Arts

Considering the issues it examines, the timing of this year’s African American Film Festival could not have been more fortuitous, according to Brenda Simmons, executive director of the Southampton African American Museum and organizer of the festival.

Residents and visitors to the South Fork may know that both John Lennon and Paul McCartney have spent time here, the latter an annual visitor to his house in Amagansett. Another member of the Beatles’ orbit, Peter Brown, who worked for their manager, the late Brian Epstein, has long summered in East Hampton.

Bob Dylan, always enigmatic, kept the world guessing for 17 days after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The JDTLab at Guild Hall will stage “Door of No Return,” a one-woman show written and performed by Nehassaiu deGannes, on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. Kelli Wicke Davis will direct the free program, which has a new score by Janice Lowe.

Marlene Markard and Ellen Johansen will give a free concert, “American Piano Works for Four Hands,” on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. at the Montauk Library.

Members of the Shinnecock Indian Nation will perform traditional and contemporary dances at the Southampton Arts Center on Sunday at 2 p.m.

Who would have thought a stage version of a classic 19th-century novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne would also work as a commentary on our recent politics? Certainly not me, who took the opportunity to view “The Scarlet Letter” (running through Nov. 26 at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater) as a respite from election exhaustion.

The plein air landscapes of the South Fork by the Australian artist, Ashley Frost will be shown at the Parasol Projects Pop-Up Gallery on Rivington Street in New York City through Monday. Roman Fine Art in East Hampton will present “Get With the Program II,” an exhibition of contemporary painting, photography, and sculpture, from Saturday through Jan. 8. A reception is set for Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

True crime stories continue to fascinate the American public, whether in podcasts like “Serial” and “In the Dark” or on television, where shows such as “Unsolved Mysteries” are staples. This week the focus is on Long Island, with the release of two series that take the Long Island Serial Killer case as a launching point.

Dilapidated buildings on urban streets, flora overtaking abandoned gas pumps on a country lane, the evanescence of a hazy Venice sunset. At Ashawagh Hall, the eyes moved from theme to theme and from subject to subject, witness to how another set of eyes saw the world and committed it to paper and canvas.

The Neave Trio will be the guest artists at the first of the fall and winter Music at St. Luke’s recital series on Saturday at 5 p.m. at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton. The program will include music by Dvorak and Korngold.

Guild Gatherings, an ongoing collaborative program designed to engage, cultivate, and connect artists, professionals, and the public on the East End, will take place tomorrow from 7 to 9 p.m. at Guild Hall. Presented in partnership with the East Hampton Arts Council, the evening will include presentations by four artists followed by a reception.

Between 1950 and 1990, the Eastman Kodak Company installed 565 color transparencies 18 feet tall and 60 feet long in New York City’s Grand Central Station. The images, known as Coloramas, portrayed a Norman Rockwell-like, predominantly white idealization of American life, while also advertising various products and activities.

Minerva Perez is not an absolute newcomer to the OLA Latino Film Festival, having been involved in its setup in 2007, but this year’s, the 13th iteration presented by the Organizacion Latino Americana, is the first she has put together as that organization’s executive director, a post she assumed in February.

The Southampton Arts Center on Job’s Lane and the Jam Session will present “The Music of Mali,” featuring Yacouba Sissoko and LUMA, on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

The Southampton Cultural Center will celebrate Veterans Day with a piano concert featuring American composers tomorrow evening at 6. Ellen Johansen and Marlene Markard, classically trained East End pianists, will perform music by Barber, Corigliano, Gershwin, and Copland. Tickets are $20, but students under 21 will be admitted free.

“From Bach to Rock,” a piano duet performed by Nadia and Vladimir Zaitsev, will take place at the Montauk Library on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. The husband and wife will perform music by Mozart, Bach, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Barber, Gershwin, Gottschalk, and Legrand, as well as Mr. Zaitsev’s arrangements of American rock ‘n’ roll medleys.

Three East End artists — Alice Hope, Bastienne Schmidt, and Linda Stein will be in the show “Overlap: Life Tapestries,”in the A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn. A reception will be held next Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. Helen A. Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, will be among the lecturers this weekend at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in connection with the exhibition “Abstract Expressionism: Expressions of Change.”

Susan Rosenberg, the author of “Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art,” the first in-depth study of Ms. Brown’s work, will give an illustrated talk about the choreographer’s career, answer questions, and sign copies of her book tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill.

The film noir aesthetic has appealed to Adam Baranello, a Hampton Bays-based multimedia artist, for as long as he can remember. B“I love black-and-white film, and the over-saturated black of black-and-white,” he said. “Aesthetically, I feel it has a cool artistic quality to it, and kind of takes you out of reality because the film isn’t supposed to be super lifelike. It’s supposed to be a little hyperbolic, or even a little more specific, like the characters don’t have every range of emotion that a real human has.”

The concert series “Bach, Before & Beyond” will begin its second season at the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor with a performance by Emilia Donato on Sunday at 3 p.m. A 22-year-old soprano from New York City, she received a degree in voice from Bard College, where she won the Concerto Competition and the Lombardi Prize.

A comedy show to benefit the Southampton Lions Club and the North Sea Fire Department will take place Saturday at 8 p.m. at 230 Elm Street in Southampton.

National Theatre Live will return to Guild Hall with an encore screening of “The Deep Blue Sea,” a masterful drama by the English playwright Terence Rattigan, on Saturday evening at 8.

Many notable artists — among them Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, and Brice Marden — worked at museums early in their careers, usually as security guards, but few kept one foot in the studio and one in a museum for three decades. George Negroponte managed to do just that.

Exactly one week before Halloween, two artists decided to offer their own trick and treats at a small beachfront cottage in Bridgehampton destined to face the wrecking ball.

The Southampton Arts Center will present a solo concert by the singer-songwriter Jennifer Lee Snowden on Saturday at 7 p.m. A New York City resident, Ms. Snowden recently performed solo at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has opened for Norah Jones’s band Puss n Boots, and has performed at venues from Manhattan to France, Italy, Australia, and Fiji. Tickets are $20, $15 for senior citizens, and $10 for students and children.

Clifford Ross, an East End multimedia artist known for his “Hurricane” series of dramatic, large-scale photographs of wild coastal storms, high-resolution landscape photographs, and mixed-media installations, has designed the sets for the premiere engagement of “Marksman,” a performance by the Kate Weare Company that will take place Wednesday through Nov. 13 at the Joyce Theater in New York City.

The Amagansett Library, in association with the Art Barge, will offer free basic drawing and figure drawing classes on Saturdays in November and December, under the tutelage of Linda Capello. A memorial exhibition of the artwork of Francesco Bologna, the East Hampton artist, gallerist, and frame shop owner who died in August, will take place at Ashawagh Hall in Springs with a reception on Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m. Family members and collectors will be lending paintings and pastel works on paper.

Work by two of the Watermill Center’s resident artists will be presented on Saturday when Andrew Ondrejcak opens his studio between 2 and 3 p.m. and Ebe Oke holds an open rehearsal from 3 to 4.

Written in 1850 and set two centuries earlier, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” is in some respects eerily relevant in an election year punctuated by the revelation and condemnation of sexual indiscretions by politicians and other public figures, with press coverage in effect serving the same function as Hester Prynne’s scarlet A.