Arts

   The Sag Harbor American Music Festival is now officially an annual event, after the resounding success of the inaugural event last year. Live music will again fill the streets, restaurants, galleries, shops, and historic spots throughout the village beginning on Friday, Sept. 28, and continuing with free shows the next day. The number and variety of musicians and venues have taken a huge jump, with more than 20 musical acts scheduled to perform outside, all with contingency plans should rain overcome shine.

Business of Art Returns

    Jane Martin’s popular four-part seminar, “The Business of Art,” will return this week beginning Monday with “The Professional Artist,” part one of the discussion, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

    The series deals with learning how to operate as a professional artist, offering a primer on consignments, contracts, marketing, invoicing, resale certificates, Web sites, databases, catalogues, crowdfunding, pricing, social media, press coverage, galleries, and studio visits.

“The Long Island Express: Rare Photographs of East Hampton Town After the 1938 Hurricane” will be on view through Oct. 8 at Clinton Academy.

Montauk Music’s Back

    Music for Montauk will return for its 21st season with a concert at the Montauk Library on Saturday at 7 p.m. Orion Weiss and Anna Polonsky, who are pianists, will present a program of works by Schubert, Ravel, Schumann, and others.

    Mr. Weiss has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and several other major orchestras and has received several awards for his work. Locally, he has performed at Pianofest and the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival.

Next for Ille Arts

     Ille Arts, a relatively new gallery just off Amagansett’s Main Street, will open “Raw,” a show of work by four artists, with a reception on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. Taking part in the exhibit are Andrew Guenther, whose paintings, often in almost primary colors or black and white, can evoke either the Abstract Expressionist period or outsider art, and Jose Lerma, whose recent work has been nightmarish pen-and-ink portraits of bewigged faces, some layered with what appears to be cut and restitched fabric, giant heads, and multilayered installations.

   The year 2012 has brought record-setting temperatures, deadly heat waves, freak storms, devastating wildfires, and prolonged droughts. While the scientific community has heretofore been reluctant to tie individual events to global climate change, a consensus is building that these phenomena are in fact manifestations of a warming planet, and harbingers of even more extreme weather events.

   The annual Box Art Auction to benefit East End Hospice will be held at the Ross School’s Center for Well-Being in East Hampton beginning at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday. Arlene Bujese organized the auction of the work of some 75 East End artists who contributed their takes on a plain box — keeping it simple or making rather grand transformations.

    On Friday, Sept. 14, the Watermill Center will celebrate the premiere of “Einstein on the Beach” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a benefit for the arts center.

    In addition to a premiere ticket, guests will be invited to a pre-show reception at 6 p.m. at the Berlyn restaurant, across from BAM, and a post-show reception there at 11:30 p.m. with Robert Wilson.

   Whether it’s the first televised dance steps of Elvis Presley or man’s first steps on the moon, Joe Lauro is the go-to guy for archival film footage.

    His specialty and passion are one-of-a-kind music performances of all genres, and his company, Historic Films in Greenport, boasts over 50,000 hours of news and entertainment footage from 1895 to the present day, pieces of which can be seen daily on television networks, on Broadway, and in museums.

   The tribute exhibition “Mike Kelley: 1954-2012,” organized by Harald Falckenberg at the Watermill Center, is not a retrospective, but through its works and catalog it does contribute a reasonably full measure of a man who, Mr. Falckenberg noted, may have been only .0002 percent finished with his work at the time of his suicide in January.

Bartlett and Sharma

    The Drawing Room in East Hampton will have solo exhibitions by Jennifer Bartlett and Raja Ram Sharma beginning tomorrow. Ms. Bartlett will show 20 paintings on mulberry paper with squares of gold, silver, and platinum leaf. They were inspired by the themes and techniques she used for a ceiling installation in Homan-ji, a Japanese temple, in the 1990s. The artist has used a grid to organize the compositions, which include snapshots of objects she saw in Japan as well as the colored squares. She lives in Amagansett and New York City.

   The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center will present “Artists on Film: Motion and Emotion,” a series organized by Marion Wolberg Weiss, a film historian and art critic, on Fridays through September.

    In exploring how artists used film to communicate movement and expression, Ms. Weiss was inspired by Jackson Pollock and his role as an “action” painter. She will discuss the films after the screenings.

Goodbye Judy

    Tonight brings the last chance to catch the inimitable Judy Garland on the big screen as Guild Hall concludes its Red Carpet Film Series, which this summer was an all-Judy celebration, 75 years after she made her first movie. The film, “Summer Stock,” which co-stars Gene Kelly, is the story of a small-town farmer, down on her luck, whose homestead is invaded by a theatrical troupe invited to stay by her ne’er-do-well sister.

