See Monster

Thursday night was the night to be in Bridgehampton. Long lines of cars snaked through the back roads and front roads around the Bridgehampton Museum and Nova's Ark where two annual art fairs have taken up residence for the next few days.

It was the opening night for both ArtHamptons and Art Market Hamptons and even those with black cards, VIP passes, or other bells and whistles on their forms of entry had a tough time negotiating parking.

Inside, however, all was lively and fun, as these photos of the Art Market Hamptons fair by Morgan McGivern demonstrate. 

An auction benefiting LongHouse Reserve is open for bidding now at Paddle 8.

Filmmakers participating in the Stony Brook Southampton’s summer shorts 20-day intensive production workshop were given a warm welcome on Monday with an opening discussion with Todd Haynes, the director of “Far from Heaven,” “Velvet Goldmine,” “I’m Not There,” “Mildred Pierce,” “Safe,” and many other original and provocative films.

Leading the discussion was the school’s graduate program director Christine Vachon, who directs the film program in partnership with Killer Films, her production company she co-founded with Pam Koffler. Ms. Vachon, who went to school with Mr.

Donald Robertson, who is also known by his Instagram handle, donalddrawbertson, is a nonstop art-making tour de force.

A documentary about an early pioneer of ecologically friendly architecture will be shown Monday at the Southampton Arts Center at 6 p.m. AIA Peconic will present “The Vision of Paolo Soleri: Prophet in the Desert,” which has been selected for a number of film festivals this year from Boston to Sedona and even New Zealand.

The film follows the career of Soleri,who died last year, from his early days working with Frank Lloyd Wright in 1946 to his own quest to promote “arcology,” a merging of architecture and ecology.

Beginning Wednesday at 10 a.m., Paddle 8 will hold an auction of Robert Wilson’s own artwork as well as his personal collection of chairs.

Mr. Wilson told ARTINFO that his collection was being culled because he no longer had room to keep it all after moving out of his Tribeca loft. “Selling them, however, is like letting your children go,” he said. But he sees it as an opportunity for more people to enjoy them in a way he no longer can.

His loss is a gain for those fascinated by chairs of all periods, but particularly tribal and 20th century.

Those looking for a lovely spring stroll through some of the most exclusive private gardens in Southampton Village had a treat on Sunday during the garden tour portion of the Parrish Art Museum’s Landscape Pleasures weekend.

On Saturday, guests heard talks by Chip Callaway, Martin Filler, and Arne Maynard.

On Sunday, the tour included the gardens of Tory Burch, Joan and Bernard Carl, Perri Peltz and Eric Ruttenberg, and Margaret and Peter R. Sullivan.

Chances are you will hear a lot about FAPE in the five weeks that it is the focus of a show at Guild Hall, organized by Robert Storr, but at this point most people here probably don’t know much  about the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies program.

The name is helpful. It is an independent foundation that provides American art to the nearest and most far flung United States embassies worldwide.

More than 50 participants helped create and erect a 30-foot column at LongHouse Reserve on May 31.

The NAWA Axis for Peace was the vision of Mariyo Yagi, a Japanese environmental artist. She worked with the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn to make the acres of fabric used to form tubes that were then twisted together by four groups of participants onsite at LongHouse.

NAWA has multiple meanings. In ancient Japanese it is the union of NA, which means you, and WA, which means I.

The South Fork and, more specifically, East Hampton have a long history of inspiring innovation in arts and letters.

     The current production of "RED" at the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall in East Hampton is an intense 90 minutes of thought-provoking discussion and banter revolving around the life and work of Mark Rothko. Victor Slezak embodies the role of the artist, articulating it with hair-trigger intensity and bellowing a late-career cri de coeur that is as wrenching as it is sometimes purposefully grating.

     Christian Scheider plays the role of Rothko’s studio assistant and subject to his insistent hectoring about the meaning and significance of art and artists.

    On Monday night, Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor celebrated its third Spring Honors event at Joe’s Pub in New York City.

     The event feted Bonnie Comley, Stewart Lane, Pia Zankel and Jimmy Zankel. Scott Schwartz, the theater’s artistic director served as host.

     The event also showcased the upcoming season of theatrical presentations at the venue. These include new productions such as  “Art and Resolution” and “Conviction” and “Travesties,” a comedy by Tom Stoppard.

     Works by artists with East End associations such as Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Robert Gober, Joan Mitchell, and Richard Prince were part of the stars of Christie’s record-breaking $745 million Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale on Tuesday night.

     East Hampton’s Larry Gagosian won Warhol's "Race Riot," (see E-catalogue here) for $62.9 million, a final price that includes the buyer’s premium (beginning at 25 percent that scales downward as the hammer price increases).

The Southold resident was chosen by Ned Smyth and paired with Rick Liss. In that context Mr. Kurita's photographs were a fitting foil to Mr. Smyth's minimalist organic sculpture and photographs of it.

     Hopes and excitement ran even higher this year for the Guild Hall members show, an annual event that brings the South Fork artistic community together for one of the largest exhibitions in the region and the only non-juried show. More than 470 artists submitted work to be placed on the walls of Guild Hall’s three main galleries with the hope of being recognized by Robert Storr, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art and the dean of the Yale School of Art.

     Mr. Storr selected William S.

     The Parrish Art Museum had not one, but two openings for its Jennifer Bartlett exhibition. The second, a reception for members, was held this weekend. The Bartlett show is the first major museum survey of the artist's work.

     "Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe--Works 1970-2011" features 22 works from each of her creative periods and series. The show includes her plate pieces, combinations of paintings and sculpture, and diptychs and triptychs.

     The show will remain on view through July 13. A review will appear at a future date.

