Everlyn Nicodemus is a Tanzanian-born artist, writer, and curator, based in

Edinburgh Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. The city is located in southeast Scotland and is bounded to the north by the Firth of Forth and to the south by the Pentland Hills. Edinburgh ...

Scotland Scotland is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It contains nearly one-third of the United Kingdom's land area, consisting of the northern part of the island of Great Britain and more than 790 adjac ...

Early life and career

Nicodemus initially enrolled in teacher training school, but eloped to marry a Swedish economist working in Tanzania. The pair moved to

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the east. At , Sweden is the largest Nordic count ...

in 1973, where, influenced by her experiences of everyday racism, she enrolled in

Stockholm University Stockholm University (SU) () is a public university, public research university in Stockholm, Sweden, founded as a college in 1878, with university status since 1960. With over 33,000 students at four different faculties: law, humanities, social ...

in 1978 to study

social anthropology Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In t ...

. While back in Tanzania doing fieldwork, Nicodemus started making art in response to her discomfort with anthropology. This quickly led to a solo exhibition of paintings and poems at the

National Museum of Tanzania The National Museum of Tanzania (NMT), (Swahili: ''Makumbusho ya Taifa''), is a consortium of several Tanzanian museums whose purpose is to preserve and show objects from the history and natural environment of Tanzania. The consortium developed fr ...

Dar es Salaam Dar es Salaam (, ; from ) is the largest city and financial hub of Tanzania. It is also the capital of the Dar es Salaam Region. With a population of over 7 million people, Dar es Salaam is the largest city in East Africa by population and the ...

in 1980. After divorcing her first husband, Nicodemus married Kristian Romare, a Swedish art historian, with whom she moved to Edinburgh in 2008. Her work includes paintings, collages, mixed-media assemblages, and poetry, and has been informed by racism, trauma, PTSD, and recovery. She completed her PhD on ''African Modern Art and Black Cultural Trauma'' at Middlesex University in 2012. Nicodemus won the Freelands Foundation Award in 2022, which supported the first retrospective of her work, at the

National Galleries of Scotland The National Galleries of Scotland (, sometimes also known as National Galleries Scotland) is the executive non-departmental public body that controls the three national galleries of Scotland and two partner galleries, forming one of the Nation ...

, from September 2024 to May 2025. Her painting ''Självporträtt, Åkersberga'' was acquired by the

National Portrait Gallery, London The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is an art gallery in London that houses a collection of portraits of historically important and famous British people. When it opened in 1856, it was arguably the first national public gallery in the world th ...

in 2022, and became the first painted self-portrait by a black female artist in the gallery's collection.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nicodemus, Everlyn 1954 births 21st-century women artists Alumni of Middlesex University African art curators Berlin University of the Arts alumni Living people People from Kilimanjaro Region Stockholm University alumni Tanzanian emigrants to the United Kingdom Tanzanian expatriates in Sweden Tanzanian women artists