ART Linda Dallas, left, and the interior of Saint Agnes Hospital.
engaging RENEGADES For Saint Augustine’s professor Linda Dallas, it’s a mission to make art central to our community by FINN COHEN photography by EAMON QUEENEY
A
t the corner of North State Street and Oakwood Avenue sit the skeletal remains of Saint Agnes Hospital, established in 1896 on the campus of Saint Augustine’s University. For years, it was the one of the only hospitals in the South for Black patients, and it closed after medical care became desegregated in the 1960s. Now it stands as a reminder of those days, and a marker of sorts between two Raleighs: the affluent enclave of Oakwood and the gentrifying neighborhoods just to the east. For Linda Dallas, a professor of visual arts at Saint Augustine’s, the hospital is also a mission. “I want it to connect and inform both of those communities,” says Dallas. She saw a lack of recognition of the site’s his-
tory, and started an arts collaboration project called Envision Saint Agnes Hospital as a way to honor the space. “That’s what artists do. They make places meaningful, even if there are not a lot of physical things there.” For the last three years, Dallas has been spearheading the Envision Saint Agnes project — a slate of watercolor workshops, installations, walking tours, and pop-up painting and drawing events — with her students. And the city has responded, helping foster collaborations with local and international artists: in 2018, for example, Austrian duo OMAi worked with several local artists for a visual tribute to the boxer Jack Johnson, who was brought to Saint Agnes after a fatal car crash in 1946, that was projected onto the facade of the hospital. The Art & Soul of Raleigh | 29
