Arts

On the morning of the 16th, a mentally unstable student named Seung-Hui Cho strode through the campus armed with a handgun and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

   The Playhouse Project, a program that provides master classes for high school music students on the South Fork and a chance for award winners to play with  professionals, is offering an open jazz workshop tomorrow and Saturday, and an "all star" concert on Saturday evening.

More and more I think it is the effort of the pruner that makes the garden.

While the focus of a film festival might be its opening, centerpiece, and closing films, four days is a long time to fill with programming.

    By every indication, it would appear that Steve Haweeli always had a fulfilling life and career. Those who follow his comings and goings on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and foursquare envy even his table-hopping and ocean-plunging posts. He’s somewhat tightly wound, but his easy smile is evidence of a busy man who is obviously having a very good time.

Susan D’Alessio’s painting “Pine on Dune” will be part of “Plein Air Peconic VI” at Ashawagh Hall this weekend.

Plein Democracy

    Alyce Peifer, of the Wednesday Group of plein-air painters, has organized a show of its members’ work that will be at Ashawagh Hall in Springs tomorrow through Sunday. The Wednesday Group is about a dozen artists who live and work on the East End, often meeting together in the outdoors with their easels in locations that are apparently selected by a vote among those planning to attend.

    Tickets will go on sale Friday for the 19th Hamptons International Film Festival and once again film aficionados will wonder how and where they will ever fit in everything they want to see, as the screenings and events will expand from their base in East Hampton to include almost every village or hamlet that has a theater from Montauk to Westhampton, including Sag Harbor and Southampton, and even Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. The festival runs Oct. 13 to 17.

Abstract Expressionism fans and admirers of Willem de Kooning have a chance to see the first full-scale retrospective of his work in some three decades, which opened on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. The show, which marks the first time an exhibit has taken up an entire floor of MoMA’s new building, contains close to 200 works spanning about 70 years.

Click to see more images.

    “Of Mice and Men,” a theater masterpiece by John Steinbeck — the Nobel Prize-winning writer who wended his way from Northern California eventually to make his home in Sag Harbor — opened last Thursday at the Levitas Center for the Arts at the Southampton Cultural Center.

    This seminal work, set against the backdrop of post-Depression-era California, tells the now archetypal tale of two transient workers, George and Lennie: George, the small, quick-thinking one, and Lennie, with the mind of a child and the physical strength that both helps and hinders his every move.

Jakob’s Garden Notes

    Through Oct. 31, the Drawing Room in East Hampton is showing “Robert Jakob: Garden Notes,” paintings on paper of flowers he has planted in his Springs garden over the past three decades. The work is naturalistic yet gestural in its evocation of poppies, salvia, fennel, and daylilies.

    It was a journey of thousands of miles and thousands of dollars, but two pieces weighing more than two tons each, stenciled by the English artist Banksy in the Palestinian West Bank, are now on view in Southampton. While more than 2,000 people have seen them in their new location, not everyone is happy about it, including the artist’s representatives.

    The Hamptons Black International Film Festival opens today in Manhattan with a premiere of “Obama’s Irish Roots,” a documentary about the President as he traces his Irish ancestry, produced and directed by Gabriel Murray. The festival will continue at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor over the weekend, showcasing films that explore the African Diaspora, with a focus on countries such as Brazil, Burkina Faso, and South Africa. 

    If it seems as though there are a lot of opportunities to bid on art at events this year, it could very well be. There is a long history of commissioning East End artists to contribute works to charitable endeavors, but this year established benefits have been revitalized and newer events that have not had such components have adopted them.

Tracy Davis at the Eagle

    The Golden Eagle art supply shop in East Hampton is showing work by Tracy Davis this month. Ms. Davis is a writer as well as an artist; her novel “My Husband Ran Off With the Nanny and God Do I Miss Her” was published in 2009.

Refunds for people who bought tickets to the Music to Know concert, an August festival that was canceled a week before performers such as Vampire Weekend and Bright Eyes were to take a temporary stage at East Hampton Airport, have largely been completed, Chris Jones, an organizer of the event, reported last week.

A minimum of 5,500 tickets would have had to have been sold for the event to break even. Of the 2,706 that were purchased, he said, only a handful of refunds remain outstanding.

