Feature by Ngoc-Tran Vu
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.