August 31, 2026 Community Stories

Remembering Rosemary Tracy Woods

Rosemary Tracy Woods
1942 – 2026

By Fungai Tichawangana, Community Member

Rosemary Tracy Woods did not ask for a seat at the table. She built her own tables, then made sure other people found a seat at them. 

I first met her on a Zoom call about 6 years ago. The first thing I realized when she spoke was that she pulled no punches. “We have left so many people out of this process,” I remember her saying, “and we keep doing this over and over.” 

I’ve spent the last few months talking to different people about her life, and this is the most common refrain that comes up from her work and her words: “Where is the representation?” 

Woods, founder of Art for the Soul Gallery and a longtime advisor to the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts, died in April this year after decades spent pushing Springfield’s arts community toward a version of itself that included everyone. 

She left behind a body of work that stretched from a single gallery wall to a citywide push for public art, and a grantmaking program that evolved with her input to cater for people from different backgrounds. 

The Birth of Art for The Soul 

In 1999, Woods and her friend Stella Butler turned years of house art parties into the beginnings of an enduring legacy. Butler had come up with the idea for a gallery and they worked on making it happen. 

They opened Art for the Soul Gallery, housed inside the old Classical High School building, now the Classical Condominiums, with an opening exhibit that featured the work of Frank Frazier. The gallery earned a reputation as Springfield’s African-American gallery, though Woods insisted it stay open to any artist willing to walk through the door. 

Woods came to this work without an art degree. She built her expertise on the road, touring museums near tour stops with her brother, Harold Melvin of Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, and teaching herself the history of contemporary African-American art and the Harlem Renaissance one gallery visit at a time. Running an unaccredited, Black-identified gallery that welcomed all comers was a hard needle to thread.  

Woods threaded it for over two decades. 

The gallery grew. In 2015, Art for the Soul opened a second location in Tower Square and became an official nonprofit. Woods also helped launch an Artists in Business Workshop at Springfield Technical Community College, backed by the UMass Arts Extension Program, the Community Foundation, and the Springfield Cultural Council, that walked 25 artists through the business and legal side of their work. The group kept meeting monthly long after the workshop ended. 

A Pillar for ValleyCreates 

Woods spent five years as an advisor to ValleyCreates, the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts’s initiative supporting the arts sector across three counties, a role that put her advocacy to work at the level of policy and dollars. 

“Tracy’s insight as we built this program was invaluable, and she shaped the work in profound ways,” said Nicole Bourdon, Senior Program Officer at the Community Foundation, who worked with Woods on different initiatives since 2018. 

She remembers Woods’s commitment to equity: “As a fierce advocate for artists, especially artists of color and those with disabilities, she pushed us at every turn to make sure our program was designed to ensure there was equitable access to the offerings and that the support we were providing matched what artists actually needed. When we began the program in 2018, we were only funding 501c3 and fiscally-sponsored arts organizations. She brought to light the inequities of this model of funding, and pushed us to find a way to fund individual artists. I’m proud to say that we’ve provided over 175 grants to artists since 2020, with the majority being artists of color.” 

“Tracy always cut to the chase – she wasn’t interested in mincing words or wasting anyone’s time; she was honest and action-oriented. As one of the key architects of ValleyCreates, she pushed the Community Foundation to do this work with integrity and to be humble, to center equity not just in words but in practice, and to make the work accessible and grounded in the needs of the community.” 

Remembering Woods 

Online, tributes for Woods have come in from all corners of the USA and beyond. In speaking to some of the people who knew and worked with her, here are the memories they cherish most: 

Vanessa Pabón-Hernandez, CEO of the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts, served alongside Woods as a ValleyCreates community advisor for more than a decade. “She showed us all how to take up space unapologetically, with courage,” Pabón-Hernandez said. “Her fierce advocacy for the arts was her soul.” 

Dee Boyle-Clapp, Director of the Arts Extension Service at UMass Amherst, worked with Woods on ValleyCreates grants and programming for years. She said of Woods: “Tracy not only respected artists; she nurtured them. She helped emerging artists bring their best work forward by helping them grow their confidence and embrace the value and importance of their work.” 

“I got to see her in action many times over our 17-year friendship during Artist in Business trainings and workshops that we held in sites in Springfield. Tracy was unapologetic in her advocacy for the arts and arts community, and dedication to seeing smaller organizations succeed. I miss her laughter, our phone conversations, and her excitement about where Art for the Soul Gallery and her new consulting work were headed. Springfield was so lucky to have had Tracy as their arts champion, and I, and so many others, were equally lucky to have her as a friend.” 

Passing the Baton 

Sierra Myers met Woods in 2015, the year the gallery opened its Tower Square location, and went on to become the gallery’s executive director. She represents a new age of arts advocates that were inspired and mentored by Woods. 

Myers fondly remembers the width and breadth of Woods’s involvement in the community: “I would see firsthand just how much of her energy and effort was spent running not only the gallery, but being involved in all of the extracurriculars surrounding the arts,” Myers said. “She was a true titan. She had so much life, and she was always planning the next project, or the next big thing, and one hundred percent of the time it was always about the community.” 

But it is the small, unseen moments that seal relationships. Myers remembers many of those: afternoons at Woods’s condo, trips to help set up exhibits and openings, getting sent home with fruit or tea. “Her biggest contribution to the arts was her ability to open doors for Black and marginalized artists,” Myers said. “This was her core mission, not only to pull up a seat at the table, but to take up space.” 

The Past and the Future 

Woods’s rallying cry, by her own account, was “I’m gonna paint this town red.” She meant it literally and otherwise, through a gallery that stayed open when it should have closed a dozen times over, through a grantmaking program reshaped to reach the artists it had been missing, through the individual artists she pulled through doors that had been closed to them. 

She still had bigger plans when she died: an artists’ cooperative built out of unused downtown space, shared studios and rotating exhibits, with mentorship built into the process. She had also been pushing for a statue of Primus Mason in Mason Square. Mason was a formerly indentured Black entrepreneur in Springfield whose 1892 estate funded what is now the Mason Wright Foundation. Mason Square is named for him.  

The Community Foundation recognized her contribution to the region’s cultural sector in 2024. Former Governor Deval Patrick had named her an Advocate for the Arts of Western Massachusetts years earlier, and the New England Foundation for the Arts gave her its Newell Flather Award for Leadership in Public Art in 2021. 

None of it changed how she worked. She kept building tables and inviting people to them.