A photo essay by Louis Zoellar Bickett from his ongoing project The Archive: twenty-two photographs of Lexington, Kentucky, from Gratz Park in spring and the Old Georgetown Street house to the Northend Wal-Mart Shopping Center.

The invitation is to meet the artist, Donna Talerico, whose show opens that very evening, in the shoe department on the first floor of Saks Fifth Avenue. In Cincinnati Saks is on Fifth Street rather than Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Race.

The May issue is a few days late, so that all the aeqai writers could have a breather after the benefit party that The Carnegie hosted for us on Thursday, May l6. We want to thank Katie Brass, Carnegie’s Director, for providing the space and the hospitality for aeqai, and are happy to report that our attendance was near l75 people, and that our revenue from the evening is nearly three times greater than last year’s.

In a recently released pop film on the much touted French painter, a gnarly Renoir, grappling with the problems of posing the girl before him, recalls being queried by another artist of his time: “why can’t one just paint apples?” His hissed reply reflects the fascination felt by artists in every epoch: “It is living, breathing skin…”

Known primarily as the author of the mythic painting The Rose, Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) was an enigmatic artist whose fierce devotion to a single work became her claim to fame. It also damaged her career, and in doing so delayed exposure of her work to a wider public. This damage is only now being undone by the first retrospective of her work, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art until June 2.

In 2011 the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Savage Beauty, celebrating the work of fashion designer Alexander McQueen, became a sensation attracting over 650,000 visitors. I had the privilege of seeing the show sans the crowds as a colleague at the Costume Institute escorted me in before the galleries were open to the public.

In a New York Magazine article about the recent opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute’s exhibit “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” Nitsuh Abebe writes: “In music, punk remains what the critic Frank Kogan calls a ‘Superword,’ a term whose main purpose is for people to fight over what it should mean, using it as a ‘flag in a bloody game of Capture the Flag.’ It’s a concept like ‘freedom’ or ‘the one true Church...

One Indian summer day we dressed in our favorite things, me in my beatnik sandals and ragged scarves, and Robert with his love beads and sheepskin vest. We took the subway to West Fourth Street and spent the afternoon in Washington Square. We shared coffee from a thermos, watching the stream of tourists, stoners, and folksingers. Agitated revolutionaries distributed antiwar leaflets. Chess players drew a crowd of their own.

“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” – Albert Einstein