On a Sunday morning, I quietly made my way through the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art’s second-floor galleries to “Powerful: The Art of Käthe Kollwitz,” on display through Jan. 4, 2026. I entered, sat on a wooden bench, collected myself and looked around, much as I would before a mass. Julia Jessen, curator of Collections […]
Eastern Iowa Arts & Entertainment
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Review: Yo-Yo Ma reflects on finding his sound, overcoming doubts and what makes us human at Hancher
Yo-Yo Ma sits in the middle of the stage, one leg draped over the other, as he listens to a question from someone in the audience. “Ask me anything” appears on a large screen above him. One of the questions comes from a young man, a cello player who wants to know how to overcome […]
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Book Review: ‘Fashion Activist: My Life as a Designer, Dreamer, and Disrupter’ by Andre Wright
This past May, I had the pleasure of attending Beyond Fashion Fest in Iowa City. Launched by Iowa native Andre Wright, it was a weekend of fashion, comedy and fun. As a Black woman, witnessing a brother move in his own creative lane was inspirational. I walked away from the festivities thinking, “How did he […]
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Review: Private school parents clash over uncomfortably familiar issues in ‘Eureka Day’ at Riverside Theatre
Jonathan Spector’s 2025 Tony Award-winning Eureka Day, with its sharp humor and painfully familiar questions about privilege, progressivism and public health, has found a lively and incisive staging in Iowa City. Under the direction of Kathleen Johnson, Riverside Theatre’s production embraces the play’s contradictions with a mix of warmth and unease — a balance that, […]
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Review: ‘Videoheaven,’ a genre-defying film essay at Refocus, stirred and challenged Iowans’ rental store nostalgia
Do you remember your favorite video store growing up? Director Alex Ross Perry, who recently released his experimental documentary film Pavements, chronicles the now virtually extinct rental shop industry in Videoheaven, a three-hour film that screened at the Refocus Film Festival earlier this month. Fascinatingly, it’s not really a documentary. Videoheaven is uniquely devoted to studying […]
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Review: Queer desire ruled at Refocus 2025, from ‘She’s the He’ to ‘Hedda’
The Refocus Film Festival awarded its Audience Choice Award to She’s the He, the debut feature from director Siobhan McCarthy. In it, high school best friends Ethan and Alex find themselves tangled up in a queer coming-of-age. Alex (Nico Carney), desperate to impress his dream girl, insists that they pretend to be trans women in […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Fully Booked at ICPL: Horror classics for young readers
October is upon us, and the veil grows thin, which means it’s time to put aside our beach reads and turn towards some darker books. As a child, I loved being read to by my mom, and our go-to for a long time was Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural, a collection of 19th and early-20th […]
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Review: Oogie Boogie, Nosferatu, a sword-swallowing jester and other creatures of the night entice for Kitty and Red’s Burlesque Revue
The lights dropped low at Rock Island’s Circa 21 Speakeasy on Oct. 10 as “She’s My Witch” started to play. Out of the darkness, Kitty Bardot stepped into the spotlight, her confidence instantly taking over the room. From that moment on, the crowd was hooked. Laughter, cheers and applause filled the space as the second […]
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An early Velvet Underground ‘protégé,’ Jonathan Richman wrote his way into punk history while trying to troll the hippies
Jonathan Richman can still pinpoint how the Velvet Underground transformed his life with their collar-grabbing sound back in 1967. “It was on record and it was that drone! Oh my God! They changed everything!” As a teenager, he saw the band over 80 times and was a regular presence before and after gigs. “If the […]
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Review: Lost Woods Music Festival reached new heights in 2025, offering the ultimate escape in a Cedar Falls forest
Returning to the Cedar Falls forest for the third iteration of Lost Woods Music Festival felt like stepping into another dimension—a place where we could escape the chaos and stress of the real world for a single night of bliss. The brainchild of Iowa’s hardest working musicians, the Cedar Falls based indie pop group Salt Fox, Lost Woods 2025 went bigger and better while retaining its authentic, intimate, identity.
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Review: Dubuque poses for the eighth Bluff Strokes Paint Out, a week of open-air art-making
The streets of Dubuque became more creatively engaging when 51 jury selected artists from across the country converged on the city for the Bluff Strokes 2025 Paint Out Sept. 28 through Oct. 4. With artists setting up easels around town, competing for awards and engaging the local community through the act of live art making, […]
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Film critic and frequent ‘Filmspotting’ podcast guest Michael Phillips talks adaptations, Trump fatigue and the Refocus film that feels most pertinent
Michael Phillips, former film critic at the Chicago Tribune, is coming back to Iowa City for the Refocus Film Festival. There, he will join UI Professor and Filmspotting co-host Adam Kempenaar for a live taping of the podcast Friday, October 10. Little Village met with Phillips to chat about the festival and reflect on his long career in a fickle field.
