Lungs is a stream of consciousness rom-com set in the pre-Trump fainting spell that privileged liberal America endured very loudly. The narrative employs the manic pixie dream girl and frustrated musician as the stereotypes to help us struggle with big decisions...
Topdog/Underdog, the final production in TheatreLAB’s series Picking Sides, does an extraordinary job emphasizing the division created by brotherhood. The Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Suzan-Lori Parks is a dark comedy rife with themes of family, history, and resentment. Starring two incredibly talented actors, Jeremy V. Morris and Jamar Jones,...
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has added 34 works from prominent African American painters, sculptors, and other artists to its collection, recently acquired from the Atlanta-based Souls Grown Deep Foundation as part of a gift/purchase program to broaden the representation of African American artists from the South in art museums across the...
The argument about what happens after death is a topic that's puzzled minds for centuries. Some see it as the very end and others see it as the beginning of a new existence. As we all deal with the thought of death in our own way, one Richmond artist uses her art to show that there are many different ways to look and deal with the cycle of life...
Hannah Shaban leaves her audience with a gift. The first 86 visitors--the number of clay cups to survive the kiln--leave her VCU Graduate Candidacy Exhibition with full hands and a better understanding of what it means to be Arab American. The opening night of Shaban’s exhibition at Artspace Richmond, she and her mother welcomed the guests...
Firehouse Theatre's latest production of “Preludes” is a trippy musical fantasia that takes viewers on a journey through 19th Century Russian history to dive deep into the music and mind of suffering Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, and the three-year writer's block, hypnotherapy, and psychological collapse that befalls him after his...
James Baldwin, hands clasped behind his back, stares off-camera in the black and white photo that opens Truthful Witnessing: The Black Photographers Annual, Volume 3 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The arresting image by Anthony Barboza doesn’t appear within the annual, but an essay by its subject, Baldwin, does, as an introduction. Themes...
Upon opening, VCU’s new Institute for Contemporary Art opened gave visitors several inspiring and thought-provoking exhibits such as Betty Tompkins’ paintings “WOMEN Words”, and Paul Rucker’s “Storm in the Time of Shelter”, featuring life-sized figures wearing the regalia of the Ku Klux Klan, but instead of white robes the figures were wearing...
Two black brothers, one named Lincoln, the other named Booth.No, you did not read that incorrectly. Yes, the irony is purposeful. TheatreLAB, home of “unexpected and evocative performance,” is at it again with another unforgettable piece. Finishing off their 2017/2018 season entitled “Picking Sides,” the award-winning Topdog/Underdog by...
The old cliché, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, rings true in the work of Jamie Phillips, who uses discarded objects and refuse to create meticulous assemblage pieces. On display through June 9 at Visual Art Studio on West Broad Street, the Virginia Beach artist’s exhibit, “Urban Assemblages,” is a collection of 17 works, inspired by...
