Now in its third year, ArtHamptons, a cultural star of the Hamptons summer season and increasingly a major buying venue for modern art, is chock full of special events this weekend. Friday begins the first annual Worldwide Art Collectors' Conference along with more than two dozen meet-the-artist opportunities, book signings, and exhibits continuing through Sunday, July 11.

The show opened with a Preview Party on Thursday night featuring 95 galleries, a stout 40% increase over 2009, under a 50,000-square-foot, air-conditioned tent at Sayre Park in Bridgehampton, New York.

With a focus on post-war and contemporary art, the international exhibitors are offering up a vetted selection of over 7,000 works of art worth more than $300 million, according to organizers Hamptons Expo Group.

Requiring registration, the Worldwide Art Collectors' Conference features Sotheby’s chairman Lisa Dennison as the luncheon speaker. Hosted by Benjamin Genocchio, Art & Auction editor, there will be 14 sessions about buying and selling art with top gallerists and art world experts such as philanthropist Henry Buhl, dealer Louis Meisel and interior designer Jamie Drake. A Sunday tour of private estates offers an inside look at top art collections in the Hamptons, including master framer Eli Wilner's personal art collection in his Montauk home with views framing, of course, the ocean.

ArtHamptons Lifetime Achievement Award is going to Sag Harbor resident Donald Sultan (b. 1951), who is lauded for his bold, large-scale still-life paintings. Sultan will be in the Collector's Lounge on July 10, 2-3 pm, and his work on view in Mary Ryan Gallery's one-man exhibition.

Also on Saturday, visitors may run into John ‘Crash’ Matos, the pioneer Grafitti artist, as well as architectural designer Hans Van de Bovenkamp, and sculptors Dolly Moreno and John Henry.

Sunday marks the first Art Book Festival at the fair, with a focus on leading artists with ties to the Hamptons. From noon to 1:30, about 11 authors, some of whom are also artists, will present their books onstage, followed by sales and signings.

Among the speakers is D. Frederick Baker, appearing with co-author Carolyn Lane and Robin Chase, granddaugther of William Merritt Chase, who will be promoting their final volume in a four-part catalogue raissonne (written with Ronald G. Pisano) covering Chase’s impressionist paintings, including some new revelations.

Also featured is the fresh release Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach, a new publication on abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock by Ellen G. Landau and Klaus Ottman's take on post-war American realist Fairfield Porter whose work was the subject of a recent exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum in nearby Southampton. Currently, the Parrish is showing mesmerizing, meticulous panoramas in Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972–2008.

View the full agenda for the weekend: www.arthamptons.com/