Arts & Entertainment
Kings Dominion’s Halloween Haunt Returns for a Spooky Good Time
Fall events are back on select nights beginning September 24th through October 30th.

Kings Dominion’s Halloween Haunt makes its return beginning Saturday, September 24 and it’s bigger and scarier than ever, with six mazes, five scare zones and new live shows, along with hundreds of monsters roaming the midways. During the nighttime event, guests can also get their adrenaline fix on more than 20 rides, including Twisted Timbers, IntimidatorTM 305 and Dominator, as fog and darkness blanket the park. The Great Pumpkin Fest also returns September 24 with family-friendly daytime Halloween fun in Planet Snoopy.
New Haunt highlights this year include:
FRESH BLOOD – NEW ATTRACTIONS
- NEW MAZE: 21
You find yourself deep in your greatest nightmare. There is no escape. Around each corner, new horrors await. The things that go bump in the night are here, and they are here FOR YOU!!- NEW SCARE ZONE: Site X
The Jungle X-pedition team made discoveries that changed history. But rumors have emerged that while excavating this site, the crew unearthed something sinister, and the jungle began to transform them. Venture into Site X to discover the horrors of the jungle, but listen closely as a luring whistle or rhythmic drum could spell your impending doom.- NEW SHOW: The Queen’s Ball
Join Queen Majesty as new Monsters from far and wide have come to pledge their allegiance to her ruinous reign. Watch dancers, musicians, and acrobats prove their loyalty through fierce performances. But they must be wary, if the queen does not enjoy their antics, they may meet a fiery end.
NEW SHOW: Convergence
There is nothing to do but watch our Ceremonial Drummers as they summon the spirit of El Tunchi. Passersby beware as this ancient jungle spirit does not like visitors and you could become the latest traveler to never leave Site X.
Great Pumpkin Fest
Kings Dominion’s daytime Halloween event, the Great Pumpkin Fest, puts the “WEE!” in Halloween with a full day’s worth of family-friendly fun, including a pumpkin patch, hay maze, ghostly games, costume party with the PEANUTSTM gang, favorite rides and so much more! The Great Pumpkin Fest is held Saturday and Sundays from September 24 through October 30 from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Planet Snoopy will close at 6 p.m. as the park transforms for Halloween Haunt.The Great Pumpkin Fest has fun for the whole family to enjoy together and as an added benefit, children three to five years of age are eligible for unlimited FREE admission to this event and the rest of 2022 when their parent or guardian registers online and activates their 2023 Pre-K Pass at the park.
Kings Dominion Halloween Haunt Admission
Single night tickets – Buy tickets at KingsDominon.com and get monster savings of up to $30 off the regular main gate price of $75. Applicable taxes and fees apply to online orders.Halloween Haunt General Parking is $25 per vehicle and can be purchased online or at the parking booth upon arrival. Preferred Parking is available for $35. Applicable taxes and fees apply to online orders.
Scream more and wait less. Speed past the lines with a Fright & Fast Lane pass. Enjoy all the Fast Lane Plus attractions PLUS bypass the regular wait lines for six Haunt mazes, one time each. Fright and Fast Lane can be purchased online for as low as $70. To get unlimited visits and free parking to Kings Dominion for the rest of 2022 and all of 2023, including Halloween Haunt, guests can purchase a 2023 Gold Season Pass.
Kings Dominion’s Halloween Haunt has welcomed visitors for over 21 years and has become an institution in the Virginia theme park landscape. For the most up-to-date hours of operation, visit kingsdominion.com. The Great Pumpkin Fest and Halloween Haunt are both included with park admission. Due to the explicit and frightening nature of Halloween Haunt, the nighttime event is not recommended for children under 13.
To increase safety and provide efficient entry into the park during the Haunt event, guests will be asked to adhere to a new policy which states that no bags of any kind larger than 6.5” x 4.5” x 2” may be brought into the park after 6 p.m. on Haunt nights. All bags will be subject to search.

Arts & Entertainment
12th annual Richmond Bluegrass Jam set for April 22nd benefitting military veterans and families
The free, family-friendly event features 20 of the region’s best bluegrass and Americana bands playing on multiple stages for nine straight hours, all to raise money for military veterans and their families through two local organizations.

