Arts

   Reductive yet expansive, abstract yet universally real, and with seemingly infinite possibilities, the unique tapestries of 3.25-by-4.25-inch Polaroid prints John Messinger has been making for the past year should, one might think, keep him occupied for many more to come.

    With a Watermill Center residency just recently behind him, however, Mr. Messinger is ready for his next act. He will continue to work in this format, but the project currently occupying him is a book, “The Estate of Joseph A. Porter,” to be published by Harper’s Books this year.

An Early Spring

    Painters looking for an early spring might enjoy Lois Bender’s art classes at Bridge Gardens in Bridgehampton beginning in March.

    Spring Art Journeys: Sketching and Painting Nature from “skyscapes to flowerscapes” will be offered in four sessions, every other Saturday from 1 to 3 p.m. beginning March 2. The first class will be Watercolor: Warm-up Skills to learn the basic skills in grid-style exercises. The class will cover washes, brushstroke use, and color blending.

King Speaks

    A rarely seen one-hour interview with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. will be screened tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. The film will be introduced by George Silano, the North Haven cinematographer who made it.

    King speaks about the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Also featured is a conversation with his wife, Coretta Scott King. The film had never been screened publicly until its premiere on Jan. 28 at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton. Admission is free.

Music, American Style

   What’s in a face?

   The answer, one finds after a walk through the colorful, compact, but powerful exhibit at the Suffolk County Historical Society in Riverhead, is the ability to define one’s self-image, both as an individual and as a people. “Hidden and Forbidden: Art and Objects of Intolerance; Evolving Depictions of Blacks in America” will be on display through June 1.

Love and Passion

    This weekend, Karyn Mannix Contemporary will present the eighth iteration of the “Love and Passion” series of Valentine’s Day shows at Ashawagh Hall. The subtitle this year is “The Naughty Show,” with mature themes of an erotic nature from more than 70 artists.

    The first season of Shine, a radio talent competition sponsored by Nvision Studios of Freeport, has ended and Ashley Reilly of Montauk was the first-place winner. Her prize was the gift of a song written just for her by Daryl Carter called “I Hope,” to be professionally recorded. She is presently learning breathing techniques and presentation from the songwriter, and will record the final version soon in Freeport’s Real Tyme Studio.

Talent Show Auditions

    “Talent Showcase,” a regional public access show broadcast on Cablevision, will be holding auditions on Feb. 23 at Cablevision’s headquarters in Hauppauge. The shows are taped at LTV Studios in East Hampton.

    The show typically holds auditions on a biannual basis and is in its eighth year. It is open to all Long Island residents. The show is looking for singers (but not bands), impressionists, comedians, magicians, and other acts of all ages. Those interested must register first online at talent-showcase.com. No walk-ins will be seen.

   “I went down to Alphabet City a few weekends ago, saw a guy walking with a guitar, felt like this was a bygone era.”

    That may sound like the opening lines of a song — and maybe it is — but in this context, Jamie Grubb, a Springs native, was musing about the state of rock ’n’ roll music, circa 2013.

    “There are no new, 25-year-old, not-so-much-money musicians moving to the East Village. It’s too expensive,” he said.

   A pineapple placed on the front gate of a returning whaling captain’s house symbolized a welcome to visitors who wished to view the treasures from his world voyages. Historical artifacts from these captains, who left the East End to hunt whales in hopes of becoming wealthy from their valuable oil, are on display in “Bridgehampton Whalers: A Farmer’s Life at Sea” at the Bridgehampton Museum, formerly known as the Bridgehampton Historical Society. Among them is a bottle of whale oil, a rare find according to Julie Greene, the curator, who offered a talk last Thursday on the exhibit.

Mostly Abstract at Ashawagh

    Cynthia Sobel has organized “Mostly Abstract” at Ashawagh Hall in Springs this weekend. The show at the art space opens Saturday afternoon with a reception from 4 to 7 p.m. It will be up through Sunday afternoon.

    Included are paintings, drawings, and sculpture from Barbara Bilotta, Beth Barry, Phyllis Hammond, Jana Hayden, Stephanie Reit, Sheila Rotner, Ms. Sobel, and Mark Zimmerman.

More Women, New Show

‘Living, Out Loud’

    Guild Hall and the Naked Stage will present an evening of essay readings on Tuesday at 7:30. “Living, Out Loud: Writers Dish on Love, Sweat, and Fears” will feature readings by Paula Ganzi Licata, Robin Eileen Bernstein, Iyna Bort Caruso, Michael A. Casano, Claudia Gryvatz Copquin, and Heather Dune Macadam. The event is free.

‘Out Loud’ Auditions

   Anyone pursuing a life in books in this digital age has to pause to consider the consequences. An entire generation has come of age learning to question the value of books or not even considering their tactile permanence.

    Still, there are some book experiences that digital facsimiles will never replace and most of those are visual. In the case of the photography books that Harper’s Books specializes in, Harper Levine said photographs are inextricable from that printed form.

Judge or Be Judged

    The eighth annual Crazy Monkey Gallery competition among its member artists will take place at the Amagansett gallery beginning tomorrow.

    Visitors are invited to vote for their favorite art works by secret ballot. Included in the show will be works in painting, drawing, mixed media, collage, photograph, or sculpture, one per each artist.

