@rvamag.bsky.social
Local culture since 2005 • RVA • Richmond, Virginia #rvamag @rvamag Find our stories here: https://linktr.ee/Rvamag
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. But it wasn’t just shock value. There was trust in those photos. Access. We had to talk about the work.
09.12.2025 16:39 — 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Tacky Lights season has officially kicked off, and the region is glowing again.
Here is a neighborhood-by-neighborhood guide to some of the brightest spots around town this year.
“We are basically creating a state mandated monopoly for the medical operators. Ten million dollars is pennies to them. That is a complete market capture.” – Chelsea Higgs Wise of Marijuana Justice
09.12.2025 15:10 — 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 1December is here, and we have only 9 legislative days scheduled before ACA enhanced premium tax credits expire at the end of the month.
Here are some highlights from the week.
How do we get #RVA to do this? @cbs6-richmond.bsky.social @rvamag.bsky.social @richmond.com
06.12.2025 22:27 — 👍 10 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 1
Virginia ABC, and seemingly every liquor company in Virginia, didn’t waste time embracing the chaos. This week the agency rolled out a series of promotional graphics featuring a raccoon posing with bottles of bourbon, vodka, tequila and more under the banner “Raccoon’s Recommendations.”
05.12.2025 16:30 — 👍 8 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 1
So when CONEX appeared there a few weeks ago, rising out of a sunken concrete pit built from cargo containers and covered in murals, it felt like the neighborhood had quietly grown a new cultural hub that no one saw coming.
04.12.2025 18:01 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
This memory came back to me in the middle of the night, and it felt connected to the way fear shapes people and systems right now. It’s just a moment from childhood that suddenly made a lot more sense as an adult.
04.12.2025 17:48 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
I love Christmas time shows, everyone’s cold so they all pack in together, maybe you’re at Punks for Presents, maybe you’re seeing your friends play their last show of the year. We got a lot of great stuff this week as we close out the year.
04.12.2025 17:38 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
... It reminded me of one of those broadcast TV guest-star-a-minute “Very Special Christmas Episodes” from the 80’s. My time at the theatre was pure smiles. I guarantee you, if you go, yours will be too.
04.12.2025 17:28 — 👍 4 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
I wanted to catch up with Jones not only to discuss the likelihood of his bill passing in the General Assembly’s 2026 session, but to also explore his personal motivations for drafting legislation that’s sure to draw national headlines… and the ire of the Trump administration.
04.12.2025 15:52 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0New reporting confirms it: the Ukraine “deal” is more about making money for Trump’s cronies than it is about a lasting peace in Europe.
Is there ANYTHING that this administration won’t exploit for their own personal gain?
Thousands of you weighed in for our 2025 Readers’ Poll, chiming in on everything from the city’s smokiest BBQ to the boutiques you swear by and the spots you insist your visiting friends have to see “to get the real Richmond.”
So thanks to everyone who voted. Here’s how it shaked out.
Reader support and local advertisers have kept our reporting rooted in the public good.
So if you are able, help us reach our year-end goal. Even $2 makes a difference. A monthly gift makes an even bigger one. Every contribution protects a free and independent press in Virginia.
Drinksgiving isn’t on any calendar, but it behaves like a holiday anyway predictable, chaotic, and oddly comforting, the way familiar mistakes often are.
This year, instead of guessing which dive bars would be overflowing, we just asked the city.
Last Thursday night’s Salon de Résistance: The Shape of Music to Come at Black Iris took on a question that has gone from hypothetical to philosophical to entierly unavoidable: what happens to music when technology stops being just a tool, and starts becoming it’s own creator?
25.11.2025 21:07 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Hammerly knows this story well. He spent a decade performing it at Ford’s Theatre in D.C. and once promised himself he’d never revisit the material. Of course, human beings are famous for breaking promises, especially to themselves. “I’m living Christmas Carol,” he said. “I wake up singing carols.”
25.11.2025 20:54 — 👍 2 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
And so we begin the holiday season, wrapped up in scarves and full of Thanksgiving leftovers. Some fantastic shows this weekend to take the in laws to, show ‘em what we got going on on a Saturday.
Got a show coming up? New single? Simply want someone to talk music? Hit me up at griffin@rvamag.com.
Lungs is a snake waiting in the grass.
Now take a step back and notice how much of yourself lingers with them. How your criticism catches in your throat to avoid hypocrisy. How over-the-top yet frustratingly realistic these people are.
One of the best parts of the Richmond scene is that there is always a good cause to support at a gig, you’re already paying the $15 for the ticket, go make it worth someone’s while.
Got a show coming up? New single? Simply want someone to talk music? Hit me up at griffin@rvamag.com.
A coalition is calling for a five-day boycott from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday.
The campaign, titled “We Ain’t Buying It,” urges consumers to avoid three major retailers, Target, Amazon, and Home Depot, and redirect their holiday spending toward small and local businesses instead.
When you talk to the workers on strike outside the Starbucks in the Fan, you don’t hear anything abstract about “labor movements” or “corporate negotiations.” You hear frustration, exhaustion, and a pretty simple question: why won’t Starbucks come to the table?
20.11.2025 20:57 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Every so often Richmond grabs a win that feels almost improbable, and this weekend we got one: Baltik’s Bagel came back from New York BagelFest with the People’s Choice Award.
20.11.2025 18:59 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
This weekend, Richmond joins that movement.
On East Broad Street, ANTENNAE Gallery is hosting the city’s local expression of Fall of Freedom, a curated show bringing together more than a dozen artists, each responding in their own way to the moment.
....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 shoulder to shoulder.
It felt like a shift.
For many Virginians, that distant war has felt closer than ever. Volunteers and medical personnel from Virginia, including Dr. Young and others drawn by humanitarian impulse, have traveled to Ukraine to assist, train, or deliver aid.
17.11.2025 20:42 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
This week we’re featuring two poems by Mary Beth Cox, a former Peace Corps volunteer living in Chesterfield and working in Richmond. The poems draw on moments from the beginning and end of her service, exploring distance, identity, service, small mistakes and big realizations abroad and at home.
17.11.2025 15:37 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Richmond, it’s that time again: our semi annual Support Local, Vote Local Poll.
13.11.2025 21:49 — 👍 4 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0
All I would like to do today is point you toward the canned food drive happening at The Camel.. The drive is intended to ease the burden placed on those suffering from the lack of SNAP benefits.
Got a show coming up? New single? Simply want someone to talk music? Hit me up at griffin@rvamag.com.
Dispatch Number six: will music survive technology?
Join us for Salon de Résistance on November 20th at Black Iris for a conversation about the future of music and it's ability to survive the AI revolution, featuring John Campbell from Lamb of God and Tyler Williams of the Head and the Heart.
