Arts

It is difficult to believe that we observe the centennial of Saul Steinberg’s birth this year. Born at the very start of World War I, he is an artist who has transcended his era in quieter and yet more influential ways than many of his peers whose centenaries we have also recently marked.

To hear Anne Seelbach talk about the painting, stencils, and bas-relief collages she’s been doing recently — “to bring awareness of the effects of industrial and chemical pollution on the marine environment” — one might easily conclude that she has become political, but it is not the case. “I am first an artist, not an activist,” she said at her Sag Harbor studio, adding, however, that “it is also true that I hope to bring awareness to nature as I see it.”

The minimal world of Mary Ellen Bartley has been in evidence in group and solo shows around the country and closer to home at the Drawing Room in East Hampton and the Parrish Art Museum, but her first New York City solo exhibition featuring her “Paperbacks” series at Yancey Richardson Gallery is something of an event.

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor will kick off Columbus Day weekend on Friday, Oct. 10, at 8 p.m., when Judy Carmichael and her quartet will perform music from “I Love Being Here With You,” her first all-vocal CD. One of the world’s leading interpreters of stride piano, Ms. Carmichael will sing standards by Peggy Lee, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and others from the Great American Songbook. Tickets are $45 for side seating, $55 for center, while $75 includes admission to an after-party with the artist.

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will open its Salon Series of classical piano concerts with the Lysander Piano Trio on Friday, Oct. 10, at 6 p.m. Due to the past popularity of the series, a second performance by the trio will take place on Oct. 11 at 2 p.m. Each concert will be followed by an opportunity to meet the artists.

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor will hold an audition for children 8 to 12 years old for its November production of “To Kill a Mockingbird” on Monday.

The audition for the Literature Live! production, directed by Joe Minutillo, will take place from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Performers of all ethnic and racial backgrounds living within 50 miles of Sag Harbor have been encouraged to attend. Performance dates are Nov. 5 through

The Museum of Modern Art will present a survey of Robert Gober’s career, spanning four decades, beginning on Saturday.

The artist, who has had a house in Peconic since 1990, is known for his enigmatic sculptures of everyday objects with a twist, large installations, and drawings and prints. The work is often minimal but charged with narrative and allusions to religion, politics, and sexuality.

Crazy Monkey in Transit

    The Crazy Monkey Gallery, located in Amagansett for 14 years, is in the process of relocating to a larger space on Main Street in Bridgehampton.

New at Halsey Mckay

The John Drew Theater Lab will present a free reading of “Eastern Standard,” a play by Richard Greenberg, on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. Peter Connolly will direct the production, with a cast of Chloe Dirksen, Joanna Howard, Kate Mueth, Christian Scheider, Tristan Vaughan, and Mr. Connolly.

Christian McBride and Friends will headline the fourth annual Sag Harbor American Music Festival with a concert and fund-raiser at the Old Whalers Church Friday at 8 p.m.

The Southampton African American Museum will present Raise Your Voice, a four-day festival of films, jazz, and spoken word, beginning next Thursday at 6 p.m. with a screening of “Fruitvale Station” at the Southampton Arts Center.

A program of spoken word and jazz, including performances by Charles Certain and his Certain Moves Jazz Band and the Grammy Award-winning hip-hop artist J. Ivy, will take place Friday, Oct. 3, at 7 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center.

Listen, you can sit in your dull Long Island home afraid of the next terrorist strike, or you can get out and engage the world. How about Florence?

Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature is back at it with another writers workshop in Italy, this one from Jan. 13 to 24. The focus in Florence will be on fiction with Susan Scarf Merrell. The author of a new novel, “Shirley,” about that master of the macabre Shirley Jackson, Ms. Merrell is also the fiction editor of The Southampton Review.

The Bach & Forth Chamber Ensemble will launch its third season of performances on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church. Members of the group are Thomas Bohlert (organ), Terry Keevil (oboe), Linda Di Martino Wetherill (flute), Rebecca Perea (cello), and Trudy Craney (soprano).

Every year there are at least one or two books that seek to capitalize on the “Hamptons style” whether it be food, art, architecture, environs, lifestyle, or decor. They can often be expensive and hollow affairs, produced chiefly for last-minute purchases at BookHampton for a host or hostess gift.

Kabakovs on Film

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will present “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here,” Amei Wallach’s acclaimed documentary about the two celebrated Russian émigré artists who now live on the North Fork, tomorrow at 6 p.m. Ms. Wallach and Ms. Kabakov will answer questions after the screening.

Guild Hall will present “The Red Orchestra,” a 2003 documentary about the resistance group that fought against the Third Reich within Germany from 1933 to 1942, on Saturday at 8 p.m. Harris Yulin, an actor with an extensive stage and screen resumé and a home in Bridgehampton, will introduce the film. A discussion will follow with Stefan Roloff, the film’s director and son of one of the group’s survivors.

The Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival will present a screening of “Anita: Speaking Truth to Power” on Saturday at 4 p.m. at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor.

