CULTURE




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The Best of RVA Magazine 2025

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...

How Locals Mike Shea and Jonathan Facka Made ‘The Light’

Editor's Note: This story that begins, as too many do, with a clown in someone’s DMs and ends with a camera duct-taped to a toy train. The first thing to know is that Mike Shea tried to make a normal introduction. In his mind, it was a filmmaker reaching out to a...

Photo | What Suitcase Joe Found at Skid Row University

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,...

The Lights Are On! Richmond’s Tacky Lights Season Has Begun

Tacky Lights season has officially kicked off, and the region is glowing again. From tight city blocks to wide Powhatan backroads, homes across Central Virginia have thrown the switch and settled into that familiar holiday tradition of trying to outshine the...

Support Richmond Independent Media This Giving Tuesday

Everyone in the media business will tell you it has been a tough year. In some ways it has been, but it was also the year we found another gear. As newsrooms froze up, we kept shining a light on the people who make Richmond what it is. The musicians, artists, comedians, actors, entrepreneurs, and all the folks building culture in real time. We...

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RVA Magazine 2025

Review | ‘Lungs’ Is a Mirror You Can’t Look Away From

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 whilst policing climate change and renewables, carbon footprints, and the rise of the...

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GIANTS! Makes the Case for a New Era in Richmond Art

The GIANTS! Exhibition Preview Party was last night at VMFA, and for the first time in my 20+ years moving within Richmond’s arts scene, I saw a mix of people I honestly didn’t expect to ever share the same room. High-end collectors, street artists, curators, younger creatives, and this new art-forward middle class moving into the city were all...

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How a Charlottesville Surgeon Found Purpose in Ukraine

Every morning at 9 a.m. in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, the world stops. Cars freeze in the streets, trams halt mid-track, and pedestrians stand silent as the national anthem plays. It lasts a minute, a ritual pause to remember the dead and remind the living what they’re fighting for. Dr. Jeffrey Young stood too, still and listening. A trauma surgeon from...

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