Nearly eighty articles originally published between 2010 and 2011 have now been recovered and are available through The Annex Updated.
These first texts mark the beginning of a larger undertaking: the recovery of the archive of aeqai.com, a publication that, between 2010 and 2019, brought together valuable writing on art, artists, exhibitions, and the cultural history of Cincinnati.

A few months ago I wondered in these pages what Macron was getting out of lending the Bayeux Tapestry to the English. Forty thousand French citizens signed a petition to block it, citing textile fragility and, I suspect, a touch of cross-Channel rancour as well. The other question remained: what would the British Museum get out of it.

I suppose that waking up to find the night has birthed a new Banksy is, by now, almost routine. This time, however, something is different. He has literally moved up a step. He has planted a life-size sculpture in one of the most heavily guarded spaces in London. No witnesses.
The piece appeared in the early hours of Wednesday at Waterloo Place, an avenue in central London halfway between Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace.

Somewhere between Salzburg and the history of postwar German art, Georg Baselitz died yesterday at 88. His gallery announced it on Thursday. The family stated that he passed 'in peace'. The cause was not made public.
Baselitz was born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, a village in Saxony, under the name Hans-Georg Kern. In the first years of his life, during the war, four thousand tonnes of bombs fell on his village...

I have known for several days. We waited for the foundation’s official publication, where it is formally announced that Leticia Sánchez Toledo has been awarded once again. This time, by the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.
As many know, Leticia is a figurative visual artist who works primarily in oil on canvas. Through its decision, the foundation supports one of the projects she currently has in development.

There is something bitterly ironic, and in some way unjust, in the posthumous fate of William Blake. An extraordinary poet and engraver, he spent his life defending imagination as a sacred faculty, denouncing slavery, and dreaming of a spiritual Jerusalem on earth. He has nevertheless ended up recast, in the contemporary imagination, as a numen, or tutelary spirit, of evil. His name and his images appear tattooed on the skin of serial killers, whispered into the ears of victims in television series...

The auction house Sotheby's has just secured a credit line of up to one hundred million dollars from the private capital firm KKR, offering as collateral the commissions its clients still owe it on auction purchases. It is a form of financing worth attending to, because it discloses where in the cycle one of the two houses that have set the pulse of the global art market for decades now finds itself. When a company begins to collateralise its receivables in order to access immediate liquidity...

I have yet to visit the exhibition Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White. Prints from the Rembrandt House Museum, which opened on February 7 in the Fifth Third Gallery at the Taft Museum. Almost every day I find myself thinking I should go. Opportunities like this are not common, especially when dealing with a major figure of Dutch art.

Presented by The Annex Gallery, The Body Isn’t a Battery That Discharges Upon Death unfolds as an exploration of what time gradually dissipates—traces and residues—and of what still resists, its resonances.
The brochure—printed austerely in black and white on tinted stock—sets out, with clarity, the exhibition’s aesthetic and conceptual framework...

Rigoberto Mena is an artist with a solid career spanning more than three decades. I consider him the most important Cuban abstract artist working today, and I am not willing, in the presence of such a figure, to write a definitive text without having this exhibition before me. Above all because this is not just another show. Here, as in a previous one held in North Carolina, something has shifted in ways that matter.

Persistently, and since the most remote antiquity, the moon has acted as a trigger for the human imagination. It has agitated artists and writers, the deranged of every kind, poets, philosophers, spiritual beings, night wanderers—but above all, lovers. Perhaps because it casts that faint light which outlines the features of the desired body: the point of light, the delicate glimmer that ignites along the maiden’s lower lip...

Human genius can be observed in many of its works. Nowhere is it more detectable than in the arts: music, literature, and the visual arts. As a species, seen from above, we are all fairly clever. But some are—or were—truly exceptional. What did they require to rise above the rest? What made them singular, beyond the reasoning most of us share?

I have not the faintest idea why The Times, in its February 16 edition, informs us—by a delay so un-British—that Damien Hirst’s Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain has been installed in the Camellia House at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Not only that work: The Watchtower, by Auke de Vries, and Muamba Posy, by Vanessa da Silva, both outdoors in the Country Park.

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, part of University College London (UCL), houses one of the most important collections of Egyptian artefacts in the world. It preserves more than 80,000 objects recovered from excavations conducted between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among them are hundreds of shabti, small funerary figures that formed part of the ritual equipment of tombs in ancient Egypt...

Last Friday, February 6, I attended the opening of the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards 2026 at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Given the temperature outside, one would have expected a thin crowd, a hush, the kind of dispersal that comes with an icy wind. The opposite happened. It was a celebration. All six floors of the institution were packed with children, teenagers, and adults—an enthusiasm the visual arts rarely manage to elicit. Everyone celebrating emerging talent.

The Pattern & Decoration (P&D) movement, once dismissed for its embrace of "decorative" arts, is now celebrated for challenging traditional art hierarchies. Explore its legacy and modern-day echoes in Cincinnati, where creative hubs like the Freeport Row Art Alley are contributing to a thriving art scene, with a mural by Esteban Leyva at Liberty and Elm streets.

The Clark Art Institute is widely regarded as one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the United States. Located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, it has been devoted to the study and exhibition of art since 1955. The Institute uniquely combines a museum of the highest caliber with a leading research center—the Research and Academic Program—positioning it as an international point of reference for art historians, curators, and scholars...

It is generally understood that national museums ought to be the natural custodians of their cultural memory.
Spaces where the history of national art is presented in an ordered and intelligible form. Where foundational images can still be contemplated. Yet, primarily for reasons of funding, an increasing number of state institutions...

