Five years ago, artists Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu and Ellen Gallagher bought Nina Simone’s childhood home in Tryon, North Carolina for $95,000. After several failed restoration attempts over the years, many feared the house would be demolished before artists stepped in to safeguard Simone’s legacy. With the The National Trust’s African-American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, Pace Gallery and Sotheby’s artists have now teamed up to host a fundraiser profit and art auction SO At Simone’s remains a national treasure for years to come.
Co-hosted with tennis champion Venus Williams, the online site the auction will go live Friday, May 12 and run through May 22, featuring works by Pendleton, Gallagher, Johnson, Mehretu, Mary Weatherford and Stanley Whitney, among others.
“Nina Simone is one of the most important musical artists of the 20th century,” Pendleton said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic. “I am inspired to be able to protect his legacy by preserving his childhood home. His music, his vision, cannot be forgotten.
The internationally acclaimed blues pianist and singer, known as the “High Priestess of Soul”, spent the first 17 years of her life in the three-room wooden house. This is Simone, born Eunice Waymon, developed a passion for music from his mother, a Methodist preacher, and his father, who had worked as an artist earlier in his career. At five, she became a pianist for the church where her mother preached, according to the estate of Simone. Two women recognized his immense talents and convinced Simone’s mother that the young prodigy needed formal piano lessons. Mrs. Muriel Mazzanovich, a local piano teacher, taught Simone and organized the Eunice Waymone Fund, supporting Simone’s first recital at the Tryon Library in 1943 and her education at a girls’ boarding school in Asheville, North Carolina. In 1950, Simone left North Carolina for a summer program at the Juilliard School in New York.
Since the National Trust designated the 650 square foot house a national treasure in 2018, the organization’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund worked with the artists, the Nina Simone Project, the World Monuments Fund and the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission to raise funds for Restoration. So far, the Action Fund has raised $500,000 and hopes to raise another $5 million at the gala and action.
Detailed plans for the renovation of the house have not been finalized, but a August 2021 The community engagement report outlined two potential directions for the project. The first possibility would renovate the house without adding modern conveniences such as indoor heating and electricity, with the house functioning primarily as a site for pilgrimages or visits and any additional artistic or cultural programming taking place off-site. The second concept would expand the current structure with an addition built over the existing house to allow for modern upgrades while maintaining the integrity of the house. Artists also have suggests to a potential artist-in-residence program for emerging black artists.
