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.
While ÆQAI.org remains active and preserves an important body of the publication’s later content, aeqai.com is no longer directly accessible online. Some of its articles survived through a mirror site hosted on Blogspot; others were transferred to ÆQAI.org, often with the text retained but their original visual material, formatting, or contextual information lost along the way.
Working from these sources, together with captures preserved by the Wayback Machine, we are restoring articles as fully as the available records allow. Images require a more demanding process. When original files have not survived, they are traced through the artists, artworks, exhibitions, and references named in the texts. Other materials are carefully processed in order to recover, as faithfully as possible, their original visual presence.
Internet Archive, Wayback Machine, Homepage screenshot.
As this work advances, The Annex Updated will continue to add new recoveries, ideally on a daily basis as research, verification, and reconstruction become more efficient. Along the way, we will also draw attention to selected texts whose return to circulation may offer renewed insight into the city’s artistic and intellectual life.
Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, archived capture of ÆQAI’s “A Painter’s Eye,” by Jane Durrell, originally published May 15, 2011. The missing image placeholder records the limits of the surviving web archive.
The long-term goal is to bring the ÆQAI archive together at The Annex Updated, making this body of writing accessible again and returning an essential part of Cincinnati’s cultural memory to contemporary readers.
The Annex Updated, ÆQAI Archives, 2026. Screenshot of the archive section where recovered articles are being made available.
We would be deeply grateful to artists, critics, writers, editors, and former contributors who may be willing to share information, documents, images, corrections, or recollections connected to ÆQAI. Much of this work depends on fragments: a recovered date, an accurate credit, an exhibition detail, a missing image, or the context surrounding a text’s first publication. Any contribution, however modest it may seem, can help us restore these materials with greater precision and care.
ÆQAI emerged from a community of artists, readers, and interlocutors whose exchanges helped shape Cincinnati’s cultural life. We approach this undertaking with gratitude and humility, aware that no archive can be fully reconstructed without the knowledge and generosity of those who participated in its making. Those interested in contributing are warmly invited to contact The Annex Gallery.
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