AFP
Tue, May 23, 2023
Nina Simone in concert at l'Olympia in Paris, October 22, 1991
An art auction and New York gala have raised nearly $6 million to preserve and restore the childhood home of soul music legend and civil rights activist Nina Simone, organizers said Tuesday.
The twin events brought in some $5.88 million -- far more than the original $2 million organizers hoped to raise to restore the rural North Carolina abode.
"The new funding will meaningfully advance our project goals to complete the full restoration of the house and landscape," said Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.
"With this investment, we are well on our way to opening the doors to visitors in 2024."
Four US artists -- Julie Mehretu, Ellen Gallagher, Rashid Johnson and Adam Pendleton -- bought the dilapidated rural home in 2017 for $95,000. They've since worked with Leggs' organization, as well as tennis star Venus Williams, to raise money to turn the house into a cultural and historic site.
The online auction, with works donated by British painter Cecily Brown and American artist Sarah Sze, was organized by Pace and Sotheby's.
Among the 11 works for sale, Mehretu's ink-and-acrylic "New Dawn, Sing (for Nina)" fetched $1.6 million.
Simone, whose songs found renewed resonance during the Black Lives Matter protests of recent years, had a complex, often difficult relationship with the United States, where she was born in 1933, during the era of racial segregation.
Born Eunice Waymon, she spent the first years of her life in the three-room house in Tryon, in the rural southeastern state of North Carolina, with her parents and siblings, and began playing the piano at age three.
But her dream of becoming a classical concert performer was shattered when she was rejected by Philadelphia's prestigious Curtis Institute of Music, an ordeal she attributed to racism.
In the 1960s, Simone was active in the civil rights movement, including through rousing speeches and song.
Her "Mississippi Goddam," was a response to a 1963 fire in an Alabama church started by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, she performed "Why? (The king of love is dead)."
Simone eventually left the United States and lived her last years in the south of France, where she died in 2003.
arb/cha/nro/ec
Nina Simone & Lauryn Hill - The Miseducation of Eunice Waymon (Full Album) | Amerigo Gazaway
Soul Mates Records
Dec 3, 2018
With his latest Soul Mates Project, Amerigo Gazaway imagines a studio session between The High Priestess of Soul, Nina Simone, and living legend, Lauryn Hill. Continuing the “collaborations that never were” theme of his previous releases, the producer seamlessly connects the dots between Hip-Hop and the genre’s predecessor, Soul.
Back in 2016, I had the pleasure of discussing my conceptual collaboration projects via a roundtable discussion at MoPOP’s annual POP Conference in Seattle. During our discussion, a fellow panelist, writer and professor, Zandria Robinson, posed an interesting question: “where’s your project celebrating women artists?”
Two years later and I’m excited to finally share the answer with my new Nina Simone + Lauryn Hill mixtape, “The Miseducation of Eunice Waymon”. Given the project was, in part, inspired by Zandria’s question, she got the first listen and has written a few words on the album below. -AG
“Soul Mates’ “collaborations that never were” enters new territory with a now familiar deft and verve, this time highlighting intergenerational conjurings between two black women cultural workers from the civil rights and hip-hop generations. With Nina Simone and Lauryn Hill seated together at the table, collaboration transforms into vivid conversation, call and response, and a call to action--private, personal, and public--across space, time, and realm.
With "The Miseducation of Eunice Waymon", Amerigo Gazaway renders listeners children in the backseat of a shiny black Chevy, transfixed by the mysteries of grown women’s conversations. We ride along and listen quietly as Hill drives down South to retrieve Simone from North Carolina and the two travel back north together, to New Jersey and then to New York, and onward to woman-ish soul eternity.
Gazaway does a different kind of labor in this mashup, creating a private, interior space for these women to speak the truths of their lives, both to themselves and to each other. As they come to know each other across the project’s apt sample and song combinations and interview snippets, Simone’s piano accompanies and buoys Lauryn and Lauryn sings back Nina’s words and sounds a resonant understanding with her acoustic guitar. They become gold- and white-framed mirrors, dancing to breakbeats around each other’s personal and political struggles and triumphs with all the freedom being seen, being recognized, brings.
In this curated interior space, audiences are compelled, at last, to listen to all of what and who these women were and are and to really hear those truths: to listen and learn about care, alienation, desperation, motherhood, women’s work; about the unending strivings for interpersonal peace and understanding; and about the necessity for liberation.” - Zandria Robinson
Tracklist:
01. Feeling Good
02. Ready Or Not feat. The Fugees
03. Doo Wop (That Thing)
04. To Zion feat. Carlos Santana
05. Fu-Gee-La feat. The Fugees
06. The Sweetest Thing feat. John Forté
07. Take It Easy
08. Peace Of Mind
09. Lost Ones
10. Killing Me Softly
11. If I Ruled The World feat. Nas
12. How Many Mic feat. The Fugees
13. So High feat. John Legend
14. Care For What
15. Angel Of The Morning
16. The Miseducation of Eunice Waymon
17. Fu-Gee-La (Refugee Camp Remix) [Bonus Track]
Produced by Amerigo Gazaway
Executive Producer: Rickey Mindlin
Soul Mates 2018
DIY Acapellas by The Goodwill Projects:
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