The subject of the 77-minute documentary, directed by Freida Lee Mock, is Anita Hill, an attorney and law professor who in 1991 was thrust onto the world stage when she testified before the Senate during its confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

This past year, some of recent history’s more creative and flamboyant spirits have discovered and interacted with an eccentric and eclectic monument to the artistic pursuits of one of their own. That the artist was Barney Rosset, known primarily for his championing of literature and film, surprised most. But the artifact he created stunned all.

What they saw was a 12-by-22-foot wall-spanning mural, as ambitious as it is idiosyncratic, and a true emblem of the 20th century, even though it was conceived during the 21st.

It could not have been easy to be an American artist at the turn of the 20th century and the years to follow.

Playing catch-up with the revolutionary movements of European modern art must have been discouraging at the very least to the young artists who tried. Those who did may have been dismissed by unsympathetic audiences or shunned entirely by fellow artists for not pursuing a more nativist vision.

When Tracey Jackson and Paul Williams first met in the 1980s, the last thing either of them thought was that they might join up to address addictive behavior in a self-help recovery book.

For one thing, the popular musician and composer was high, very, very high. “I was at a party in Robert Mitchum’s house doing lines with Mr. Mitchum in his bedroom.” Ms. Jackson came in and complimented Mr. Williams on a recent film. His impaired retort was such that he said, “She went into the bedroom a fan of Paul Williams and came out a fan of Neil Diamond.”

Since its founding 22 years ago, the Hamptons International Film Festival has featured one-on-one conversations conducted by film journalists and magazine editors with actors, directors, and other industry notables. Joel Schumacher and Hilary Swank will be among this year’s guests for the “A Conversation With . . .” programs.

Mr. Schumacher will speak at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Oct. 11 at 11 a.m., when Jess Cagle, editorial director of People and Entertainment Weekly, will present him with the Golden Starfish Lifetime Achievement in Directing Award.

Solow at Whaling Museum

The Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum will open “City Square/Piazza,” an installation by Peter Solow, with a reception Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view through Oct. 13.

Mr. Solow, who lives in Sag Harbor, had his first solo show in New York City at the age of 29. In a review, John Russell, art critic of The New York Times, called him “someone to watch.”

Speaking of horticulture, the Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack will close its garden season with a party on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. The opportunity to enjoy a glass of wine and a stroll around the garden will be free for members, $40 for nonmembers. Guests can R.S.V.P. to [email protected].

Drew Petersen, an award-winning classical pianist, will perform a free concert at the Montauk Library on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. The program will include works by Schumann and Brahms.

The Grammy-nominated Eroica Trio will premiere a new work by Bruce Wolosoff, a Shelter Island composer, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. Titled “The Loom,” the piece was inspired by the paintings of Eric Fischl, who collaborated closely on the project and created a new painting inspired by Mr. Wolosoff’s music. Trios by Beethoven and Smetana will also be on the program.

Three prizewinning Latin American films will be shown at the 11th OLA Film Festival this weekend at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. Founded by Isabel Sepulveda and presented by the Organizacion Latino-Americana of Eastern Long Island, the festival will kick off tomorrow at 5:30 p.m. with “Pescador,” an Ecuadorean film, which will be followed at 7 p.m. by a performance by Mambo Loco on the museum’s terrace.

Teri Dunn Chace, a writer, editor, and blogger whose work has appeared in major gardening and outdoor living publications, will deliver an illustrated lecture for the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons, “Seeing Flowers: Discover the Hidden Life of Flowers,” on Sunday at 2 p.m.

Ms. Chace’s book of the same name, published last year, includes lyrical and illuminating essays, observations, and horticultural lore from the author, and 343 photographs by Robert Llewellyn, a noted macro-photographer.

Walk my way, and a thousand violins begin to play, or it might be the sound of your hello, that music I hear, I get misty, the moment you’re near.

One can almost hear the deeply romantic lyrics as the musician Pat DeRosa plays “Misty,” on a Selmer Mark VI saxophone, in his house in Montauk. Airy, breathy like the human voice, the melody of Errol Garner’s standard is awash in vibrato as it races down the wire and into a telephone receiver, to be heard several miles to the west.

The John Drew Theater Lab will present a free staged reading of “Viva Los Bastarditos,” a new musical by Jake Oliver, Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. The production will be directed by Ethan McSweeny, a Tony Award nominee, and will star Blake DeLong and Alex Morf.

Set in a fictional land known as West Massachusetts, the play pits two villainous landlords against Los Bastarditos, three rock stars who unite to fight the would-be dictators and their army of rent collectors. The play draws upon and repurposes golden-age musicals, vaudeville, bedroom farce, and B-movie westerns.

Emily Cheng at Ille

Ille Arts in Amagansett will present an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Emily Cheng from Saturday through Sept. 30, with an opening reception Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. Ms. Cheng draws upon the world’s cultural history for images and emblems, sometimes only fragments, which are transformed and recombined, in the artist’s words, “to service an entirely different purpose and context.”