The Black Rose, the West Branch bookstore and cocktail lounge that opened earlier this year, has closed its brick-and-mortar location, owner Ashley Kofoed announced on Sunday on social media. “This isn’t a goodbye,” she said. “It’s a page turn.” Even without the Main Street store, “the story continues online, where so many of you have […]
Eastern Iowa Arts & Entertainment
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Hancher announces a new multi-venue spring music fest in Iowa City, Stop/Time Festival
Hancher Auditorium, lead by executive director Andre Perry, announced that they are producing a new music and arts festival scheduled for this coming Spring. The Stop/Time Festival is billed as a “two-day, multi-venue, multi-artist spring festival devoted to innovation and independence in contemporary music and the arts.”
The first edition of Stop/Time Festival launches Friday, April 3 through Saturday, April 4 in Iowa City.
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After four decades, the Minnesota Orchestra makes a triumphant return to Hancher Auditorium
The Minnesota Orchestra, under new Music Director Thomas Søndergård, performed at Hancher Auditorium earlier this month, on Nov. 15. The performance saw the return of the ensemble to the University of Iowa, as their last visit came in 1982. Before that, the Orchestra made regular visits through the decades prior, with a a partnership that […]
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Fully Booked at ICPL: Timeless gifts for teen readers
A great book gifted by someone special in your life, especially during your formative years, can become a keepsake. I regularly purge décor, art, clothes and, yes, books, but my permanent reading collection is a part of my identity. This list of books for youth in middle and high school runs the gamut of genre and […]
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With ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,’ chef Samin Nosrat boiled cooking down to its elements. At Hancher — and with her new book — she reflects on why we set a table in the first place
If there’s anything we all could use at the end of 2025, it’s comforting food with good company. Helping patrons get into the holiday feasting mindset, Hancher Auditorium hosted a conversation with acclaimed chef and author Samin Nosrat and Iowa City’s own Carmen Maria Machado on Nov. 13. The auditorium, buzzing with food enthusiasts of […]
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Review: Käthe Kollwitz’s stark, intimate portraits of war, on display at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, feel all too familiar
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 […]
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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 […]
