When she was 11 years old, Nina Simone refused to play at her local library in North Carolina until her parents were allowed to return to the front row seats they were removed from to make room for white people. In 2017, America’s racial divide is still felt strongly by many people, and so is Simone’s presence. Four New York artists are now preserving a tangible piece of the artist’s legacy: her childhood home. Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher, and Julie Mehretu pooled their money and purchased the humble three-bedroom home for $95,000 soon after it went on the market earlier this year. Speaking to the New York Times, they said the act was one of both art and politics.
“It wasn’t long after the election that this all began to happen, and I was desperate like a lot of people to be engaged, and this felt like exactly the right way,” said Johnson, who recently revealed that he would be making his directorial debut with a screen adaptation of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son. “My feeling when I learned that this house existed was just an incredible urgency to make sure it didn’t go away.” Pendleton, who we last talked to about creating a multimedia “Black Lives Matter” installation at the 56th annual Venice Biennale, said it took him “about five seconds” to sign on. “We don’t have a blueprint for our ideas yet, but I think sometimes artists are the best people to deal with really tricky questions — like, for instance, how to honor the legacy of someone as vital and complicated as Nina Simone,” he told the Times. Pendleton also emphasized the importance of having women artists involved.
Simone’s unfavorable feelings towards the town that helped shape her are not a mystery. “The day after the recital, I walked around as if I had been flayed,” Simone wrote of the library performance in her 1992 autobiography I Put a Spell on You. “But the skin grew back a little tougher, a little less innocent and a little more black.” And while many residents of Tryon harbor resentment towards Simone for speaking out about racism, not all of them want to dissolve the town of reminders that inequality still exists. Tryon resident Kevin McIntyre has spent many years and much of his own money attempting to preserve the home with just the right period 30s details. “We wanted a place that, in the right hands, he told the Times, would become inspirational not only as a relic of the past but as a catalyst for right now.”
Credits
Text Hannah Ongley
Image via Wiki Commons