Editor’s Note: RVA Magazine is partnering with the Virginia Museum of History & Culture on coverage related to America’s 250th anniversary, including Richmond SailFest and IllumiNation. It's hard to impress people with just a building. Yet standing in front of the...
The Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen is hosting Environment at Risk, a group show curated by Appalachian Voices’ Virginia field coordinator Jessica Sims. Installed in the Gumenick Family Gallery, the exhibition gathers paintings, prints, collage, sculpture, photography, and fiber works from more than 35 regional artists grappling with the...
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will host Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys from November 22, 2025 through March 1, 2026. The exhibition brings more than 100 works from nearly 40 internationally recognized Black artists to Richmond, including pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kehinde Wiley, Amy Sherald, Nick Cave,...
Now on view at the ICA at VCU, Julien Creuzet: Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon (through February 22, 2026) plunges audiences into a submerged cosmos of history, myth, and invention. Acting Senior Curator Amber Esseiva describes it as a...
"You have to be delusional to be an artist." That’s how Peter Cochrane closes our conversation. We’re sitting across from each other in a quiet Richmond studio, the air thick with pollen and thought. The line lands not as a punchline but as a thesis offered without irony. What does it mean to believe in a practice that resists productivity...
If you walk into the 2025 VCUarts MFA Thesis Exhibition expecting a finale or a big conclusion, prepare to encounter something else—something quieter and less resolved. A residue. A gesture mid-motion. An echo. When I walked into the opening reception on April 11, I was immediately haunted by my own MFA thesis exhibition from a year ago. I walked...
The curtain comes down on Stay Gold: 20 Years of RVA Magazine & Gallery5 this Friday. Huge thanks to everyone who packed the place at the opening earlier this month. Big thank you to PLF, RVA Moon Market, Gallery5, Gull, Sweet Potatoes, No BS! Brass Band and The Head & The Heart's Rivers and Roads Foundation for partnering with us on this...
Walking through Frida: Beyond the Myth at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts doesn’t feel like attending a documentary screening — it feels like slipping into Frida’s world. It disorients you into her mind. You step through doorways that feel like mirrors, gaze through archways into rooms you haven’t reached yet, and find yourself caught in a web...
Last weekend in Church Hill, Richmond did something that only Richmond can do — it let history walk and talk right in front of us. Inside St. John’s Church, the scene was familiar. A reenactor delivered Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech to an attentive audience, a ritual that’s been part of the city’s cultural calendar for...
Merenda Cecelia, a Richmond-based artist and instructor, was recently dismissed from her teaching position at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) after reading a statement aloud in class. She describes the statement as a personal expression of artistic and academic freedom, which led to the termination of her contract just three days later....