The Richmond Bluegrass Jam will return for its twelfth year on April 22, 2023, from 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., at American Legion Post 354, on the banks of the James River in Midlothian, Va. This is the second year the Jam is being held at the American Legion Post after a previous multi-year run at the Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen.
The free, family-friendly event features 20 of the region’s best bluegrass and Americana bands playing on multiple stages for nine straight hours, all to raise money for military veterans and their families through two local organizations: the Richmond Fisher House, a home away from home for the families of veterans and active-duty soldiers recuperating at Richmond’s McGuire Veterans Medical Center; and Liberation Veteran Services, which provides housing and care for veterans in crisis.
Fans are strongly encouraged to make tax-deductible donations to the Richmond Fisher House and Liberation Veteran Services at the event or online at rvabluegrassjam.com. Over the past eleven years, the event has raised more than $204,000 for the families of military men and women.
The bands—all of which play at no charge in support of the Richmond Fisher House and Liberation Veteran Services—include Tara Mills Band, Cary Street Ramblers, Josh Grigsby and County Line, Cook County Bluegrass, Slack Family Bluegrass Band, and more.
The event also will feature local craft beverages and Richmond’s food trucks.
“We’re excited to bring the Richmond Bluegrass Jam back to American Legion Post 354 after a successful event last year,” says Tim Gundlach, president of RVA Bluegrass Jam, Inc., the event’s organizer. “This new location along the James River is not only inspiring, but also further connects the Jam with our military community. This year, we’re expanding our support of our military veterans and their families by raising money for both the Richmond Fisher House and Liberation Veteran Services. We’re proud to partner with these two extraordinary organizations.”
In addition to listening to the scheduled bands, attendees are encouraged to bring their own instruments. Several open jam areas will be available, as well as an instrument check station.
American Legion Post 354 is located in Midlothian, Va. Parking will be available at nearby James River High School, 3700 James River Rd., with free shuttles running throughout the day.
More information at rvabluegrassjam.com and on Facebook at facebook.com/rvabluegrassjam.
Arts & Entertainment
Husband-and-wife duo bringing new restaurant concept to former Mill on MacArthur space
The deal closed Monday for an undisclosed amount. Sperity Real Estate Ventures’ Nathan Hughes worked the deal.

From Richmond BizSense:
Barely a month after its closure, The Mill on MacArthur restaurant space in the Bellevue neighborhood is set to be reborn.
Husband-and-wife duo Rawleigh and Jaya Easley purchased The Mill’s lease at 4023 MacArthur Ave. and its equipment and are planning to open a new restaurant in its place called Neighbor.
The deal closed Monday for an undisclosed amount. Sperity Real Estate Ventures’ Nathan Hughes worked the deal.
Arts & Entertainment
Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU’s bevy of spring exhibitions run the gamut
An international group exhibition studying abstraction and a monumental new public artwork by Navine G. Dossos for ICA’s iconic facade kick off the 2023 spring season

The Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU) has announced its Spring 2023 season, featuring a group exhibition and corresponding public art installation, both organized by ICA Senior Curator and Director of Programs, Sarah Rifky, as well as hybrid performances as part of the Test Pattern series. Additionally, Misread Unread Read Reread Misread Unread Reread (MURRMUR), an ongoing research framework that opened in Fall 2022 with the self-publishing pavillion by Rafael Domenech, will continue through 2023 with further iterations and programs by artists and educators.
Installed across the ICA’s multiple galleries and spaces, So it appears, runs through July 16, 2023. The exhibition features nineteen artists from around the world whose works appear inscrutable at first glance—but upon closer examination, tangible, acutely urgent narratives begin to emerge. Grappling with the paradox of how to represent the unrepresentable, the collected artists have surfaced abstraction as a visual strategy—a tactic for encoding, encrypting, and indexing otherwise invisible realities and disasters, as well as speculative futures. Formal abstraction, color fields and conceptual minimalism act as repositories for stories of carcerality, injustice, enslavement, the invisibility of migrants, environmental racism, and sonic warfare, among other realities.
Though created at different times (from 2004 to the present) and in vastly disparate contexts across fourteen different countries, the works presented in So it appears reveal surprising affinities in their approaches, subtleties and associations. Seen together, they invite visitors to reflect on the interconnectedness of the manifold global crises.
Featured artists include Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Monira Al Qadiri, Alexander Apóstol, Navine G. Dossos, Torkwase Dyson, Basmah Felemban, Žilvinas Kempinas, Agnieszka Kurant, Dinh Q. Lê, Jeewi Lee, John Menick, Novo (Reynier Leyva Novo), Trevor Paglen, Walid Raad, Tomás Saraceno, Pak Sheung-Chuen, and Levester Williams. Tasmania-based artist Tricky Walsh and New York–based audio artist and producer Sharon Mashihi will also be in residence throughout the exhibition’s run and will produce new works to be presented on April 21st on the occasion of the ICA’s fifth anniversary.
Concurrently, artist Navine G. Dossos will present a public work, McLean (2023), on ICA at VCU’s iconic N. Belvidere facade, on view for one year, February 24, 2023 – January 7, 2024. For this visually spectacular work, the artist adapted one hundred gouache paintings she created between 2018 and 2020, each panel in response to a news article published in the wake of the heinous murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi—a resident of McLean, Virginia—in October 2019.
Through this series, Dossos has developed a lexicon of symbols that stand in for the absent picturing of the case. The work is rendered in Dossos’ double take on Islamic and geometric arts, yet instead of lines and shapes, Dossos composes her intricate work through graphic icons, a representation of the narrative thread, encompassing multiple forms of technology, different individuals, nation-states, law enforcement agencies and human rights organizations. McLean is developed from Dossos’ project No Such Organization (2020) and which will be shown as part of So it appears.
Continuing from the 2022 Fall season is Misread Unread Read Re-read Misread Unread Re-read (MURRMUR), a ten-month curatorial framework and publishing program committed to expanding how we think about exhibitions and what it means to read, publish and distribute art, books and ideas. Developed in conversation with participating artists and educators, MURRMUR seeks to break down, massage, map and circulate information through experiments, improvisations and alternative curriculums. MURRMUR is organized by Senior Curator and Director of Programs, Sarah Rifky, and Assistant Curator of Commerce and Publications, Egbert Vongmalaithong.
MURRMUR presents two new programs in April 2023 and one new installation of research, references and a materials library designed by Sam Taylor in February 2023, organized by Egbert Vongmalaithong, ICA Assistant Curator of Commerce and Publications. On view February 24–July 16, 2023, in the ICA Shop + Cafe, Taylor’s installation provides objects that can be activated with a tap of your phone to reveal media and texts, providing insight on MURRMUR and the upcoming iterations.
One of the new programs is between a book and a soft place, a new commission by new media artist and design educator nicole killian. Designed as a playful learning environment, visitors are invited into this play-space to consider various ways for language to be carried out, embodied, and “queered”: we wear the language, we dance the language and we hold it in our hands. An intervention on the ICA’s 2nd floor, between a book and a soft place, can be considered a study on killian’s research questions around queering design education.
MURRMUR also presents SIT(UATION), a mutable seating and display system by artist Riley Hooker in collaboration with architect Nick Meehan. The project grows from a desire to center the body in the act of reading and the structure can be understood as plasmatic—resisting fixed linearity and promoting intellectual promiscuity. The design pulls from 1960s radical architecture, post-modern seating design a-la Peter Opsvik and Terje Ekstrøm, educational methods developed for neurodivergent students, embodiment and mindfulness practices, and anarchic political theories. The research and process behind these programs will be presented in February 2023 and on view from April 21–July 16, 2023.
In September 2022, MURRMUR opened with The Medium is the Massage, a new commission by artist Rafael Domenech. Visitors to The Medium is the Massage can become authors, readers, editors, and publishers when they enter this continuously transforming publication-pavilion. The living space turns the art gallery from a site of passive reception into a site of active production, right up until it closes on July 16, 2023, when the public will be invited to take the project’s remains out of the gallery and into their homes.
TEST PATTERN
Curated by ICA Assistant Curator and Producer David Riley, Test Pattern is a hybrid performance series inspired by the legacy of visionary public-access TV programs and alternative video movements in the US. The series invites artists to turn the ICA auditorium into an experimental production studio for week-long residencies, during which they collaborate with members of the local community to create a live performance and internet broadcast. Launched in March 2022, past Test Pattern performers include DeForrest Brown Jr., madison moore, SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, Moor Mother, jaamil olawale kosoko, Kinlaw and Dorian Wood.
Test Pattern returns to the ICA auditorium on Friday, April 7, with a performance by vocalist, composer, and performance artist Holland Andrews. Their work focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build cathartic and dissonant soundscapes. Andrews arranges music for voice, clarinet and electronics and frequently highlights themes surrounding vulnerability and healing. In addition to creating solo work, Andrews develops and performs soundscapes for dance, theater and film. Their work has toured nationally and internationally with artists such as Bill T. Jones, Dorothee Munyaneza, Will Rawls and poet Demian Dinéyazhi.