This story first appeared in the Bay State Banner.
Candelaria Silva-Collins, an arts administrator and author who pioneered culture as a tool of economic development in Roxbury, has died at 71.
Silva-Collins passed away from cancer on March 24 surrounded by family at her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. She had moved there last year to be near her grandchildren, said her husband, Tessil Collins.
Through more than half a century living in Boston, Silva-Collins founded or seeded Black cultural institutions and programs that include the performance space inside Hibernian Hall, Roxbury Open Studios, an annual literary journal and what has become the Roxbury International Film Festival.
“I think Candelaria was a visionary,” said Kelley Chunn, who was the founding chair of the Roxbury Cultural District. “Giving artists a voice I think is one of her strongest contributions to our community — through film, visual arts and literature.”
In 2015, the St. Louis American, a Black-owned weekly newspaper in her hometown, dubbed Silva-Collins a “cultural pioneer.”
For a decade ending in 2007 Silva-Collins was director of ACT (Arts, Culture and Trade) Roxbury, an arm of the Madison Park Development Corporation.
“We believe arts and culture are a vehicle for economic development,” she said in a 1999 interview. “A lot of artists focus on their art, but they don’t think of it as a product or as a business. Part of what we want to do is to get people to the next level. …We want people who have products to get them sold.”
Before relocating to the South, Silva-Collins had been program manager since 2014 of the Boston Public Library’s Fellowes Athenaeum Trust, awarding grants for enrichment events ranging from yoga classes to jazz concerts at the Shaw Branch in Nubian Square.
“She was a really strong steward at the Fellowes program, and it gave a lot of community-based artists a platform before they became well known,” Chunn said, citing visual artist Ekua Holmes as an example.
As coordinator of community membership at the Huntington Theatre Company, Silva-Collins attracted more Black patrons to shows at the venerable theater on the edge of Roxbury.
She also spent eight years coordinating Creative Entrepreneur Fellowships awarded by the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston.
“She was a fierce mentor and a vital force in Boston’s arts and community ecosystem,” said Ngo-Tran Vua, one of the 80 fellows Silva-Collins mentored. “I am so grateful to have crossed many paths with her, to have been guided by her and to have learned from her wisdom.”
Other organizations Silva-Collins worked for include METCO, Roxbury Community College and Boston Medical Center.
Born in Bethesda, Maryland, to an African American mother, Norma Jean English, and a Puerto Rican father, Saturnino Silva, Silva-Collins was raised in the suburbs of St. Louis, her mother’s birthplace. One of her proudest recollections was of being baptized in the Mississippi River as a child.
She lived with her mother first in Kinloch, a Black enclave, before moving to University City, a prosperous suburb that was then predominately Jewish. She was one of the first African American students to graduate from that suburb’s high school.
In the early 1970s, Silva-Collins arrived in Boston to attend Northeastern University. She left in her second year to start a family with her first husband, Thomas McQueen, who later died.
Silva-Collins went on to graduate from Goddard College through a program for older adults. Before computing as we know it today existed, she earned her bachelor’s through distance learning, mail correspondence and occasional visits to Goddard’s campus in Plainfield, Vermont, with her infant son and toddler daughter in tow.
She started her career as a writer and poet, with her works appearing in the Bay State Banner, Ebony Junior, Roxbury Literary Annual, School Library Journal and The Boston Globe.
After her long years in arts administration and consulting, Silva-Collins returned to her passion for writing, publishing a series of three children’s books, all with a Black girl named Stacey Huggins as the main character: “Stacey Became a Frog One Day” in 2020, “Jump! Jump! Jump! Stacey” in 2021 and “What’s the Baby’s Name, Stacey?” in 2022.
Kirkus Reviews named “Jump! Jump! Jump! Stacey” one of the Best Indie Books of the year.
In addition to her husband, Silva-Collins leaves her daughter, Amber Rashida McQueen; son Cyrus Malik McQueen; her mother, Norma Jean Thompson; siblings Nina Gardner, Glenn Ellis, Vicki, Maribel and Nimar Silva; and her grandchildren.
A memorial service is scheduled April 23 at Sardis Baptist Church in Charlotte.
Silva-Collins’ vision of culture stimulating economic development in Roxbury, still a work in progress, received official recognition in 2017 when the city and state designated a Roxbury Cultural District in the neighborhood. The film festival, open studios and Hibernian Hall’s performance space she orchestrated have continued, supplemented by a newer annual book festival at the Shaw branch library. A jazz club inside the Bolling Building is planned.
