From the advance publicity:
[The exhibition]
Takes readers on a visual journey through 40 years of the artist's drawing, collage and painting, including works newly produced for the 2024 exhibition.
The book draws together an international cohort of authors who have prepared newly commissioned texts that engage with the artist's practice.
One of these is a new interview with the artist in which she discusses her work as an artist and an art historian.
This is the first major publication on the artist Everlyn Nicodemus and accompanies the first ever retrospective of her work. It offers a fascinating introduction to her life, career and art. Over the course of a 40-year career, Nicodemus has created and cared for a vast body of work that, until recently, has been kept in storage – unseen and unexhibited. Nicodemus engages with complex subject matters, unflinchingly addressing human suffering and societal responsibility. While her works convey and process traumatic experiences, they are ultimately hopeful, focusing on healing and the power of creativity. This publication will reveal the scope and ambition of this astonishing artist’s practice. Expert contributors offer new insights into Nicodemus’s practice, including a new interview with the artist. Exhibition curator Stephanie Straine explains and contextualizes the rich pages of artworks, drawing on extensive primary research with the artist and her archives.
Professor Eddie Chambers is David Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is editor of the Routledge Companion to African American Art History (2020, Routledge) and author of World is Africa: Writings on Diaspora Art (2021, Bloomsbury). Dr Perrin M. Lathrop is Assistant Curator of African Art at Princeton University Art Museum and is cocurator and editor of African Modernism in America (2022, Yale University Press). Catherine de Zegher is a curator, art historian and former Director of Drawing Center, New York, and is a long-standing supporter of Nicodemus’s practice. Stephanie Straine is Senior Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art at National Galleries Scotland.
Text extract as follows
...Several decades ago, the artist Rasheed Araeen (b.1935) made a celebrated mixed-media work, How Could One Paint a Self-Portrait!. Over an image of himself, Araeen superimposed, almost as a gesture of obliteration, the sort of racist graffiti that was common at the time, including ‘Blacks Out’ and the use of what we might discreetly refer to as ‘the p-word’. The work could be read in a number of ways, one of them being the dominance, at the time, of the National Front, a far-right political group that propagated sentiments such as ‘If they’re Black, Send them back!’ and ‘End Immigration, Start Repatriation!’ In making the work, one of Araeen’s assertions took the form of a question. How can an artist such as he paint a self-portrait when to all intents and purposes, the society all around him refuses to recognise him as an individual, refuses to recognise his humanity and equates him with a pestilence of near-biblical proportions – the scourge of immigration. The red, white and blueness of the graffiti gives How Could One Paint a Self-Portrait! a particularly British frame of reference. Numerous Black artists have utilised the self-portrait and it emerged as a vehicle of choice for a great many Black women artists, including Mowbray Odonkor (b.1962). One of Odonkor’s celebrated pieces, Onward Christian Soldiers (otherwise known as Self-portrait with Red, Gold and Green Flag) was acquired by the Arts Council Collection – a reflection of its significance as a prime example of Odonkor’s concerns and artistic style. Time and time again, Odonkor embraced the vehicle of the self-portrait as a means of expressing herself and her ideas. Indeed, even those works which were not, in a direct sense, self-portraits, reflected such a profound empathy on Odonkor’s part for the struggling Black women of the world that they were very much a part of her body of self-portraiture. With Black women being challenged by experiencing sexism and the patriarchy in ways that differed markedly from how white women do, and experiencing racism and white supremacy in ways that differed markedly from how Black men do, for artists such as Odonkor (for example) and Nicodemus, the self-portrait was embraced as a persuasive and compelling vehicle. Indeed, in making Self-portrait, Åkersberga and other work, Nicodemus signals the work she has produced as nothing less than ‘a form of psychological survival’. In a piece in The Guardian celebrating the acquisition by the National Portrait Gallery, London, of Self-portrait, Åkersberga and several other self-portraits by other women artists, Nicodemus is quoted as asserting: ‘I exhibited myself as a subject, showing every part of myself, my problems, my hopes, my conflicts – my whole life … It was a form of psychological survival.’
One of the first things we notice about Self-portrait, Åkersberga is that it shows itself to us as not one visage of a woman, but three, or is it four? Certainly, there are two women, the dominantly positioned one in profile. The other two faces emerge or recede in the painting, depending on how our eyes move around the work. The way in which these perhaps supplementary faces appear reminds us of African masks that have been stylised even beyond the classic ways in which African masks are themselves often dramatically essentialised renderings of the physiognomy, pertinent to whichever language group or belief system the mask might have primary relation to. The imagined face to the right of the composition may represent a part of the dominant face in profile, or equally might exist with its own terms of reference. The decidedly earthy colours with which Self-portrait, Åkersberga is executed contrast markedly and breezily with the more primary colours that Nicodemus uses in the work. These more forthright colours – including blue and yellow – have been described as having been ‘drawn from the Tanzanian and Swedish flags’. Gavin Delahunty asserts that the manner of the self-portrait’s composition ‘suggests some internal conflict. The Janus-faced figure seems unsure of her allegiances to each nation and uncertain of how to make sense of her peripatetic way of life.’ I would like to suggest, though, that there is something decidedly holistic, resolved and self assured about the work. I made mention, earlier in this text, about Nicodemus’s disconnect from, as much as connection to, the art world. Mindful of that sentiment, one might similarly assert that, in part, Self-portrait, Åkersberga signals the artist’s explicit connection to Sweden, even though she herself has also spoken of a somewhat alienating and fractious relationship with the Nordic country...
The above extracts are from "Everlyn Nicodemus: Some Reflections", a text in the catalogue published to accompany the first retrospective exhibition of Everlyn Nicodemus's work, held at National Galleries Scotland: Modern One from 19 October 2024 to 25 May 2025. Text on pages 25 - 29