   “The Painting Plays,” a group of short plays by leading playwrights, all inspired by paintings from prominent East End artists, will be given staged readings on Saturday at Guild Hall at 8 p.m. by a stellar group of actors including Blythe Danner, Melissa Errico, Harris Yulin, and Tovah Feldshuh.

    It is a concept close to Ms. Feldshuh’s heart.

    “The goal is to cross-pollinate local artists with writers and actors,” she said on Sunday.

   The East End’s gallery scene recasts itself at such a fierce rate that it’s almost impossible to keep up. Art outgrows its walls; leases run out; business partnerships split up. But nothing seems to stop artists from showing their work here.

   Last Saturday, the lazy late-summer afternoon was punctuated by the sounds of bat hitting ball and ball hitting glove. On the Amagansett School field, a group of men and women were engaged in a spirited but friendly game.

    This first annual meeting — on the diamond, that is — of music industry attorneys lay at the end of a long and winding road shaped by the seismic changes in the music business over a relatively brief period.

Tonal Vision

    Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in East Hampton will shift its usual focus to host Peter Dayton’s “rocknrollshrink” record release on Sunday from 6 to 8 p.m., along with a preview of the exhibition “Andy Warhol: Album Covers.”

   Rory Kennedy has captured a rare intimate view of her family in “Ethel,” a documentary on her mother to be screened at Guild Hall tomorrow night as the conclusion to the SummerDocs series organized by the Hamptons International Film Festival.

   In an event combining art, music, history, pathos, and humor, Audrey Flack will bring her History of Art String Band to Guild Hall on Saturday night to raise money for autism services and to celebrate the life of Jackson Pollock.

Morning Music

    Peter Martin Weiss and Jane Hastay will perform at a musical Shabbat service on Saturday at 10 a.m. at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons on Woods Lane in East Hampton. The couple, who live in Springs, play jazz and standards — Mr. Weiss on stand-up bass and guitar, Ms. Hastay on piano.

‘Green Afternoon’

   Guild Hall has had a lot to offer this season and that continues in the final week of August.   

   “Ideas are nothing without execution‚” words that mean quite a bit to Southampton natives Margaret Braun and Chloe Gifkins, childhood friends who can now see their two-year-old vision morph into reality.

    A relative newcomer to East Hampton, the Halsey Mckay Gallery is committed to advancing the careers of emerging artists — “emerging” might be a stretch, in that Eddie Martinez and Jose Lerma, whose works are currently on view, are precipitously close to becoming established in the contemporary art world.

    The gallery strives for interesting pairings. Their shows feature artists who are not an obvious match on the surface, yet may share a particular aesthetic or a perspective that is highlighted and investigated in works that are juxtaposed.

    Mike Solomon will present “Exquisite Corpse.2: The Surfboard as Body” an exhibit and silent auction of artists' surfboards he organized to benefit three nonprofit organizations. The show will be presented at Neoteric Fine Art in Amagansett on Saturday.

    The theme of the show, “surfboard as body,” features surfboards transformed by artists such as Scott Bluedorn, Matisse Patterson, Bubba Charron, Michael Rosch, Peter Dayton, Mathiew Satz, Michael Halsband, Peter Spacek, and many others.

Sneak View of Box Art

    This year’s Box Art Auction, which benefits East End Hospice, will be held on Sept. 8. For years, dozens of East End artists have taken a basic box and used their creative vision to transform it into a singular personal expression.

    This year, the auction organizers will hold a preview of the boxes on Wednesday and next Thursday at Hoie Hall in St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton. A free reception with the artists will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. on Wednesday. Regular viewing hours for the preview will be from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

   It has been a good summer for the silly in the Village of East Hampton. First, Guild Hall gave us theater of the absurd with the Lonny Price-directed “Luv,” and now the Mulford Repertory Theatre gives us theater of the ridiculous with a revival of Charles Ludlam’s Off Broadway hit, “The Mystery of Irma Vep: A Penny Dreadful.”

   An art exhibit opened on Saturday night. A few dozen people hovered around the room as they chatted about how great life is and how much the art speaks to them while wine and hors d’oeuvres were passed.

   This sort of thing happens all the time, right? True. But what made this event unusual was the setting: a hair salon.

Open Auditions

    Center Stage at the Southampton Cultural Center will hold open auditions Wednesday and next Thursday at 6 p.m. for its forthcoming production of “Inherit the Wind.” The play will be performed at the Levitas Center for the Arts.

Breuer at Bay Street

    The comedian Jim Breuer, who’s been seen on “Saturday Night Live” and in a number of movies, will return to the Comedy Club at Bay Street Theatre on Aug. 27 in a one-man show.  Tickets are $67, $60 for members.

Young Musicians

   Synchronized swimmers from Eau La La Entertainment performed on Saturday night at an East Hampton Library Authors Night dinner to honor Lynn Sherr, the author of “Swim: Why We Love the Water.” The dinner was hosted by Ken Lipper at his East Hampton house.