(New York) An art auction and gala in New York to benefit the project to restore the birthplace of soul diva and civil rights activist Nina Simone, has raised nearly 6 million of dollars, beyond the hopes of the organizers, they announced on Tuesday.
“This new funding will significantly advance our plan to complete the complete restoration of the house and its exterior” in North Carolina, welcomed Brent Leggs, director of a specific program for African-American heritage. within the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is piloting the project.
“Thanks to this investment, we are on track to open the doors to visitors in 2024,” he added to AFP. On Friday, he said he hoped for $2 million.
The auction, which had been going online since May 12, closed on Monday with a total of $5.38 million, plus $500,000 from a gala on Saturday, the art gallery said. Pace who organized the sale with Sotheby’s.
The abode, a modest 60 square meter, three-room house with an 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 back for $95,000 to save it from oblivion.
Among the eleven paintings on 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, some of whose songs, like 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 the house of Tryon, where she lived her very first years with her parents and her brothers and sisters, little Eunice Waymon – her real name – immersed in music and began the piano at three years old.
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 married in the 1960s the fight for the civil rights of African-Americans. Nina Simone had left the United States and settled in Europe, where she died in 2003, in the south of France.