Artists auction works to turn Nina Simone’s birthplace into a cultural site

Artists have brought together eleven works, including paintings by Cecily Brown and Sarah Sze, to turn the soul diva’s birthplace into a cultural site. The session, orchestrated by Pace and Sotheby’s, takes place on the internet and ends on Tuesday 23 May.

By Le Figaro with AFP

Posted on 05/20/2023 at 10:25

A place to bring the memory of Nina Simone: in New York, artists put their works up for auction to make the birthplace of the soul diva and civil rights activist a cultural site, with the support of Venus Williams.

The abode, a modest pillared house with front porch and wood-plank facades, is nestled on a hillside in the small township of Tryon, in a rural county of North Carolina, in the southeastern United States.

It was on sale in 2017 when four artists, Julie Mehretu, Ellen Gallagher, Rashid Johnson and Adam Pendleton, bought it back for $95,000 so it wouldn’t disappear.

” READ ALSO – Nina Simone’s house, narrowly saved from ruin, relies on donations for its restoration

«Nina Simone fought for an inclusive and diverse America“says Adam Pendleton. Allow “people to see and visit» his birthplace, «it’s a way to keep his legacy, his music, alive for future generations“, he adds to AFP, inside the Pace gallery in New York, where the works for sale were exhibited this week.

“First move”

«Over the past five years, we have raised $500,000“, used in part for the first works of consolidation and painting, adds Brent Leggs, director of a specific program for African-American heritage within the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which works with the artists. But the 60 square meter house still needs funding to become a permanent site, open to visits and cultural events.

To give a helping hand, the artists brought together eleven works, including paintings by Cecily Brown or Sarah Wed, whose sale will fuel the project. The auctions, organized by Pace and Sotheby’s, have been taking place on the internet since May 12 and until Tuesday. Brent Leggs hopes to make $2 million from it, notably thanks to a gala on Saturday evening in New York, supported by tennis champion Venus Williams. “It’s Nina Simone’s legacy that made people like me visible“, assures in a video the first black player to become world number one.

Black Lives Matter

Nina Simone, some of whose songs make up the movement’s playlists Black Lives Matter, had a complex, often difficult relationship with the United States, where she was born in 1933, during racial segregation. In Tryon’s three-room house, where she lived her very first years with her parents and siblings, little Eunice Waymon, whose real name was immersed in music, began the piano at three, and excelled in lessons. of “Miss Mazzie”, an English teacher who passed on her passion for Johann Sebastian Bach. But her dream of becoming a classical concert performer is shattered at the front door of the Philadelphia Conservatory, a failure that she will attribute all her life to racism.

His career in the 1960s embraced the struggle for the civil rights of African Americans, sometimes with radical speech, sometimes in song, with Mississippi Goddamresponse to the murderous burning of a church in Alabama by members of the Ku Klux Klan (1963), or with the poignant Why ? (The king of love is dead)which she performed three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King (1968).

She had eventually left the United States and lived her final years in the south of France, where she died in 2003. According to Brent Leggs, Tryon’s home could be open to the public as soon as 2024.”Our country is beginning to understand the need to preserve all of our history, and recognize and celebrate our country’s diversity“, he adds. “An exciting time for historic protection“, according to him.