Arts

    “Downton Abbey” fans who can’t wait for the Jan. 5 return of the PBS Masterpiece Classic can visit the Southampton Historical Museum for a taste of the era, starting on Saturday. “Downton Abbey Style In Southampton: 1900 to 1920” explores the village’s Gilded Age with an installation of women’s clothing, period furniture, dinnerware, vintage photographs, and more.

    With a fully reserved first performance of the “Water’s Edge Radio Hour” at Wolffer Estate Winery on Saturday, clearly an audience exists for a home-grown version of “A Prairie Home Companion,” the popular public radio staple.

    According to its Web site, “A Prairie Home Companion” had an initial live audience of 12 people. The show now has 4 million listeners. It remains to be seen whether “Water’s Edge Radio Hour” catches on to the same extent, but the enthusiasm is there, both in the current sold-out show and a well-received test performance in April.

    The Parrish Art Museum’s “Artists Choose Artists” exhibition will open on Sunday, as part of the museum’s weekend-long celebration of its first anniversary in Water Mill.

    Awadagin Pratt, a classical pianist who has been playing internationally for over 20 years, will perform on Saturday at 7 p.m. as part of the 10th-anniversary celebration of Southampton Cultural Center’s Rising Stars Piano Series.

    Marking the one-year anniversary of its Water Mill location, the Parrish Art Museum will have a weekend celebration for the community on Saturday and Sunday. Since last November, the museum has hosted 65,000 visitors and wants to encourage more through its temporary exhibitions, periodic reinstallations of the permanent collection, and regular concerts and special events.

    Dance Heginbotham, a performance group now in residence at the Watermill Center, will open its rehearsal process to show “Fly By Wire,” a work in progress set to the music of the American composer Tyondai Braxton.

    The performance group, which is devoted to the dance and theatrical work of John Heginbotham, a Brooklyn-based choreographer and performer, features highly structured, technically rigorous, and theatrical choreography, often set to the music of contemporary composers.

    This year’s Black Film Festival opens tonight at 6:30 with a screening of “The Central Park Five,” a 119-minute documentary by Ken Burns, David McMahon, and Sarah Burns about the five young black and Latino men convicted of raping a jogger in Central Park in 1989 and exonerated 13 years later.

    The East Hampton Library is offering a free four-session workshop called “Meandering in the Mind of Vladimir Nabokov,” beginning next Thursday. The 5:30 to 7 p.m. workshop, conducted by Kara Westerman, a writer and editor, will focus on Nabokov’s “Lolita,” considering language, point of view, and the book’s transition from text to film.

    The third session will feature a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation. Those interested in participating may sign up at the adult reference desk or by calling the library.

    A screening of “Ocean Keeper,” a documentary about the Amagansett Life-Saving Station, will be held at LTV Studios in Wainscott tomorrow at 6 p.m. Produced and directed by Eileen Olivieri Torpey, the film blends archival and contemporary footage to detail the station’s 110-year history, during which it was moved away from and back to its location on Atlantic Avenue.

From East Hampton to Paris

    East Hampton will be represented at Paris Photo 2013, an art fair held at the Grand Palais from next Thursday to Nov. 17 that hosts 136 galleries and 28 publishers specializing in photography books. Harper’s Books will be exhibiting for its ninth year, bringing more than 30 books and photo albums, including several albums from the Vietnam War, as well as a deluxe edition of its own publication, “Yea Yea Yea” by Stuart Sutcliffe and Richard Prince.

    Lois Bender, an artist and educator, will conduct a watercolor workshop from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Nov. 16 at Bridge Gardens, 36 Mitchell Lane, Bridgehampton. The class, which will focus on fall foliage and holiday floral bouquet, is open to beginners and experienced artists. Students may bring their own art supplies or purchase them from Ms. Bender. The class is $45 plus materials, and prepaid registration is required.

    Debra McCall will discuss her reconstruction of the 1920s Bauhaus dances of Oskar Schlemmer, explain the philosophy and work of Bauhaus artists, and screen a film of her reconstructions on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m., at the Watermill Center.

    The Bauhaus, a school of art, crafts, and technology founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. Its faculty included Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, and Wassily Kandinsky.

     Neo-Political Cowgirls, a dance theater company dedicated to works that explore the female voice, is presenting a dance and choreography workshop titled Be a Cowgirl for a Day, on Nov. 9, from 12 to 4 p.m., at Guild Hall.

    Participants will create, design, and direct a personalized dance theater piece, telling their stories through gesture, movement, and text put to music. Dance experience is not a requirement for the workshop, which costs $40.

    Bay Street Theatre’s Literature Live! series will present “The Diary of Anne Frank” from Friday, Nov. 8, through Nov. 26. The play, written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, is an adaptation from the book about eight people hiding from the Nazis during World War II. It won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best play in 1956. The Bay Street production will be directed by Joe Minutillo and is suggested for ages 13 and up. Tickets are $12 for students and $25 for adults, with special pricing for schools and other groups.

    The American premiere of “Lost Childhood,” a concert opera based on the award-winning memoir of Dr. Yehuda Nir, will be performed by the National Philharmonic on Nov. 9 at 8 p.m. at the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, Md.

    Dr. Nir, who has a house in Springs, is a Holocaust survivor whose father was killed by German soldiers in 1941. His memoir details his survival, along with his mother and sister, and their return to Poland in 1945.

