Cubans don’t confuse people with their governments. Again and again, we were met with surprise and delight. Surprise because Americans there are rare, delight because Cubans are predisposed to like us. I was fortunately enough to spend some time there, camera in tow.  

Reversing the usual order of things, Kennedy Heights Arts Center encourages visitors to get the feel of Brenda Tarbell's ceramics in the exhibition 'Touch,' on view through Sept. 25. "There's a Braille to my sculpture," she says. "It is meant to be explored tactilly. It is meant to be touched." Other works in the show, not necessarily touchable but influenced by organic forms and textures, are presented by Claire Darley, Rebecca Nebert, Lisa Wilson and Rebecca Nava.  

Sandy Plunkett reverses the normal order of things. Instead of languishing through youth somewhere in Ohio, longing for New York, he did his languishing in New York's Upper West Side and came to southeast Ohio to find his creative home. The World of a Wayward Comic Book Artist reflects sketchbook/journals Plunkett has kept since 1992, by which time Athens, Ohio, was his town.  

A benefit of our shortened attention spans is the re-emergence of the short story. That pleasurable form of fiction, sliced thinner than a novel but at its best equally compelling, for a decade or two languished out of fashion but returns full of ginger. In Out of the Mountains, Meredith Sue Willis gives her characters the juice of life. Some turn up in more than one story, prompting the pleasure of recognition.  

Pat Timm looks at Kentucky landscapes with a photographer's eye, and the results of her observations are just a pleasant drive along the river away at the Augusta Art Guild (116 Main St., Augusta, Ky.). Kentucky Landscapes: Photography by Patricia Timm opens 6-8 p.m. Friday with hours from noon-6 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays through Aug. 21. Timm says she began using her camera "to tell a story, to dig deeper into what I saw through the lens. I found myself connecting to landscapes and events in a surprising new way (that is) profoundly spiritual."  

Full Art Spectrum wants to bring mash-up techniques to the fine arts. This Friday at the Downtown Coffee Emporium the group will hold its first public event in which musicians and writers respond to visual arts on display there. There will be three paintings, each the product of three artists who are members of Full Art Spectrum. The artists worked individually — the first painting a layer, followed by the second, then the third — with sometimes-surprising results.  

Works never previously exhibited by the late Charlie Harper, one of Cincinnati's favorite artists, are on view at Phyllis Weston Gallery. Many of the pieces are originals, rather than the prints we usually see of Harper's work, and subject matter includes much more than just the artist's familiar birds. "Many of the works are watercolors and most are small," Weston says. "There are also signed prints and collages."  

Ardine Nelson makes poetic photographs of considerable beauty using flimsy camera equipment or simply creating her own pin-hole camera with a clay garden pot. Ardine Nelson: Construence at Over-the-Rhine's Iris BookCafé has a title as hand-made as her camera -“Construence” seems to come from “construe,” meaning piecing together. She also puts the strip film of a give-away toy camera to extraordinary use by merging images along its length.  

The house in your head — the one nobody can foreclose on — is probably an element of the internal life of each of us. But what happens when six artists zero in on explicitly externalizing their visions of such a place? The results are 'The House in My Head,' which fills downtown's Weston Art Gallery through Aug. 29.  

Make your own flag at Prairie Gallery and march with it in Northside’s 4th of July parade with the aid of artists Katie Parker and Guy Michael Davis. Parker and Davis will conduct a hands-on workshop featuring a die-cutting press to create assembled paper sculptures. The “flags,” which will relate to Parker’s large wall collages currently on view at Prairie, are to be finished in time for their creators to show them off in the famous holiday parade.