Arts

   Is it possible that someone born a century ago could have upended the conventions of painting so much that his work is just as relevant to today’s artists as it was some 65 years ago when it was first painted?

    Few can claim such an impact, but one artist who continues to challenge, confound, and set the benchmark for absolute expressive abstraction well after his death is Springs’s own Jackson Pollock. Whether he is ignored, contemplated, aped, mocked, or appropriated, artists who have followed him have had no choice but to react in some way to his work.

    If Anita Sorel has her way, the lines of people waiting to perform on the stage at the Studio Playhouse at LTV Studios in Wainscott will be as long as the lines to sit in the audience.

    “I want every waitress and every plumber and every fireman to perform,” she said in a recent interview.

    A community theater in East Hampton has been a dream of Ms. Sorel’s for years, and has finally become a reality.

    “I used to say that it’s a shame that we’re so close to the city with so many artistic people that there isn’t more theater here year round.”

Beethoven’s Beloved

    Guild Hall and the Hamptons International Film Festival will present “Immortal Beloved,” a film about Beethoven and his mystery love, to whom he wrote a letter just prior to his death. Alec Baldwin will host and will discuss the film with Bob Balaban after the screening.

    In January 2011, Bonnie Rychlak left the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum where she worked for 30 years to pursue her own artistic endeavors. It would prove to be a very short retirement.

    Ms. Rychlak, who still takes on independent curatorial projects and is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute, was also recruited by LongHouse Reserve to organize this year’s outdoor sculpture exhibition, which became “Diversities of Sculpture/Derivations from Nature.” The exhibit opens on Saturday in conjunction with the reserve’s season opening.

    Many people here on the South Fork may subscribe to the old antiques store aphorism that “the only one interested in what your grandmother had was your granddad,” especially when it comes to “brown furniture,” dark handcrafted pieces with a history of more than 150 years or so.

The Academy at Kramoris

    Romany Kramoris in Sag Harbor will present “The Academy,” a group show, beginning today with a reception on Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m.

    Artists included in the show include Joan Tripp, Nancy Achenbach, Richard Udice, and Pingree Louchheim. The title is meant with jest, referring to a larger self-named group of painters the artists are members of on Long Island. Each has a particular style within the larger genre of Realism. The gallery describes the exhibit as a colorful and happy one.

Mourning Is Broken

Primo Levi Tribute

    The Montauk Library will offer a free presentation of “But When We Started Singing . . .” on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

    Robert Spiotto, the artistic director of community arts programs at Hofstra University, will be the sole performer in this tribute to Primo Levi, an Italian-Jewish author who died in 1987. Levi was a novelist, essayist, and poet who was best known for his recountings of his imprisonment at Auschwitz during World War II. The event will commemorate the 25th anniversary of his death and International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

   On Saturday, the East Hampton Historical Society will present a daylong illustrated seminar on famous and infamous antiques fakes and forgeries with Charles F. Hummel.

   Mr. Hummel, an expert on antiques and American decorative arts, is the author of “With Hammer in Hand: The Dominy Craftsmen of East Hampton.” He has documented the Dominy family as well as the history of East Hampton and is the retired senior director of the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, one of the most important collections of American decorative arts.

   Initially, it might be difficult to reconcile Dan Flavin’s Expressionist tendencies with his use of the quite literally linear form of long, colored fluorescent lightbulbs to express himself for most of his creative life. Yet a new exhibition of his drawings at the Morgan Library demonstrates that his stylistic influences were varied and well outside of the Minimalist milieu with which he is primarily associated.

Therapy in Numbers

    Beginning Saturday, Harper’s Books in East Hampton will present “Group Therapy,” an exhibition of paintings, photographs, and mixed-media works. The artists, who all work on eastern Long Island, include Linda K. Alpern, Mary Ellen Bartley, Philippe Cheng, Peter Dayton, David Diskin, Jameson Ellis, Sunny Khalsa, Laurie Lambrecht, Liliya Lifanova, Steve Miller, Peter Sabbeth, Bastienne Schmidt, Matt Satz, Michael Solomon, Kevin Teare, Ross Watts, and Nick Weber.

   Fred Melamed was 22 in 1978, the first time he played the title role in Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” which he is now reprising in an innovative and daring production directed by Stephen Hamilton at the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall for a limited run next month.

    Mr. Melamed had graduated from Hampshire College the previous summer, where, as a freshman, he’d joined the music department.

Concert for Concerts

    Three of the East End’s most popular local bands will perform at Gurney’s Inn on Sunday from 3 to 7 p.m. in the fourth annual Concert for the Concerts to benefit the Montauk Chamber of Commerce’s free Monday night Concerts on the Green series. 

    Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks, Caroline Doctorow and the Steamrollers, and Nancy Atlas with Johnny Blood will entertain for the cause, with a $10 admission fee. A discounted menu will be available for hungry listeners.

   The story of the building known as the E. and C. Bennett Blacksmith Shop at the South­ampton Historical Museum began and ended with a tree.

    The shop building, complete with a functioning forge, was originally built from local oaks in about 1790, moved to the museum from Hampton Road in the 1970s, and was restored in the 1990s. There it stood until Aug. 28

   Sometimes a play needs a grand vision. Sometimes it needs a minimal touch. But sometimes, it needs both. Josh Perl and Peter-Tolin Baker have brought both to bear on a late Tennessee Williams play “In the Bar of a Toyko Hotel,” which opens next Thursday in Bridgehampton.

   The Parrish Art Museum will celebrate Anne Porter’s life and her contributions to the arts and letters of the East End on Saturday at 3 p.m.

   Ms. Porter, a poet who was a National Book Award finalist, was married to Fairfield Porter, an artist with whom she raised a family on South Main Street in Southampton. She died in October, just shy of her 100th birthday.

Groovy in Springs

    Music and art will merge at Ashawagh Hall this weekend with the second annual presentation of “Art Groove,” an exhibition of work by 14 artists paired with music with a dance beat, including Motown, disco, and hip-hop styles.

   On a temperate spring day last week, works of art from Audrey Flack’s light and airy studio in East Hampton were being gently borne to the Gary Snyder Gallery in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, where they will be on view from next Thursday through May 19. They range from tabletop size to flat-out enormous, and they all showcase Ms. Flack’s passion for the “sacred feminine” — the women heroes of mythology and religious iconography.

Pollock-Krasner Benefit

    Stony Brook University will honor Ed Harris, an actor, writer, and director, at its 2012 Stars of Stony Brook Gala on April 25 at Chelsea Piers in New York City. The event will also honor the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which has issued a $1 million challenge grant to help the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs establish an endowment during this centennial anniversary year of Pollock’s birth.

    Farmer, winemaker, musician, “art worker,” editor, chef, and even artist, were some of the vocations represented last week at the Parrish Art Museum’s second “Lighting Round” presentation.

    Participants were asked to show 20 slides and speak for six minutes on who they are and what makes them tick.

New at the Monkey

    The Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett will feature work by three members of its artists cooperative — Barbara Bilotta, Lance Corey, and Wilhelmina Howe — beginning tomorrow.

    Ms. Bilotta attended the fine arts program at the State University at Stony Brook. An “abstract impressionist,” she said she uses “the flow of colors and their relationship to trigger the imagination.”

From Europa to Heidi

    On Sunday at 2 p.m., Guild Hall will screen in HD the Berliner Philharmoniker’s “Europa Konzert” from Moscow in its North American premiere. The concert will feature Vadim Repin, a violinist, with Sir Simon Rattle conducting. The program will include Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, Bruch’s Concerto for Violin No. 1 (Op. 26), and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A major (Op. 92). Tickets cost $20, $18 for members. Students under 21 are free with identification.

   Purists may sniff at giving up an entire museum show to a single private collector and — in the Parrish Art Museum’s case — putting art on the wall that is from an entirely different region of the country. Yet there is an argument to be made for the “EST-3: Southern California in New York-Los Angeles Art from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection” exhibition, and the museum and its curator have made it well.

New Work at Vered

    “Ray Caesar: Selected Works” will open at the Vered Gallery in East Hampton tomorrow. The exhibition features the artist’s work in Maya, a three-dimensional modeling software used for digital animation effects in film and games.

St. Luke’s Series Ends

    The Music at St. Luke’s series will conclude on Saturday with a solo recital by Daria Rabotkina, a pianist, at 4 p.m. in Hoie Hall at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton.

    The program will be: Robert Schumann’s Humoreske, op. 290, Franz Schubert’s Grand Rondeau for four hands in A Major, D. 951 (featuring William McNally), and Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet — Op. 75.

    Tickets are $20 and free for students 18 and younger.

New Organist

New Amagansett Gallery

    “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” the 18th-century French novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos about aristocratic power games and the lives they affect, has been adapted into every form imaginable. It can boast of at least seven versions on film, including two set in Korea, an opera, a radio series, and even a ballet. But it is the Christopher Hampton stage adaptation that has garnered the most attention in the Western world, first as a successful Broadway production and then as a successful Hollywood film in the 1980s.

Pina and Juliet

    The Parrish Art Museum’s schedule of programs for next week starts on Sunday with a screening of “Pina,” a documentary by Wim Wenders about the choreographer Pina Bausch, and continues with a ballet performance of “Romeo and Juliet.”

   We all should write a thank you note to Robert Wilson for locating his grand experiment in arts sponsorship on the South Fork.