A Woman in the World: Everlyn Nicodemus

by Erica DiBenedetto

In the mid-1980s, over the course of three years and across three continents, feminist artist Everlyn Nicodemus (born 1954, Kilimanjaro, Tanzania) gathered together women to discuss their everyday experiences. From these conversations, which took place in Skive, Denmark; Kilimanjaro, Tanzania; and Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, she produced a series of seventy-five paintings and related poems that she called “Woman in the World.1 Organizing such dialogues as a prelude to the act of painting was a way for the artist to reject her early training in social anthropology at Stockholm University, where she chafed at the idea that researchers could be neutral observers of communities to which they do not belong. With the permission of participants, Nicodemus taped the events. But she did not use these recordings as tools to empirically document what was shared, as one might do in academic research. Rather, through careful, solitary listening, she began to translate the joy, pain, and mundanity of women’s lives into abstracted figurations. Together these works foregrounded something latent in her earlier compositions: a desire to make the relationship between self and non-self (or “other”) a pictorial and poetic strategy based on affinity instead of an anthropological problem rooted in difference.

By her own account, Nicodemus decided to study social anthropology after being “confronted with everyday racialist attitudes for the first time when migrating to Europe.”2 She had moved to Sweden in 1973 after spending her formative years in the Kilimanjaro region. Already fluent in Kichagga, Kiswahili, and English, she picked up Swedish quickly and enrolled in Stockholm University in 1978. Anthropology, she thought at the time, “seemed to offer the intellectual means to better understand human behavior,” especially the baser forms she encountered while living abroad as a Black and African woman.3

Once she began her coursework, however, she discovered that the discipline lacked the possibilities she imagined. Social anthropology was a relatively new offering in Swedish academia, but like all anthropological fields, it had deep roots in ethnography, which had itself emerged from the systems and structures of colonialism. About a decade before Nicodemus arrived, the university attempted to loosen these ideological ties by changing the department’s name from “General and Comparative Ethnography” to “Social Anthropology” and by moving away from curricula designed around the Museum of Ethnography collections.4 Despite these changes, which might suggest a shift from a collection-based approach to studying culture and society to a people-oriented one, Nicodemus grew increasingly uncomfortable with the role of anthropologist—even as she continued her studies.

Her frustrations prompted her turn to art-making. Nicodemus returned to Tanzania in 1979 to do fieldwork while also providing Kiswahili instruction to, in her words, “Scandinavian aid workers.”5 While living in an international community of expatriates, she met some women who invited her to attend amateur drawing sessions.6 Nicodemus abandoned the sessions after a few meetings to make time for more serious artistic pursuits, resolving to have her own solo exhibition as quickly as possible.7 Nicodemus achieved her goal in 1980, when she debuted her paintings and poems in a one-woman show at the National Museum in Dar es Salaam, and preeminent Tanzanian modernist Sam Ntiro gave the opening remarks.8

Click here to read Erica DiBenedetto’s full text on Everly Nicodemus in MoMA post - Notes on Art in a Global Context

1: In the case of the Tanzanian component, the conversations took place in the Kilimanjaro region, but Nicodemus painted the works in Dar es Salaam. Kristian Romare, “Woman in the World by Everlyn Nicodemus,” in Woman in the World III, exh. cat. (Calcutta: Sisirmanch, 1986), 2.

2: Everlyn Nicodemus, “African Modern Art and Black Cultural Trauma” (PhD diss., Middlesex University, 2012), 30.

3: Nicodemus, “African Modern Art and Black Cultural Trauma,” 30.

4: See Ulf Hannerz, “Swedish Anthropology: Past and Present,” kritisk etnografi: Swedish Journal of Anthropology 1, no. 1 (2018): 55–57.

5: Everlyn Nicodemus and Catherine de Zegher, “The Black Color Is Joy and Pain: A Conversation between Everlyn Nicodemus and Catherine de Zegher,” in Everlyn Nicodemus: Vessels of Silence, exh. cat. (Kortrijk: Kunststichting-Kanaal-Art Foundation vzw, 1992), 6.

6: Everlyn Nicodemus, email message to author, August 22, 2024.

7: Nicodemus and de Zegher, “The Black Color Is Joy and Pain,” 6.

8: Everlyn Nicodemus, email message to author, February 22, 2023.