Arts

    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. 

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.

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.

    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.

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.

    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.

    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.

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."

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.

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.

    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.

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.

    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.

    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.”

Pollock’s Politics

    Michael Leja will discuss Jackson Pollock’s political views on Sunday at the Fireplace Project, a gallery space across Springs-Fireplace  Road from the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs.

    The illustrated lecture, “The Pollock Brothers and the Politics of Art in the 1930s,” is based on Mr. Leja’s recent book about letters written by and to family members from 1927 to 1947. Three of five Pollock brothers became artists during the Depression years.

    A concert reading of “Giovanni the Fearless,” a new musical by the composer Mira J. Spektor and the lyricist Carolyn Balducci based on a classic Italian folk tale, will take place at the Montauk Library on Saturday evening at 7:30.

    “I bought my car based on what I could fit into it,” Cynthia Knott said recently at her Springs studio, gesturing at her all-terrain vehicle. “That way I can go on the beach and get out of the way of hurricanes.”

    An unlikely hero, Josh Grisetti has a face like a question mark. His raised eyebrows and nose are the curve and his often agape mouth forms the dot at its base. As the protagonist of “Enter Laughing,” he can mold that face like putty, looking doltish or debonair in the span of a second.

    There’s such a dizzying number of things going on at Guild Hall over the next eight days that it’s hard to know where to begin.

    On Friday, Aug. 26, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick will appear along with Mario Cantone, Joy Behar, Scott Adsit, Tovah Feldshuh, Eugene Pack, and Dayle Reyfel in “Celebrity Autobiography: In Their Own Words” at 7 and 9 p.m.

    Music by three composers was linked together by a common theme at a Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival concert on Sunday.

    Called “Historic Firsts,” the program, at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, consisted of Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G Minor, considered the first major piece written for the combination of piano and three strings; Kenji Bunch’s “Changes of Phase” for woodwind quintet, which was commissioned by the festival and premiered in 1999, and Louis Spohr’s Nonet in F, the first-ever work to call itself a nonet.

    And you be wise, alert for inconsistencies and tolerant of them and of all other caprices of growth, you will find that the garden at its core is inexhaustible and sparks off by day and by night curious independent tangents, little trills and flourishes that are boundless in their possibilities and endless in their ability to woo, cajole, and astonish. The sunflower on the southeast corner of the Inner (formerly Secret) Garden, for example. I didn’t plant it.

Springs Invitational at 44

    The Springs Improvement Society Art Committee’s invitational exhibit will open this week with two events. The first, this evening from 4 to 7, is a preview benefit to honor the contributions to the society by Ernestine Lassaw, Jean Hoffmann, and Abby Abrams, with a $25 donation collected at the door. Also, art sales during the three-week show will benefit the society, Ashawagh Hall, and the society’s scholarships. The regular opening reception will be held tomorrow from 4 to 7 p.m.

    It’s one thing to play the music of the Allman Brothers, but quite another to have a member of the legendary Southern rock ensemble sit in with you when you do. That’s what will happen at Guild Hall when the drummer Butch Trucks, a founding member of the group, joins Great Caesar’s Ghost onstage for shows on Monday and Tuesday starting at 7:30 p.m.

By the end of 2009, it seemed all print media companies were on the verge of collapse. Bankruptcies and layoffs were the common headlines generated by activities happening in the very newsrooms reporting them

    Tonight is the first of what Kathy Zeiger hopes will be many Thursday night “art walks.”                          

    Ms. Zeiger, an East Hampton resident, has convinced 11 of the some 16 galleries in East Hampton to stay open until 8 tonight, and every Thursday thereafter this summer, so that diners, moviegoers, and others who stroll in the village business district can stop in and see fine art.     

Balloons will indicate the participating galleries, as will fliers that can be obtained at each.

Richard Phillips and Local 87

    Richard Phillips will show his work in East Hampton beginning this week at John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in the space also occupied by Harper’s Books.

    Mr. Phillips channels the hard and soft sell of commercialization through manipulating products and displays using objects such as album covers, posters, designer handbags, and beach towels in a show titled “P.O.P.” for Point of Purchase. This is the first full-scale presentation of these works.

    Before house-share reality shows like “Big Brother” or — dare we mention it? — “Private Stars,” there was “Betty’s Summer Vacation” by Christopher Durang, the well-known author of “Beyond Therapy,” “Romance,” and other theater favorites.

    Nostalgia is not a sweet or minor matter, being, fundamentally, a form of boredom  and it is boredom,  not confinement, that will kill the lion. Forget the smiling, amiable, charming elder speaking winningly and dulcetly of the good old days for he (or she) has only contempt for the present and those good old days so deliciously described were as rotten as those of today and as similarly lamented.

A New Gallery,

A Russian Artist

    The Arthur T. Kalaher Fine Art Gallery has opened at 28 Job’s Lane in Southampton and is showing the works of Henry Bing, Richard Ericson, James Knox, Charles Levier, and Abraham Rattner and featuring the paintings of Nahum Tschacbasov. The gallery has another space on Madison Street in Sag Harbor, which is showing large-format works by Tschacbasov.