     If it is the first Thursday of the month, it must be time for “The Water’s Edge Radio Hour,” which is broadcast on WPPB on that day at 7 p.m. The variety program was conceived through the Hamptons Independent Theater Festival by John Landes, Joshua Perl, and Peter Zablotsky.

     This week’s episode, the sixth in the series, was taped on April 6 at the Bridgehampton Community House and has a spring theme, having fun with local concerns like potholes, the traffic uptick, and the new utility poles installed by PSEG.

     Elizabeth Dow, whose wall coverings and fabrics have been installed in the White House and in the private homes of Paul Simon, Harrison Ford, and Bill Gates to name a few, actually got her start as a painter and she continues in that medium to this day. Many of her recent works went on view at Vered Gallery in East Hampton on Saturday in a show called "Heaven" and will stay there until May 19.

     With several of her wall paper designs now in the collection of the Smithsonian, it is not surprising that her preferred support for her oil paint is paper.

     LongHouse Reserve offered a preview to both a sale of textiles from the collection of Jack Lenor Larsen and to what patrons will see on Saturday when the gardens open to the public for the season.

     The textiles and objects for sale include Indian blouse fronts, a silk hanging for designed for the Sears Tower in Chicago, Pennsylvania German hooked rugs, and other woven pieces from Peru, Anatolia, and other locations in the Americas, Africa and Asia. There are some 200 objects in all. While the preview took place on Saturday with a talk by Mr.

     If you look up Sammy’s Beach on the Internet, you are given maps, a lot of real estate listings, and a few photographs of a bay beach, typically with a lot of tire ruts. On Instagram it’s different, more arty shots of wind blown waves on a rocky shore, abstract amalgamations of jingle shells and seaweed, dramatic sunsets, and the like.

    These are useful ways into Connie Fox’s series of paintings inspired by the beach up in the far northern reaches of Springs that leads to the cut of Three Mile Harbor into Gardiner’s Bay.

     If you think the tabs on pop top cans are mundane subject matter,  Alice Hope will likely change your mind with a show at  the Ricco Maresca Gallery in Chelsea. There, viewers will find a range of tab-inspired artworks that either incorporate the small metal pieces of  flotsam, elevate the form to sizable hanging sculpture, or come up with other interpretations wholly unique to the artist.

     At an opening on April 3, Ms. Hope, who received her M.F.A. from Yale University, decorated the attendees with tabs on necklaces and temporary tab tattoos.

     The Spring Fling at the Parrish Art Museum may have been causing delays on the highway in front of its Water Mill headquarters, but over in East Hampton several gallery exhibitions opening on Saturday night, kept many residents close to home.

Ille Arts had an engaging show of word paintings by Matt Vega in Amagansett. They featured poetry, with both legible and more freeform text. It was presented in stark black-and-white and more vibrant color combinations. Mr. Vega studied painting at Boston College and has an M.F.A. in photography from the Yale University School of Art.

     Shigeru Ban, an architect known for both high-end and humanitarian projects using environmentally sensitive and recycled materials, has won this year's Pritzker Architecture Prize it was announced Monday.

     On the South Fork, he is best known for  designing one of the Houses at Sagaponac, Furniture House 5, with his American colleague Dean Maltz. According to their website, the house is formed of modular "floor-to-ceiling furniture units that act as elements of structure, spatial division, and storage."

    The development was conceived by Harry J.

     I had not planned on going to the Art Dealers Association of America show at the Park Avenue Armory so late. Initially, it was on my schedule for Thursday as my first drop in of the weekend, but I got in later than I thought, other plans arose, and the next thing I knew it was Sunday and it was quiet.

     The crowd was older and looked serious, like they might be there to buy something at a fair's end price. Anyone younger was likely at the MoMA PS1 Spring Preview.  The walls and halls were painted dark with somber lighting.

     Despite a reported increase in "fair fatigue" among dealers and collectors and a warm sunny day outside, the Armory Show packed the piers on Saturday with long lines to get in and crowded aisles and booths all afternoon.

     Seeming oddly out of the way in Soho, once the nexus of the contemporary art world, Volta NY offered a mostly focused presentation at its annual satellite fair during Armory art week in New York City.

     It was also the only fair in the city this week that attracted South Fork dealers: Halsey Mckay Gallery from East Hampton and Sara Nightingale Gallery from Water Mill. The fair was invitational and restricted to solo shows. 

     The some 90 booths sprawled over two floors and were particularly cohesive on the first floor.

     The Bruce High Quality Foundation's final Brucennial, a biannual event timed to the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial exhibition, is devoted only to women, this year in its final iteration. 

     Although there were rumors that some men submitted under female names, there was enough sheer quantity to earn the anonymous group a record for the largest female exhibition.

     Representing the South Fork were artists such as Marilyn Church, who is known for her courtroom drawings, but is also an accomplished abstract painter, as well as Lola Montes Schabel and B

     Li-lan, an artist who has had a studio in Springs since the 1970s, celebrated the publication of a monograph, "The Art of Li-lan: A World Achieved" with text by Carter Ratcliff, a poet and art critic for Art in America, on Thursday night at the Rizzoli book store on 57th Street in Manhattan.

     The Watermill Center was the scene of a durational performance by Temporary Distortion on Saturday afternoon and evening. The New York City based performance group is in residence at the center and working on a new piece, My Voice Has an Echo in It.”

     Lasting six hours, the audience was invited to come in for parts of it or the entire piece. It was the first time the group had performed all six hours. They will tour France with the piece later this year.

     While a discussion in an East Hampton community newspaper blog of the relevance of an Italian movement from the early part of the 20th century that has little to do with New York, let alone the East End, may be off-topic, it is still one worth offering.

     The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has given over its vast spiral to the fullest examination of Futurism ever presented outside of Italy. Opening on Feb.