Make time to do what you want to do.
Not the thing you could do,
or the thing you should do,
or the thing you have always done,
but the thing you want to do—
the thing that burns in your blood
and won’t let you rest.—Candelaria Silva-Collins
With the passing of Candelaria Silva-Collins on March 24, 2026, Boston lost a deeply respected cultural leader whose work shaped artists, organizations, and community life across the city. We in the Creative Entrepreneur Fellowship community feel that loss deeply. For many of us, Candelaria was not only a public leader, but a mentor, collaborator, and friend. We learned from her in real and lasting ways. She believed in artists, paid close attention to people, and showed us what care, generosity, and cultural leadership looked like in practice. Her passing leaves a profound absence in Boston’s arts community and in our own lives.
Those who knew Candelaria knew her as a connector, an advocate, and a source of encouragement. She knew how to recognize people’s gifts and help make room for them. For eight years, she was a guiding force in the Arts & Business Council’s Creative Entrepreneur Fellowship, mentoring more than eighty artists and makers. Many of us experienced her not simply as an advisor, but as someone who saw us clearly and urged us to take our work, and ourselves, seriously.
Her impact reached far beyond the Fellowship. In Roxbury and across Boston, Candelaria helped build cultural life in ways that will endure. She spearheaded the Roxbury Film Festival, Roxbury Open Studios, and the Roxbury Literary Annual, and helped transform Hibernian Hall into a vital cultural home for artists, writers, and community members. Her belief that “Roxbury is rich” was not a slogan. It was something she lived by. She saw the depth, talent, history, creativity, and possibility of the neighborhood, and worked throughout her life to make sure others saw it too.
Candelaria was also an author whose love of storytelling began early in life, shaped by her upbringing in a large extended family in St. Louis, Missouri, her deep love of reading, and her commitment to centering children of color in literature. Her children’s books, including Stacey Became a Frog One Day, Jump! Jump! Jump! Stacey, and What’s the Baby’s Name, Stacey?, reflected her warmth, imagination, and belief in the power of stories to help young people see themselves.
What made Candelaria so meaningful to so many of us within the Fellowship was not only what she built, but how she moved through the world. She paid attention. She followed through. She understood that care was not separate from the work. One of us remembers how she would cut out newspaper clippings and send them directly as a way of documenting what mattered. She understood the importance of being seen, of having a record, of knowing your work had landed somewhere beyond yourself. She also taught us the power of a personal thank-you note, the simple but lasting act of acknowledging someone with sincerity, specificity, and heart. These gestures may have seemed small to others, but with Candelaria they never were. They were part of how she built trust, memory, and community.
Candelaria believed artists mattered, not only for what we made, but for how we helped to shape the life of a neighborhood and a city. She understood that creative work needs support, recognition, and relationships in order to grow. In conversation, in mentorship, and in the many spaces she helped shape, she encouraged artists to think more clearly and more boldly about our work. She challenged people with honesty, but she did it in a way that made us feel strengthened rather than diminished.
As Creative Entrepreneur fellows, we feel her loss both personally and collectively. We also know that her influence continues in the ways so many of us now move through our own work: how we document, how we encourage, how we make connections, how we thank people, and how we try to build something lasting with care. Her legacy lives not only in the institutions and programs she helped shape, but in the artists she mentored and the values she passed on through her example.
We offer this tribute with grief, gratitude, and love. We honor Candelaria Silva-Collins for the steadiness of her leadership, the generosity of her spirit, and the lasting impact of her life’s work. She helped make Boston’s cultural landscape stronger, more connected, and more alive. She will be deeply missed as she rests in power.
A memorial service will be held for Candelaria Silva-Collins on May 9, 2026, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., at Sardis Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. The service may be viewed via live stream here.