    The Friends of the Montauk Library movie series begins next Thursday at 7 p.m. with “The Way, Way Back,” a coming-of-age story about a 14-year-old boy’s summer vacation with his mother and her overbearing boyfriend. Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, and Liam James star in the film, which the Philadelphia Inquirer called “sly, richly modulated, emotionally engaging, and brutally honest.”

    A search, via its Web site, of the John Jermain Memorial Library’s catalog will yield a wealth of media, from literature to periodicals to DVDs.

    A search of the Sag Harbor library’s Web site will also reveal a collection, now numbering approximately 100, of CDs produced by local artists. Recently added titles include “Go West” by Inda Eaton, “Time Bomb Love” by the Glazzies, “Smoke and Mirrors” by Joe Delia and Thieves, and a CD compilation of live recordings of the Thursday Night Live Band from the weekly jam sessions at Bay Burger, also in Sag Harbor.

    Autumn seems to be film festival season on the South Fork. This weekend, the World Peace Initiative Hamptons debuts at Guild Hall. As a satellite of Artisan Festival International, its mission is to promote peace and cultural diversity by showcasing both the work of artists and over 25 films from around the globe. The community has been invited to attend along with international guests including environmental engineers, diplomats for peace, filmmakers, fine artists, and fashion designers.

    The Hampton Theatre Company, which has been bringing drama to the people since the mid-’80s, opened its 2013-14 season last week with Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities,” a meaty choice and hopefully the beginning of a winning season for the Quogue group.

Abstraction at Ashawagh

     “Life in the Abstract,” a group show of paintings by John Haubrich, Fulvio Massi, Barbara Groot, and Dru Frederick, will be on view tomorrow through Sunday at Ashawagh Hall in Springs. Ms. Groot, who organized the exhibition, has pointed out that all four artists have design backgrounds — Mr. Haubrich as an art director, Mr. Massi as an architect, Ms. Frederick as an art restorer, and Ms. Groot as a textile designer. “Elements of mass, geometry, line, color, and balance are clearly informed by each artist’s background,” according to Ms. Groot.

    The first WPPB Harvest Costume Ball and Art Auction will be held Saturday from 8 to 11 p.m. at the South Street Gallery in Greenport. Organized by Joyce deCordova, Alex Ferrone, and Amy Worth, the event will benefit 88.3 FM Peconic Public Broadcasting. The evening will include music from a D.J., dancing, hors d’oeuvres from Noah’s Restaurant, wines from Lieb Cellars, and a silent art auction with works by more than 40 artists selected by Arlene Bujese, curator at the Southampton Cultural Center.

    Artists’ books have taken many forms. The ’70s were a sort of golden age, when boundaries between mediums had dissolved and so many artists were creating books and other ephemera that Martha Wilson founded Franklin Furnace in Tribeca as a repository for such work. In 1993, the Museum of Modern Art purchased the Furnace’s collection, which had become the largest of its kind in the United States.

     “Music, Milestones, and Remembrances,” a concert at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church, will celebrate the rebuilding of the church’s Steinway piano, the 50th anniversary of the Austin pipe organ in the sanctuary, and present reflections on the church’s history on Saturday at 7 p.m.

Miller at Four Seasons

    Steve Miller, an artist who divides his time between New York City and a renovated potato barn in Wainscott, created an installation at the Four Seasons one night last week. The “one-night stand with Philip Johnson,” the architect who designed the restaurant, consisted of work from his series about the Amazon entitled “Health of the Planet.”

    The Parrish Art Museum’s Salon Series of classical music concerts continues tomorrow at 6 p.m. with a performance by Inna Faliks, a pianist. Her program will include works by Chopin, Schumann, and Zhurbin.

    Guild Hall will open two exhibitions this week to inaugurate the museum’s fall season, each lively and provocative in its own way. In one gallery, Thomas Moran’s stylistic legacy and his preoccupation with European art movements will be examined in “Tracing Moran’s Romanticism and Symbolism.” In the other, Christa Maiwald will offer “Short Stories and Other Embroideries.” Ms. Maiwald was the winner of the 2011 members exhibition.

     “Aging Magician,” a new multimedia theater work about the journey of an elderly man to a Coney Island magic show, will be presented at the Watermill Center on Saturday at 4 p.m. With music composed by Paola Prestini, libretto and performance by Rinde Eckert, and design and direction by Julian Crouch, the production combines music, theater, puppetry, instrument making, and scenic design.

    The Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue opens its 29th season tonight at 7 with Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities,” a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and winner of the Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding new Off Broadway play.

    Capt. Dan King, a former president of the East Hampton Town Baymen’s Association and a former town trustee, and Marsha King, his wife, have begun a Kickstarter.com campaign in support of a historical novel they are putting together, “A Fine Day for Fishing,” documenting “the death of a centuries-old way of life played out on a sandy beach,” according to a release. That is, “the ban on hauling a seine to catch striped bass.”

    Scott Schwartz, Bay Street Theatre’s new artistic director, was given a welcome party, hosted by Bonnie Comley and Stewart Lane, at a private club in New York City last Thursday. The event was organized by the veteran producers to celebrate Mr. Schwartz’s appointment and to introduce him to Bay Street Theatre patrons and members of the Broadway theater community. Jeff Blumenkrantz, an actor and Tony-nominated composer and lyricist, performed two original songs.