Tennis superstar Venus Williams has teamed up with conceptual artist Adam Pendleton to preserve the home where the late singer Nina Simone grew up.
In collaboration with the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, Williams is raising money to renovate the North Carolina property.
The fundraising effort will be two-fold, and will include both an auction of “extraordinary works donated by internationally renowned contemporary artists” organized by Sotheby’s, starting online May 11 and closing May 22. as well as a ticketed gala at Manhattan’s Pace Gallery on May. 20.
“Through this project, the Action Fund aims to restore the birthplace of music icon and civil rights activist Nina Simone in Tryon, North Carolina,” reads one Press release on the National Trust for Historic Preservation website, saying that Simone’s cultural legacy “is of great personal importance to all artists who donated the work.”
Simone, born Eunice Wayman in 1933, spent her childhood in a three-room clapboard house—attending church with her mother, a Methodist preacher.
It was during this time that members of the community recognized Simone’s nascent talent and the then 6-year-old prodigy began taking private piano lessons.
Eventually, in 1950, she moved to New York City to attend Juilliard—then began performing in Atlantic City, changed her name, and gradually became a high priestess of spirit and a civil rights activist, according to his property,
He died in 2003 at the age of 70.
By 2017, Pendleton and a group of other artists—Ellen Gallagher, Rashid Johnson, and Julie Mehretu—decided to jointly purchase it to protect its legacy, considering “little known” about that humble home. Was”.
Now, a wide variety of groups and individuals are working together to make decisions. How good To conserve space.
Currently, those involved are undecided whether the house should be maintained as it is or renovated to include a modern amenity-equipped extension that could be used as an artist residence.