The Artists Preserving Nina Simone’s Childhood Home

“I was born a child prodigy, darling. I was born a genius.”

Nina Simone’s wry remark, made late in her life, referenced what was really a rather unassuming arrival: she was born on 21 February 1933 at 30 East Livingston Street, Tryon, North Carolina, in a 660-square-foot, three-room clapboard house without power or plumbing. In 2017, barely standing, weather-beaten and undergrowth-troubled, that century-old building was saved for posterity by the artists Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher and Julie Mehretu, who purchased it – sight unseen – and oversaw its much-needed restoration. It has since been named a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

“I would like for it to become a physical space that extends the scope of Nina Simone’s legacy,” says Pendleton, who orchestrated the house-protection plan. “Inspiring those who visit it to listen to her music and engage critically with all that she represented culturally.”

That act of conservation will continue on 20 May with a fundraising gala dinner at Pace Gallery in New York, supported by a special Sotheby’s online auction of 11 works donated by artists: these include vibrant oil paintings by Cecily Brown – currently enjoying a mid-career retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – and Sarah Sze (whose site-specific installations can be enjoyed at the Guggenheim) as well as by the four artists who saved the house from demolition.

The auction was co-curated by Pendleton and the tennis icon Venus Williams. “I’m so excited to be a part of this expansive project centering on the life and legacy of Nina Simone,” Williams says. “Each of the artists Adam and I have selected for the auction has a unique, powerful voice.”

Other highlights from the auction include Rashid Johnson’s Bruise Painting “Nina’s Blues” (2023) – which delivers a soulful abstraction akin to Simone’s keyboard jams – and Robert Longo’s Untitled (Nina), a politically evocative charcoal portrait of a black panther. At the gala dinner and auction at Pace, the Grammy-award winning musician H.E.R. will perform a set that will include one of Simone’s songs.

She was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon (the Nina Simone pseudonym was adopted in the mid-1950s when she began playing in dubious clubs in Atlantic City, NJ). Living in Tyron during the Great Depression, the Waymon family struggled, but with dignity. “My earliest conscious memory of my mother is her singing while she cooks, with she washed clothes,” recalled the singer. “We had a farm, little bitsy one. Momma used to churn buttermilk on an old-fashioned churn and she showed me how to do it.”

Her devoutly religious mother introduced her to the joys and rigor of music at the Methodist church, St. Luke CME, just across the road from their home. Although impoverished, the family was spiritually rich, and it was playing the piano to the congregation that young Eunice’s talent was first spotted. She subsequently enjoyed many homes, with periods living in Mount Vernon, NY, and Barbados, and would settle in her final years in the south of France. It was all a far cry from her beginnings in that humble dwelling in North Carolina.

The range of figures and organizations involved in the preservation of Simone’s birthplace – which also includes the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund – speaks to her broad and lasting appeal, both as a performer and a civil rights activist. She was an anomalous wonder, a classically trained musician with a rebellious spirit, a singer who flitted between genres and a figure who voiced the Black experience yet was loved by white audiences across the world. She brought a Cubist sensibility to the piano – chopping keys into new forms – and sang with an instinctive quality that oscillated between the fragile and ferocious.

Simone’s music was often a prism through which she looked at other performers’ songs. A Simone “cover” is a work in and of itself. Pendleton recognizes parallels in the way that he has appropriated and altered others’ motifs and text – such as the writings of Toni Morrison – in his own art. “I think what is key here is the reimagining and reconfiguring to transform something so that it becomes your own,” Pendleton says.

Urgency, anger and sensitivity were unified in Simone’s music, all bound together by a strong thread of humanism, a line that can be traced back to that ramshackle residence in Tryon. Sotheby’s involvement in the preservation of the site felt fitting for collegiate as well as cultural reasons, explains Catherine Almonte, Sotheby’s Head of Equity and Impact. “Often, we work from a place of competition, but there are rare moments I think when galleries and auction houses, even artists, can build genuine authentic relationships with folks across the art industry,” she notes. “It’s important, and I think this was a unique opportunity to do that for an artist who had such an impact and who brought people together.”

Pendleton agrees: “Artists are often incredibly generous,” he says. “And I think it is the generosity of Nina’s music that has allowed this endeavor to become one that is so inclusive.”

Past Auction

Nina Simone Childhood Home: Benefit Auction

12–22 May 2023 | 3:00 PM EDT | New York

_{Banner: Nina Simone sings for a crowd of supporters and marchers during a rally prior to the last day of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, on 24 March 1965. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images.}