Iowa City multimedia artist Barry Phipps has released his most recent book of photographs, Driving a Table Down (University of Iowa Press). It’s a visual travelogue told over 18 days and 108 pages, detailing a trip taken with his mother from Iowa to Florida, to visit (and deliver the titular furniture to) family. In Zak […]
Iowa City events
ICCT presents ‘Company,’ just in time for its 50th birthday

Update: On Friday, March 13, Iowa City Community Theatre decided to postpone performances indefinitely due to health concerns related to coronavirus. For as long as there has been theater, fictional lovers’ stories have culminated in either marriage or death. Love and sex were fun to watch, but not the point of the story. If the […]
Fact and fiction intersect to find truth in ‘Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets’

Vino Vérité returns for 2020 this weekend with Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. Directors Bill and Turner Ross will be in attendance for a Q&A following the screening. The series, presented by FilmScene, Bread Garden Market and Little Village, presents films in the vérité tradition paired with hors d’oeuvres, wine and desserts. Tickets are $20 for […]
Riverside’s ‘Stages’ is 75 minutes of honest human experience

Riverside Theatre opened the Iowa premier of the one-man show Stages by David Lee Nelson on Feb. 28. Nelson’s show and performance are remarkable for several reasons. Co-created and directed with Riverside’s Producing Artistic Director, Stages is the chronicle of Nelson’s own lived experiences with stage four colon cancer. Nelson is both playwright and actor. […]
Five questions with: Playwright/actor David Lee Nelson

This Friday, Feb. 28, Riverside Theatre’s artistic director Adam Knight brings a story close to his heart to the Gilbert Street stage. Stages is a play that Knight helped develop with long-time friend David Lee Nelson, following Nelson’s diagnosis in 2017 with stage four colon cancer. Throughout the course of his chemotherapy, Nelson kept a […]
Tristen Ives’s new film is an exercise in vulnerability and the inexpressible

On Sunday, March 1, at 6 p.m., Public Space One will screen PS1 Free Studio Resident Tristen Ives’ diaristic film take a pic of me and leave me here, a screening and installation that is the culmination of their four-month residency. The screening is free, and patrons should note that 225 and 229 N. Gilbert […]
‘The Assistant’: A snapshot of our current conversation around sexual misconduct (the image isn’t pretty)

Kitty Green’s The Assistant is currently playing at FilmScene on the Ped Mall for the next two weeks. Papercuts are not the only wounds that sear in Green’s masterful and mesmerizing feature film The Assistant (2020). Some hurts are untraceable, undetectable on the surface of one’s skin. While the industrial revolution altered the domestic sphere’s […]
‘Matt & Ben’: Rewriting a Hollywood Bromance

After more than a decade of superhuman blockbusters on the big screen, it’s hard to say if audiences are still hungry for another origin story. Willow Creek Theatre Co., Iowa City’s newest troupe, is staking their claim on the witty retelling of the rise of Hollywood celebrities, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Mindy Kaling and […]
The Actors’ Gang brings the huddled masses to Hancher, Tim Robbins talks mythic courage and national identity

“… cries she / With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …’” — “The New Colossus,” Emma Lazarus The New Colossus, directed and co-written by Academy Award-winning actor, Tim Robbins, was created in collaboration with the Actors’ Gang, the 39-year-old, Los Angeles-based company where he […]
Blake Shaw gets romantic: 14 songs on his Valentine’s Day playlist

Musician Blake Shaw is a familiar face, and voice, in Iowa City. He’s been performing in town for the past 16 years, more than half his life, and living here for 10 of those. If you frequent the city’s formidable jazz circuit, you might have seen him playing out with the Blake Shaw Quintet, Blake […]
Wassail in celebration of the Apple Tree Man returns to Rapid Creek Cidery with Flash In a Pan

Rapid Creek Cidery will be presenting their second annual Wassail event on Saturday, Feb. 1, with doors opening for VIP ticket holders at 6:30 p.m. and the downstairs opening for everyone at 7:30 p.m. Standard tickets are $25, and include a pint of cider, light appetizers and the sounds of Flash in a Pan, Iowa City’s notably excellent bluegrass band. […]
Music weaves through all aspects of life for poet-critic Hanif Abdurraqib

Music critic, poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib has made a career writing about music in both a critical and poetic way. The two aspects that aren’t often mixed, but Abdurraqib has seen renowned successes with his four books. He’ll be reading from them at Prairie Lights on Thursday, Jan. 30 at 7 p.m. […]