with established ones, had responded favorably to the idea.

Some participating galleries are the Vered and Wallace Galleries, between Park Place and Main Street, and some newcomers like Local 78, Halsey McKay, and Linde Gallery.

“It’s a wait-and-see how this will take off,” Ms. Zeiger said. “It’s all grass roots and word-of-mouth currently, but there is wonderful art here.”

Richard Phillips and Local 87

    Richard Phillips will show his work in East Hampton beginning this week at John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in the space also occupied by Harper’s Books.

    Mr. Phillips channels the hard and soft sell of commercialization through manipulating products and displays using objects such as album covers, posters, designer handbags, and beach towels in a show titled “P.O.P.” for Point of Purchase. This is the first full-scale presentation of these works.

    At the same time the gallery owners will also inaugurate Local 87, a space devoted to showing emerging South Fork artists alongside artists with a more international reputation in rotating group exhibits, which will include work by Mary Beach, Marc Joseph Berg, Will Cotton, Michael Counts, Peter Dayton, Jameson Ellis, Kim Gordon, Mats Gustafson, Brion Gysin, Michael Halsband, Duncan Hannah, David Levin­thal, David Matterhorn, Adam Mc­Ewen, Jill Musnicki, Paul P., Richard Prince, Terry Richardson, Peter Sabbeth, Toshio Saeki, Matthew Satz, Mike Solomon, Andy Warhol, and Nick Weber. During the summer there will also be performances, installations, and talks.

    Receptions will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. The P.O.P. exhibit will be on view through Aug. 8.

Firestone Does ‘Nose Job’

    The Eric Firestone gallery in East Hampton will show “Nose Job,” a group show of airplane nose cone art organized by Carlo McCormick, beginning tomorrow.

    Mr. Firestone and Mr. McCormick found the basis for the art in the dumping grounds of old military planes in the Arizona desert. The show will consist of a variety of cones in different shapes and sizes painted by contemporary artists such as Aiko, Dan Colen, Peter Dayton, Viejas Del Mercado, Jane Dickson, Shepard Fairey, Futura, How & Nosm, Juan James, Ryan McGinness, Tara McPherson, Nunca, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Lee Quinones, Carlos (Mare 139) Rodriguez, Retna, Saner, Kenny Scharf, Shelter Serra, Swoon, J.J. Veronis, and Aaron Young.

    The show will be on view through Aug. 21.

Plein Air in Ashawagh

    Plein Air Peconic, a group of painters and photographers who work from direct observation of the natural world, will exhibit South Fork landscapes at Ashawagh Hall in Springs beginning tomorrow at 10 a.m.

    The work will concentrate on properties preserved by the Peconic Land Trust. The group’s regular members Casey Chalem Anderson, Susan D’Alessio, Aubrey Grainger, Gail Kern, Michele Margit, Gordon Matheson, Joanne Rosko, and Eileen Dawn Skretch, and the photographers Tom Steele, Kathryn Szoka, and Ellen Watson will be joined by Leo Revi, Susan Nash, Bruce Lieberman, and Anita Kusick to exhibit work they painted as part of “Paint Out/Shoot Out,” an event held at Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett.

    There will be a reception on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. The show will close Sunday.

Russell Young Back at Keszler

    The Keszler Gallery in Southampton will open “American Envy II” by Russell Young on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m.

    A frequent exhibitor at Keszler, Mr. Young’s latest work grew out of his rehabilitation from a severe case of swine flu in 2010 that left him in an induced coma for eight days and in the hospital for three months. He not only had to rebuild his strength but had to relearn to write, draw, think, and create art after severe memory loss.

    His own trauma found him looking to other historical traumatic experiences such as the 1969 Manson murders and Altamont rock concert. His latest art reflects hope in the face of adversity.

Parrish Announces Groupings

    The Parrish Art Museum has announced the artists selected for the upcoming “Artist Choose Artists” exhibit, a show of work by East End artist who were chosen by a jury of other East End artists. The exhibit will open on Aug. 21.

­     The jurors for this exhibit are Alice Aycock, Ross Bleckner, Dan Rizzie, Matthew Satz, Gary Simmons, Agathe Snow, and Frank Wimberley. The artists they chose from 200 online submissions and studio visits were Kryn Olson, Mike Solomon, Renate Aller, Mary Ellen Bartley, Ross Watts, Tad Wiley, Terry Elkins, Lillya Lifanova, Perry Burns, Melinda Hackett, Alice Hope, Nella Khanis, Fulvio Massi, and Julie Small-Gamby. Each juror chose two artists whose work will be exhibited alongside their own.