My interest in Asia does not arise from fascination, but from the recognition of a cultural sediment that resists superficial readings. China and Japan have been fundamental references in this process, both in the realm of visual arts and in that of symbolic management. Their literature and philosophy have not lost their capacity to converse with contemporaneity—not as untouchable corpora, but as tools for living thought, applicable to politics, ethics, cultural architecture, and aesthetics.

Margate is a coastal town in southeastern England. Located in the county of Kent, on the shores of the North Sea, it forms part of the Thanet district and lies approximately 120 kilometres east of London.
Directly facing the sea stands Turner Contemporary, a contemporary art centre designed by David Chipperfield Architects and inaugurated in 2011...

Australian photographers Peter Eastway and David Evans, founders of the International Landscape Photographer of the Year award, have launched the inaugural edition of the Aerial Photographer of the Year. This international competition is devoted exclusively to images captured from the air—using drones, airplanes, helicopters, or hot air balloons—and seeks to encompass the widest possible range of aerial photographic practices...

A truism, almost an embarrassment, is that we know far fewer people than we pretend to—fewer artists still, and far fewer careers. I read that the influential British photographer Martin Parr, a central figure in contemporary photography and a prominent member of Magnum Photos, has died at 73 in his home in Bristol. I didn’t know him, and if I ever saw one of his images, I erased it, discarded it without ceremony.

Philately was one of the small devotions of my childhood. I inherited hundreds of stamps from my father. I could never say whether he collected them himself or simply bought them for my brother and me. Among all of them, one in particular held my gaze with disproportionate insistence: a reproduction of The Sleeping Gypsy, the 1897 painting by Henri Rousseau that I finally saw years later at the MoMA.

What could I possibly say today about Wifredo Lam and the exhibition the MoMA has devoted to him? Little that hasn’t already been uttered—successfully or not—by the hundreds of critics and journalists who have read, interpreted, or merely circled around the curatorship of Christophe Cherix (David Rockefeller Director) and Beverly Adams (Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art).

Founded in 1968 by the Cincinnati Art Club, ViewPoint is an open juried exhibition—responsible for both the selection of works and the awarding of prizes—that reflects the creative breadth and diversity of the Greater Cincinnati artistic community. Over the years, the exhibition has expanded to include submissions from across the country and abroad. Today, it stands among the most prominent annual juried shows in Southwest Ohio, esteemed for its continuity. It is usually hosted by one of the area’s distinguished commercial galleries...

It is enough to walk long enough through the arteries of any major city for the iconic eyebrows of Frida Kahlo to emerge from some unexpected corner. Alongside the Virgin of Guadalupe and the poblano chili, they constitute Mexico’s leading exports and a confused symbol for millions of women worldwide. In her homeland her image circulates on banknotes, perfumes, and the most unimaginable supports. To give you an idea, I once found her on the shelf of a grimy pastry shop in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The art market revolves around monumental sums. What captures the spotlight is usually the excessive sale, the broken record, the news that one artist or another has climbed the rankings. The tip of the iceberg. Behind these dazzling transactions lies the effort, talent, and dedication of one of its key figures: the advisor. A specialist who assumes he will never shine before the public, though he is the one who prepares the ground for a mechanism sustained by fascinating yet essentially deceptive flashes....

It’s astonishing—over 40,000 people have signed a petition to block the French government from lending the Bayeux Tapestry to Britain. Yes, that’s right: a concerned multitude insists the ancient fabric is too fragile for the journey.
The campaign was spearheaded by Didier Rykner, the art historian behind La Tribune de l’Art, who argues that President Macron should have heeded the advice of conservators and restorers instead of green-lighting the loan to the British Museum.

This article has little of true interest. What catches my attention, however, is the way its original content has drifted from one outlet to another, as if there were nothing else in the world worth recounting. Perhaps it belongs to a secret chain of good fortune. This is my extract of an extract of yet another extract, and so on, until the original author dissolves into the distance. Take it as a nocturnal diversion and as a reiteration of the open secret that most cultural blogs venture into the fields to harvest the grain that will be baked into the bread of the mornings to come.

I've known Leticia for so many years that I can’t quite find the thread of the memory. What I do remember—clearly—is that while she was studying design, I suddenly realized she would never be a designer. Because she was an artist, and because she couldn't, wouldn't, and had no interest in being or doing anything else. I can’t recall the first time I saw her work either. But what I do know is that her work has been orbiting my gaze for a very long time, as if it had always been there—lurking, silent, waiting for unsuspecting, gentle eyes.

In The Climate of Art Collecting, Christopher Cameron examines how extreme weather events are radically reshaping the economics of the art world. In the wake of recent fires, hurricanes, and floods, private collections, galleries, and studios face losses without precedent, raising troubling questions about the fragility of cultural heritage and the limits of insurance. The piece shows how climate change is forcing collectors, insurers, and museums to rethink preservation strategies and their own responsibilities in a market growing ever more vulnerable.

This insightful article, published by Anny Shaw in The Art Newspaper on March 10, 2025, explores how the art world is shifting toward a slower, more reflective pace. Shaw notes that museums are staging fewer large‑scale exhibitions, prioritizing quality and depth over sheer quantity. Artists are scaling back their output, and collectors are becoming increasingly selective—prompting galleries, museums, and fairs to foster a more deliberate and meaningful connection with their audiences rather than relying on rapid turnover.

I’m not much of a Nuevo Herald reader. I download the PDF of its print edition every day only because, for work reasons, I try to stay informed about what’s happening in the city. I don’t like its design. Its use of typography is anarchic. The headlines jump wildly from one typeface to another, as if shoved toward the next text block. The masthead, for its part, looks like it just returned from the past. Beyond that, I’ve adapted to the broadsheet format. I used to prefer the tabloid, but now it makes no difference.