Three steeples patina glimmering mossy green after rain. Green as copper does after salt and pollutant-filled raindrops clobber for years, after intermittent wind burns and sun bleaches beat their surface like flint for fire; the parts most exposed are most faded, as with us humans.

The April issue of aeqai has just posted, and it’s a very full issue: you may have noted that each issue of aeqai is getting bigger, and that’s because we’re getting a lot of national attention, as well as regional, and we’ve been finding superb writers in many other cities: we’re now covering Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Seattle, occasionally Austin, and New York, as well as Lexington/Louisville.

Two novels by young American women writers popped onto the literary scene in the past month or so; Wreck and Order (perhaps poorly titled), is a debut novel by Hannah Tennant-Moore, and Innocents and Others, the fourth offering by Dana Spiotta, one of the world’s most astonishing newer talents.

In the confessional, ramrod straight, mouth cotton dry, lips like crazed china, hands a fidget, I concentrate, rehearse, wait my turn. The window slides open. Father Keller’s ghostly image emerges, dour silhouette, a mystery barely discernable through the thin curtain. I cross myself mechanically. I can’t remember all the lies. Sins go unreported.

The Year of the Runaways, by Sunjeev Sahota, is the best novel to date of 2016, and may well end up as one of the year’s finest.

Yet another superb small novel appeared in the past couple of months, titled Thomas Murphy, and written by Roger Rosenblatt, better known to many as a playwright. This novel is roughly equivalent to last year’s small, splendid Academy Street, little noticed by critics, but listed on my “top twelve” books of the year as third.

Here and now mercilessly morphs into there and then, but sometimes a news release Now brings up a Then. The Museum of Modern Art reports a new hanging of some of its permanent collection, bringing to mind a visit I made to New York in late winter, 2005, to see what the Modern was showing in then newly renovated and extended galleries, and also to experience Christo’s fabric “Gates,” installed throughout Central Park.

The exhibit, “White People: A Retrospective” which opened on March 25 and runs through May 13, at Art Beyond Boundaries Gallery, delivers a captivating glimpse through the lens of photojournalist, Melvin Grier.

Dana Spiotta’s Innocents and Others is a truly remarkable–brilliant–novel, centering around two young women from the Greater LA area, who attended a private high school specializing in film studies/film history.

From March 3 to 9, 2016, I traveled to Cuba, one in a group of 21 Americans and two Canadians. This immersion in a different culture, landscape, and climate was an intense experience for me. Cuba, for all its differences, is so close to the U.S. that I never left the time zone where I live in Kentucky.

Versace’s Fall 2016 ready-to-wear collection was presented right around the time of the Moschino MFW runway show featured in last month’s AEQAI. While both brands have a penchant for drama, the collections couldn’t have been more different. Enough so that it deserves a second trip back to Milan during this runway off-season.

A quick cyber-jaunt reveals surprisingly little about photographer Paul Kohl, but the internet did offer one interesting morsel, stored within the digitized archive of the Crimson. A 1974 review by Susan Cooke included a couple sentences about Kohl, whose work had been featured in a group installation of artists decidedly unburdened by the parameters of photographic normalcy in the mid-seventies.

Professing to let your freak flag fly and actually raising it on one’s pole for all to see are two different things. More often than not, we succumb to social standards and allow a subliminal code to dictate how we look, feel and act. We can’t help but find comfort in ordinary belonging.

With The Liminal landscape at Marta Hewett Gallery, Guggenheim Award winner and Cincinnati native Frank Herrmann presents an enlightening shift in a body of work that has been remarkably consistent and serious for the last 15 years. I encourage you to go see the exhibition; Herrmann is the breed of artist that is rare in Cincinnati: Ambitious, hard-nosed, and focused on painterly innovation at the cost of all else.

Turner-Yamamoto’s paintings and sculptures are so commanding yet austere that, depending on temperament, a viewer either pays little attention or becomes lost in front of them. The latter of course is preferable and, I would suggest, the point of art, conjuring an experience of a new thread of reality; and with any luck becoming a littler better of a human being in the process.

Binary Harmonies was one of the more carefully assembled exhibitions of printmaking on display at this year’s Southern Graphics Conference International in the ever-eccentric Portland, Oregon. It opened on April second at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center.

The concept of repetition isn’t new, nor is the simplicity of subject matter. Artists have long been expanding on these inspirations. Think Warhol. Hunt Slonem’s chosen milieux of birds, bunnies, and butterflies for his exhibit at Miller Gallery comes as a shock at first glance, begging familiarity and exploration before deciding their artistic value.

