Frank S. Costanza

With professionals in all sorts of arts fields currently suffering from lack of work on the East End, Andrea Grover and other members of the Hamptons Arts Network decided to create a grant program for struggling artists. Then artists Eric Fischl and Clifford Ross jumped into the effort and ran with it.

There’s nothing like forced downtime to inspire a busy person to focus on organizational tasks, and in recent months, director Marcia Milgrom Dodge has been spending her days at home, rifling through old boxes in the small Manhattan apartment she shares with her husband, Anthony Dodge. And in those boxes, Dodge has discovered forgotten gold — buried treasure in the form of scripts, photographs, playbills and opening night congratulatory messages from the plays Dodge directed and choreographed for Bay Street Theater between 1999 and 2013.

Carefully sketching in her studio space, 28-year-old Jodi Bentivegna let her long brown hair fall to the side as she nudged her glasses to look up and greet Southampton Arts Center (SAC) patrons. This was way back on February 9, and the young artist was excited to debut her work at one of the largest art museum’s on the East End.