   When the Sunday afternoon jam proved impractical to continue in the confines of Crossroads Music, in Amagansett Square, it quickly found a warm welcome a half-mile to the east, at St. Michael’s Lutheran Church.

    Richard Barons, the executive director of the East Hampton Historical Society, has been named executive director of the Thomas Moran Trust following a vote in December. Joining him at the trust are new board members and a new chairman who are also with the historical society.

Guild Hall Happenings

    On Saturday at 8 p.m., Guild Hall will present a screening of “The Magistrate” by Arthur Wing Pinero. The National Theatre Live presentation stars John Lithgow as the magistrate and Nancy Carroll as his wife, Agatha.

    The Victorian farce is centered on a deception. Agatha lied about her son’s age as well as her own when she married Posket, the magistrate. But her son’s precocious predilections for alcohol, women, gambling, and smoking threaten to expose the five years she has shaved off their ages.

   Following the student art exhibition, which will run from Feb. 2 to March 3, the Parrish Art Museum has a full schedule of temporary exhibitions lined up for the next two years.

    Guild Hall has announced the recipients of its 28th Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Awards, to be presented on March 4 at a benefit dinner at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

    Those who will be honored are John Alexander for visual arts, Walter Isaacson for literary arts, Nathan Lane for performing arts, and Mickey Straus for leadership and philanthropy. Marshall Brickman will return as master of ceremonies and the presenters will include Ken Auletta, Alec Baldwin, and Jack O’Brien.

   Joan Semmel, a longtime resident of Springs, will have a solo at the Bronx Museum beginning today, with a reception on Saturday.

   “Joan Semmel: A Lucid Eye” will include 27 recent self-portraits in which she explores the process of aging and reveals some of her working methods. A group of four paintings will illustrate how the artist takes pictures of herself in mirrors and then uses the photograph as the basis for the painting.

New Work at Vered

    Vered Gallery in East Hampton will have a show devoted to new work by Hunt Slonem tomorrow through March 11.

    The show will feature 20 paintings of colorful birds, butterflies, and bunnies in Mr. Slonem’s characteristically whimsical and Expressionistic approach.

    Also in the Gallery are works by Willem de Kooning, Arman, Milton Avery, Bert Stern, Man Ray, Perle Fine, Ray Caesar, Ron Agam, Adam Handler, Will Cotton, Steven Klein, Pablo Picasso, and many others. The gallery is open on weekends through the winter.

‘Maria Stuarda’ in HD

    Guild Hall will present The Met: Live in HD’s screening of Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda” on Saturday at 1 p.m. Joyce DiDonato stars as Mary, Queen of Scots, in the first-ever Met production of Donizetti’s dramatic historical opera. Elza van den Heever, a South African soprano, makes her Met debut as Mary’s rival, Queen Elizabeth I, and Matthew Polenzani sings Leicester, the nobleman caught between the dueling monarchs.

   There are some unique and thought-provoking offerings this winter at the Amagansett and John Jermain Libraries and we have a native son to thank for it. Christian Scheider has just made the dead of winter here a bit more interesting.

   Robert Richenburg’s paintings and works on paper from the 1950s and 1960s, during the height of Abstract Expressionism, are the subject of a new show on view in New York at the David Findlay Jr. Gallery on Fifth Avenue. The exhibition includes work that is gestural and full of color and linear movement.

   “The Scottish Play” is the title many people substitute for “Macbeth” when inside the theater, not because they are interested in geography, but because, according to an ancient theatrical superstition, speaking the title aloud in a theater will bring calamity upon the speaker and the theater itself.

    But only good luck was in the air at the Friday night debut of William Shakespeare’s bloody masterpiece, produced by the Round Table Theatre Company and Academy at LTV Studios in Wainscott.

Art in the Sky

    Tomorrow, the Parrish Art Museum will offer a guided telescope viewing and slide lecture on extraterrestrial life. The telescope viewing begins at 4 p.m. and continues through 8, weather permitting, and is offered through the Montauk Observatory, Suffolk Community College, and the Dark Sky Society.

Neoteric Symposium

    From 7 to 11 p.m. tomorrow, Neoteric Fine Art in Amagansett will present two events. First up is the “Neoteric Symposium,” a show-and-tell of multiple presentations by local people on a variety of topics. Based on the popular PechaKucha format (lately at the Parrish Art Museum), the symposium aims to provide a forum for ideas and introduce the people behind them. A listing of presenters is available on the gallery’s Web site.

    Now that the holiday season has left us, those on the South Fork looking for other reasons to get out of the house can take advantage of the return of several winter film and theater programs beginning this week, such as the Bay Street Theatre’s Picture Show.

Eric Meola, whose most famous image is the photograph of Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons on the "Born to Run" album cover, has had a full and varied career. He is now traveling the globe and capturing the "last great places" with his camera.

Saunders’s “Long Now”

    “Christopher Saunders: The Long Now” will open at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in East Hampton on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. “The Long Now” refers to a term used by Brian Eno: “The precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes.” In the painting “The Long Now,” from 2011, three horizontal planes, implying different states of place or time, are merged.

    The Scottish play known to nonsuperstitious Shakespeareans as “Macbeth” will be performed beginning tomorrow at LTV Studios by the Round Table Theatre Company.

    This will be the first full production of the new theater ensemble, which had its inaugural event in October with a reading of “Double Falsehood,” a play with portions attributed to Shakespeare.