GUILD HALL’S 75th ANNIVERSARY GALA

For all of its 75 years, Guild Hall, the cultural center in the village of East Hampton, feels young and dynamic. The center’s 75th anniversary celebration on Friday night was a celebration of the present that included dancing to the Peter Duchin Orchestra and local corn on the cob.

“There’s a constant effort to stay current with people’s interests and needs. We’re doing a lot of listening,” the executive director of Guild Hall, Ruth Appelhof, said.

There were brief mentions of the East End artists who exhibited at Guild Hall and became world-famous afterwards, such as Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell. Instead, guests were excited about the artist Elizabeth Peyton, who just opened her first exhibit there.

The success of the exhibitions program depends on the flow of artists to the area who appreciate the sense of openness and light, according to Guild Hall’s curator, Christina Strassfield. “There is a constant regeneration,” she said

And what of the institution’s history? There were no standing ovations for Mary Woodhouse, the patron who built and carried the institution through the Great Depression. There was, however, well-deserved applause for the institution’s current chairman, Melville Straus, who by all accounts has worked tirelessly to sustain and strengthen this community gem.

Mr. Straus knew how to work the crowd. “I’m boiling down the 15-minute speech I’ve been given to this: bid high and bid often at the auction,” Mr. Straus said. (And the audience listened: Simon de Pury wrangled more than $20,000 for a portrait by William Wegman.)

The honorees made little fuss as well. “I was told no speeches,” Guild Hall board member Ann Tenenbaum said on her and her husband’s behalf after receiving the Guild Hall Award of Excellence from Guild Hall’s vice chairman, Michael Lynne.

One clipping from the East Hampton Star provides perspective on what the institution started as and what it remains to this day. On Friday, October 17, 1930, under a rendering of the facility designed by Aymar Embury, the town newspaper wrote, “The community of sponsors for the proposed little theater and art museum at the corner of Dunemere Lane and Main Street is taking shape.”

Seventy-five years later, that community of sponsors has evolved, and so has the little theater and art museum, which is now undergoing a renovation. “We’re starting the theater in October,” the architect Robert A.M. Stern, who is overseeing the project, said. “When you come back, you won’t know what changed. It’s going to look fabulous and the same.”

Inside the theater, Robert Wilson was rehearsing his work “Persephone,” which played there on Saturday and Sunday. Mr. Wilson said he was thankful to have a showcase for his work. He placed Guild Hall within a growing and flourishing cultural scene in the community: “There’s the Parrish, the Bay Street Theater, Guild Hall, and my center [the Watermill Center]. Together we’re stronger than we are separate,” Mr. Wilson said.