The 2026 Richmond Jazz and Music Festival took place this past weekend, August 8 and 9, at Maymont with over 20 performers. It was a hot and humid weekend, with the majority of festivalgoers either camped out in shaded lawn chairs or arriving right before sunset....
This Friday, March 27, a different sort of experimental prompt video event will showcase a collection of work made for Homegrown Stories. In the early days of RVA Magazine, that space existed through Project Resolution, a monthly prompt-based series that gave new filmmakers a place to show work and get real critique. Around 2005, it was one of...
When I called Nicolás Aguilar earlier this week, he was standing on a Richmond street corner waiting to meet a few of the men who appear in his new exhibition at Art Brigade inside Health Brigade. They were planning to attend the opening together later that evening, a small but meaningful reversal. He had spent years sitting with them in their...
Last night, Undeniable, the new exhibition pairing Christian Siriano and Ashley Longshore, drew a crowd into the Branch Museum of Design on Monument Avenue. The gallery buzzed with fashion, color, and bold expression as visitors moved between Siriano’s sculptural silhouettes and Longshore’s pop-driven canvases. Shout out to our guy Rudy Lopez....
Over a decade ago, some of Matt Licari’s earliest published photographs appeared in our printed pages, back when he was living in Richmond. Since then, Licari has gone on to become a sought-after editorial photographer, shooting globally recognized actors, musicians, and public figures, while continuing to document people and places far from the...
An unseasonably warm Friday afternoon set the tone for Day 2 of Heart of Winter at The Canal Club, a strange but welcome contrast to the bleak, frostbitten sounds pouring out of the venue. Despite the mild weather, the atmosphere inside was anything but soft. Black metal and doom devotees packed the room early for a sold-out show, battle vests...
Editor’s Note: This article reflects on United Blood’s return back in April 2025 and is a preview of what is in store for 2026. Words and photos by Cristian Espinoza The sleeping giant walks the earth again. After a five-year hiatus, United Blood returned to Richmond, Virginia with a heavy barrage of cutthroat sonics. The once-annual festival was...
Richmond's Nettspend and Vans turned Laurel Skatepark into a canned food drive that was part skate scene, part community pull-up, built around a simple ask: bring something that helps someone else eat. For readers who may not know him yet, Nettspend is one of Richmond’s most visible breakout artists of the last few years. You can read about him...
As we close out the year, here’s a look at some of the most impactful stories we published in 2025. Over the past year, we covered Richmond as a living system under pressure, focusing on the people, culture, and policies that shape daily life and determine who gets held up or left behind. Thank you to everyone who read, shared, challenged us, and...
I hadn’t seen him in years. Then I caught his pop-up photo show in an alleyway gallery in Oregon Hill a few months back. The images were real life. Honest. Some of them tough to even look at. Street people, prostitutes, gang bangers, punks mid-fight, scenes in bars, bikers, protests, pain, and joy all jammed into the same wall. But it wasn’t just...
