Jun 20, 2009

Soul proprietor: Afro-centric gallery developing broad appealBy Matt EvansTriad.BizJournals.com

Winston-Salem — Race can be a touchy subject, and as a rule retailers don’t like touchy subjects. Rather, they like as many customers as they can get. Sometimes, though, the issue is there anyway.

Dana Suggs has been aware of the challenges of racial sensitivity since well before she opened her Afro-centric gallery Body and Soul in the Trade Street Arts District in 2003. But it was there that she saw it regularly, literally poking its head in her door.

Caucasian window-shoppers “would come to the door and they’d see something, a beautiful piece of jewelry maybe, and they’d want to come in and look at it,” Suggs says. Body and Soul is a magnet to the eyes and ears, with colorful artwork, lotions and hand-made crafts artfully displayed to the accompaniment of world-beat music.

“But sometimes they’d look up and see my brown face and you could see them struggle” with whether or not they should come in, or whether they would be welcomed, or whether they would find anything for them in a shop dominated by African culture, she says.

That hesitation was the last thing Suggs wanted, and not just as a matter of profit. Part of her goal in opening the shop following a 17-year career in New York City and Winston-Salem advertising was to introduce black culture to an audience that may not have seen it in their style before.

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