Arts

   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.

   “Non-matriculated” is the operative mouthful of a word as relates to a trio of graduate-level workshops in writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton this spring. Some quick details: The courses run weekly from Jan. 28 to May 22 and cost about $1,800. The deadline to apply is Saturday.

   The courses: Ursula Hegi is offering Contemporary Literature by Immigrant Writers. Ms. Hegi, the author of 12 books, is now editing an anthology of just this type of fiction, “Second Voices.”

‘Les Troyens’

    Guild Hall will screen the Met: Live in HD’s presentation of “Les Troyens,” an opera by Berlioz based on Virgil’s “Aeneid,” on Saturday at noon. Fabio Luisi will conduct. The production stars Marcello Giordani as Aeneas, Deborah Voigt as Cassandra, and Susan Graham as Dido.

    The five-act epic has a running time of 300 minutes, with two intermissions. It is based on Francesca Zambello’s 2003 production, receiving its first Met revival this season. Joyce DiDonato will host the transmission and conduct backstage interviews with the stars.

Chrysalis Gallery Opening

    Chrysalis Gallery in Southampton Village will present “Color Fields,” featuring the work of Joe Bucci, this weekend. On Saturday and Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. the exhibit will be complemented by poetry readings and refreshments. Guests have been encouraged to wear their favorite color and join in the poetry readings related to color.

Syd Solomon at Spanierman

Festival Passes

    The Hamptons International Film Festival is offering its founders passes at reduced rates through the end of the year. The passes, which provide priority access to screenings, conversations, and other festival events are now $1,250, a 25 percent discount off this year’s rates.

East End Women Artists

In New Book

    “Danger! Women Artists at Work,” a new book by Debra N. Mancoff and published by Merrill, features Lee Krasner, Judy Chicago, Cindy Sherman, and Elizabeth Peyton, who have all lived and worked at one time on the East End, or still do.

   The first thing you notice is the hair. Grace Coddington’s signature vermilion mane is full and fluffy, somewhat triangular, parted in the middle, and held back on one side by a comb.

Pollock-Krasner House

Receives Grant

    The Helen and Claus Hoie Charitable Foundation of East Hampton has given the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center a $14,700 grant, which the center will use for educational purposes.

    The grant will allow the center to purchase 20 mini digital audio units to offer tours in several languages to visitors to the house and site. The same system is used in museums and historic sites all over the globe.

   Can theater survive in a world of tweeting and Facebook, iPads and PlayStations, and films in 3D that cost more to make than some nations’ gross domestic product? If it is as simple, good, and devastatingly truthful as “What Rhymes with America,” the brilliant new play at Manhattan's Atlantic Theater Company by Melissa James Gibson, theater will not only survive, it will thrive.