    Midday and lovely, the 26th of August, well before the eve of the storm, a day and more before its brunt. Fell Irene, Irene most foul, Irene so lovely a name to be so affixed and hence besmirched. All of the other “I”s I can rummage up are equally fine, save, I suppose, Irma, which doesn’t sound like a name at all: Ivy, Ilene, Iphegenia, Ilsa, Ida, Ilka, Imogen. It would be a shame to abuse them by attaching them to a weather event brooding with the direct of consequences.

Despite the jaded ho-hum reaction many bad boys and girls of appropriation garner these days, it appears to be one of the most consistently marketable veins of contemporary art. Collectors snapping up the work might like the familiarity of the images that are being regenerated while patting themselves on the back for buying something still considered subversive.

    As familiar as John Jonas Gruen’s scenes from the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, seem on the walls of the education center at Guild Hall, there is something Old World and alien about them.

Art for Animals

    The Richard Demato Gallery in Sag Harbor will open “Creatures Real and Imaginative” to benefit the Southampton Animal Shelter on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. The works are by the gallery’s regular artists, such as Harriet Sawyer, Kevin Sloan, and Devorah Jacoby, and some were created specifically for this exhibit. Ten percent of gross sales will benefit the Southampton Animal Shelter Foundation.

The versatile actor of stage, film, and television said he would aim to keep things flexible for his Sunday night show at Guild Hall. "I'm always hesitant to give out a set list. I have a great three-piece band and a music director. . . . I'll do some musical theater, tipping my hat to different shows I've been in."

    Despite what many people assume, the artists who practice on the East End still make up a small community; it is just spread out a bit. Nonetheless, it took a couple of outsiders, coming from Texas, no less, to remind us all.

It’s one of those endings, sad but understandable, that have become all too familiar among older artists and writers in East Hampton. After several decades of active involvement in the arts community of Springs, Jean Hoffmann is leaving East Hampton for Manhattan.

    She may be packing up most of her belongings, but she hopes to leave something precious behind. On Saturday, Ms. Hoffmann, the widow of the painter and printmaker Arnold Hoffmann Jr., will hold a studio sale of a large part of his work.

It’s not every actor who has over 100,000 fans on his Facebook page. Or, come to think of it, a Facebook fan page dedicated solely to his eyebrows. 

            Zachary Quinto — best known for his work as the uber-villain (though possibly redeemed) Sylar on “Heroes” and for his role as Spock in 2009’s “Star Trek” — will play Clifford Glimmer at Guild Hall in Warren Leight’s Tony Award-winning play, “Side Man,” on Sunday at 7 p.m.

    Andrea Martin’s self-proclaimed “hybrid grab-bag” of comedy awaits audiences at the American premiere of her one-woman show, “Final Days! Everything Must Go!” on Monday at 8 p.m. at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor.

    Guild Hall will celebrate its 80th birthday on Saturday at 8 p.m. with “A Night of Stars,” a roster of well-known performers from stage, screen, and concert halls.

    Elaine Stritch, Blythe Danner, Eli Wallach, Larry Pine, Jake LaMotta, Melissa Errico, Anna Bergman, Tovah Feldshuh, and others will take the stage to perform works by Terrence McNally and new material from Jules Feiffer, Marsha Norman, and Joe Pintauro. Tickets range from $50 to $125.

    The show continues an all-star tradition established at Guild Hall’s 50th and 75th anniversaries.

Ramiro Returns

    After four years, Ramiro, a classically trained painter, has returned with a new show of his works at the Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor. A reception will take place on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    Yale University’s  Whiffenpoofs will be in town tomorrow at 4 p.m. to sing at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. Tickets are $25, $15 for students and children.  

     Every year, 14 seniors at Yale are chosen for the Whiffs, which has been all-male since it was founded in 1909. The group began as a senior quartet that met for weekly concerts at Mory’s Temple Bar in New Haven.

    Guild Hall’s Red Carpet Film Series is welcoming one of its own next Thursday with the presentation of the film “The Art of Getting By” by Gavin Wiesen. Not only was the script written in East Hampton, but the writer and director also chose the films for the 2008 to 2010 summer series.

     If the title sounds familiar, it is because the film had a limited release in June, garnering positive reviews. It was also a selection of this year’s Sundance Festival, although under another title, “Homework.”