It was a surreal experience for Dr Samuel Waymon, Nina Simone’s youngest sibling, to walk back into the renovated childhood home that he once shared with the singer and civil rights activist. On that day in the fall of 2025, Waymon, an 81-year-old award-winning composer, said that memories flooded back of him playing organ in the house and cooking on the potbelly stove with his mother as a child in Tryon, North Carolina. He was overjoyed to see the large tree from his youth still standing in the yard. Simone, born Eunice Waymon, lived in the 650 sq ft, three-room home with her family from 1933 to 1937.

After sitting vacant and severely decayed for more than two decades, the recently restored home is now painted white, with elements of its former self sprinkled throughout the interior. On the freshly painted mint-blue wall hangs a shadow box that encases the rust brown varnish of the original home. A small piece of the Great Depression-era linoleum sits on the restored wooden floor like an island of the past in a sea of the present.

“It does conjure up wonderful tears of joy in my heart and in my eyes when I stand in that house, on the porch, going into the rooms where the stove is, and I’m saying, ‘Wow, this is actually real. The house is restored,’” Waymon said. “It’s like time travel.”

The home was bought for $95,000 in 2017 by four Black artists behind the collective Daydream Therapy LLC – the contemporary artist Adam Pendleton, the painter and sculptor Rashid Johnson, the abstract artist Julie Mehretu, and the collagist and film-maker Ellen Gallagher. For them, the structure is a assertion that Black history is worthy of investing in. The restoration comes at a time when historians and researchers say that the federal government is attempting to diminish the contributions of Black Americans. A presidential executive order has directed the vice-president, JD Vance, to discontinue spending on programs or exhibits based on race at the Smithsonian Institution and its museums and research centers. The restoration of Simone’s childhood home could serve as an example of how privately funded projects can preserve Black history during a time when federally funded programs are under threat.

On 1 September, the total rehabilitation of the home was completed after several years of planning and fundraising of nearly $850,000 in materials, construction and engineering costs for the renovation, which began in June 2024. The project has been overseen by the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (AACHAF), which is now working with a consulting team and the Tryon community to create a long-term management and programming plan for the site. They hope to create a cultural district around the home, which is projected to open to the public for tourism in 2027.

“What I love is the fact that they didn’t destroy the basic structure of the house; they improved and restored it. So I think when the public or anyone goes into the house, they can feel the spirit and the energy that existed in that house,” Waymon said. “If one believes in spirits, one would have a sense of that when they walk in that house [that] Nina Simone, Eunice Waymon, was there. And that’s the joy I get from that. It’s very strong.”

It is pivotal for cultural sites within the Black community to be given as much weight as other populations, said Tiffany Tolbert, the AACHAF’s senior director for preservation. “Being able to preserve the birth or childhood home of these icons, activists and leaders in the African American community is really important so that future generations will understand where we came from, how these individuals came to be, the icons that we know them to be and also just understanding the African American experience more broadly in this country,” she said. “Having this home still extant, having it where people can visit, where they can learn, is significant because they greatly enhance the understanding of the African American experience in the middle 20th century in itself.”

‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’

The Simone home first came under Pendleton’s radar in the winter of 2016, when he received a message from a museum curator who alerted him that it was for sale. At first, Pendleton considered other people who might be able to preserve and protect the home, but then he pondered the final line from poet June Jordan’s Poem for South African Women: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

“I eventually realized that the person was not someone else. The person was me,” Pendleton said. “It was a gesture, an act that I thought could have more impact if it was a group of people joining forces to protect and preserve Nina Simone’s childhood home.””

With the help of another curator friend, Pendleton brainstormed a list of fellow artists who might be interested in joining him, and Johnson, Mehretu and Gallagher quickly came onboard.

When the collective bought the home the following year, Pendleton was contemplating what constituted American culture and how it was represented. The home signified Simone’s contributions to American history. “So much of how we understand our culture as a country and understand our place within it is through memory. And memory is, of course, embodied in individuals. It’s also embodied in different art forms, from painting and sculpture, and of course, in the case of Nina Simone, her music,” Pendleton said. “Her music is powerful from a formal standpoint, but also from a political and cultural one as well, as she was such a vocal supporter of the civil rights movement during her time.”

Walking through the home shortly after its purchase, Pendleton was struck by how much he felt the spirit of the home. “‘This is where it all started for Nina, in this humble home,’” he recalled thinking. “And it occurred to me, in that moment, that everything starts somewhere.”

The artists then worked with the AACHAF, which developed a preservation strategy for the home. In 2020, the AACHAF created a preservation easement, a legal agreement that restricts any future changes to the property and prevents demolition, which will be overseen by the historic protection non-profit Preservation North Carolina. Architectural consultants and the AACHAF created a blueprint of what the home looked like when it was first constructed by researching typical African American homes in North Carolina during the early 20th century and using an old family photograph from when the Waymons lived there. They also took clues from the materials used for the foundation and the roof to reconstruct the building and prevent further deterioration. The architects created a restoration plan that involved repairing the entryways and walls, evening out the floors, and creating an accessible ramp.

The AACHAF has also been involved in preserving the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane’s homes in Long Island, New York, and Philadelphia. It has also offered direct grants to the preservation of the jazz trumpeter and vocalist Louis Armstrong’s home in New York and blues singer Muddy Waters’ home in Chicago.

With the Simone home, Tolbert said, “a model is being built that blends both preservation of the building and program and interpretation of these spaces with an eye of having a greater understanding of the legacy and experience of these individuals, and how the communities where they lived or shaped who they became to be, both artistically as well as in their own right as leaders in the African American community”.

Pendleton and the rest of the collective have continued to act as representatives on the project. In 2023, he partnered with the AACHAF and tennis player Venus Williams to create an auction and fundraiser at the Pace Gallery in New York. The project also received funding from the Mellon and Tejemos foundations.

Now that the home is restored, the AACHAF and a consulting team are working with St Luke’s CME church, where Simone’s mother, Kate Waymon, preached, to incorporate the surrounding East Side neighborhood into future programming. Pendleton sees the future of the home as being a site for reflection, he said, and to “become a place where artists go with intention to write music, for example, or to perform in the town. In other words, if it can be a mechanism that propels history.”

If Simone were to visit the house today, Waymon said that his sister would be amazed and grateful that it has been restored. Along with being a representative of the building’s legacy as Simone’s last surviving sibling, Waymon is also keeping her memory alive by releasing a new duet with his sister of the song Love Me or Leave Me in mid-January 2026. His sister’s voice was recorded in 1967 and Waymon added in his own several months ago to weave the present with the past. The project is a flashback in time, similar to how he felt as he stood on the porch of his recently restored family home.