Spearheaded by Los Angeles based painter David Spanbock, BLAM debuted its first show, “Concrete,” at their Los Angeles exhibition space on Saturday, April 16.

What are your ambitions as an artist? To work my fingers to the bone, as long as it makes me happy! Also to create works that revolve around human/environmental interactions. I will continue to explore new materials and discover new places in which they resonate. Describe your art in its current form. What do you think is important -for your work to work? My practice engages in a dialogue between place, form and material.

Louisville, KY is a town known for many southern aesthetic qualities. Bourbon, horses and poignantly relating to this article, Muhammed Ali. The Muhammed Ali Center exists in the heart of downtown Louisville where it stands tall representing more than its biographically titled occupancy; the center most importantly exists to represent cultural awareness and heroism.

Kenya Barris’s Black-ish, a Wednesday-night sitcom on regular old ABC television, is simultaneously zeitgeist-y genuine, frantically people-pleasing, and deliciously aware of its own precarious situation: a high-energy comic take on the foibles and follies of a loving upper-middle-class African American family living in the lap of Southern California luxury.

Around one hundred people gathered at The Mercantile Library to listen to Scott Huler, author of Defining The Wind, and Robert Off, miniature rooms creator, on a cold March night. Under the direction of John Faherty, the library regularly sponsors lectures by guest authors. Off called Faherty and suggested the collaboration.

Seattle-based artist Jeff Mihalyo has built an international reputation on his mesmerizing, large-scale narrative artworks depicting surreal architectures and fantasy worlds in brilliant oil colors. This versatile creator has also experimented with cast-paint objects, and his video installations, in which his famously luxuriant beard looms large, are eminently memorable.

A trip to The Irwin M. Krohn Conservatory, an indoor botanical garden with 3,500 plant species from all over the world, may be second nature to some Cincinnatians, but executive director Andrea Schepmann said she is always looking for new ways of displaying seasonal exhibits and special shows. Annual attendance is approximately 200,000.

If your appetite for Van Gogh was whetted by the five wonderful canvases shown at the Taft Museum’s current “Impressions of Landscape,” you should promptly schedule a road trip to Chicago where the Art Institute is showing “Van Gogh’s Bedrooms,” an exhibition designed to contextualize the three different versions Van Gogh painted of “The Bedroom” in his house in Arles in the late 1880s.

Hard Luck Honky Tonk showcases the devilish and defiant screen printing of Carlos Hernandez at Austin’s premier venue for the printed multiple, Flatbed Press and Gallery. Importantly, Hernandez has been synonymous with his shop Burning Bones Press in Houston, TX for six years now in partnership with one-time Flatbed Master Printmaker, Pat Masterson.

In late winter, when my skin’s its palest and the sky its grayest, I head southwest to get some sun and some heat. About 2700 degrees worth of heat – the temperature that melts scrap iron down into a molten pool that gets poured into a mold and becomes a sculpture.

Clifton Cultural Arts Center (CCAC) is in very real of danger of losing access to the historical building it calls home. Leased from Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS), CCAC has been notified that Cincinnati Public Schools is considering prematurely terminating their lease.

In February, I attended what I thought was the opening of Graffiti and Street Art Museum (GASAM) among the warehouses of Houston’s East Downtown. Much-hyped in local media since the fall, the museum currently lives in a fairly average gallery space populated by bright canvasses and display cases of graffiti ephemera. At the event, a wall-sized projection showed spray painting in action, and a live DJ got the party going.

In Origins artist and photographer Sal Taylor Kydd explores the essence of childhood and how it relates to our sense of place. The work is also a reflection on time and how we become aware of change and transformation both within us and in the world around us. As the title suggests, Origins seeks to understand what defines our relationship with our past: What ties us to a place and connects us to what has come before?

The story behind this exhibition, which runs through April 29 at the Clifton Cultural Arts Center, is important. In June 2015 Cincinnati artists M. Katherine Hurley and Jens G. Rosenkrantz, Jr., visited Havana for a week as part of a people-to-people cultural exchange, the only legal way for Americans to travel to Cuba. Such travel is usually done in small groups following itineraries planned by American and local guides.

I never thought I would miss the smell of raw sewage. Being a graffiti writer can take you to a lot of places your average city-dweller never sees. Graffiti thrives in the underbelly. Hidden behind retaining walls, sound barriers, and drainage ditches is a culture very few have the privilege of knowing about, let alone seeing. At 14 my friend’s mom gave him a book about graffiti and graffiti artists.

The quick road trip to Columbus just became even more worthwhile. The new addition to the Columbus Museum of Art is beautifully done with light filled spaces, clean lines, high white walls, wood floors and floor to ceiling windows at either end of the cantilevered gallery spaces.