Photograph courtesy of Gitana Productions
Cecilia Nadal’s aunt died this summer. She was 100 years old. As a girl, she’d briefly studied art at Washington University, and she later told her niece, “The only reason I got in was because I looked white.”
She wasn’t white, though: Her blood held traces of Africa, Ireland, and the Cherokee Nation. She left the university because of racial pressure. But she never stopped drawing.
“She surrounded herself with art that was indeed phenomenal,” says Nadal (whose own artistic leanings prompted her to found Gitana Productions). “She sold paintings to members of her church or gave them away to friends and family members. And when I asked if she ever got information from arts organizations, she said, ‘Child, those people don’t want me to go there! I’m just another Negro they would rather see stay at home.’”
Nadal thought a lot about her aunt, and what St. Louis missed by not making room for her, while working with the Regional Arts Commission to plan a conference called “Cross-Cultural Engagement: Building a Diverse and Dynamic Community.” Held October 11 and 12 at Webster University, it is open to the public and will teach participants to navigate cultural differences, stitching together St. Louis’ patchwork of immigrant communities, people living with poverty or disabilities, people of different sexual orientations.
The conference won’t be dry or preachy—there’s an experiential workshop by the Urban Bush Women Leadership Institute, a Hindu ritual of colors, a poverty simulation to help nonprofit staff understand what it means to be poor, and workshops to connect participants with the Hispanic and Asian communities.
“If you were to ask my aunt if she felt marginalized, she would have said no, because she surrounded herself with beauty and volunteered with emotionally challenged youth at Hawthorne Psychiatric Center,” Nadal says. “What is telling is that she never got a flyer or a call to become engaged with the arts community, either as a patron or an artist, because she lived on Euclid between St. Louis Avenue and Natural Bridge. That kind of marginalization happens quite a bit in St. Louis, when we ‘cluster’ people into one aggregate group—Northside, poor, disabled, lesbian, immigrant—and do not engage with them as individuals.”
For information on the conference, which is part of a larger initiative to connect St. Louis’ fragmented communities, visit stlcrossculturalengagement.org.
