An auction of works of art and a gala in New York for the benefit of the restoration project of the birthplace of the soul diva and civil rights activist Nina Simone, have raised nearly $ 6 million, beyond the expectations of the organizers, they announced Tuesday, May 23. "This new funding will significantly advance our plan to complete the complete restoration of the house and its exterior," said Brent Leggs, director of a specific program for African-American heritage at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is leading the project. "With this investment, we are on track to open the doors to visitors in 2024," he told AFP. On Friday, he said he hoped for $2 million.
The auction, which had been taking place on the Internet since May 12, closed Monday with a total of $ 5.38 million, to which is added $ 500,000 thanks to a gala Saturday, said the Pace art gallery which organized the sale with the company Sotheby's. The house, a modest house of 60 square meters and three rooms, with entrance porch and wooden facades painted white, is located in 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 for $95,000 to prevent it from falling into oblivion.
Rejected by the Philadelphia Conservatory
Among the eleven paintings for sale, a work by Julie Mehretu entitled New Dawn, Sing (for Nina), was sold for $1.6 million. The initiative was supported by tennis champion Venus Williams.
Nina Simone, whose songs, such as Mississippi Goddam, make up the playlists of the Black Lives Matter movement, has had an often difficult relationship with the United States, where she was born in 1933, during racial segregation. In Tryon's house, where she lived her early years with her parents and siblings, little Eunice Waymon - her real name - was immersed in music and began playing the piano at the age of three. But her dream of becoming a classical concert performer will be shattered at the front door of the Philadelphia Conservatory, a failure she has attributed all her life to racism. His career then marries in the 60s the struggle for civil rights of African-Americans. Nina Simone had left the United States and settled in Europe, where she died in 2003 in southern France.