When the National Galleries of Scotland announced a major retrospective for an Edinburgh-based artist few people had heard of, the question on many people’s lips was: who is Everlyn Nicodemus? In the answer lies a remarkable story: an artist who made work consistently for 40 years with little recognition; a woman working in a care home to pay the bills, keeping her life’s work in storage containers hoping that somehow it might see the light of day.

And suddenly, Everlyn Nicodemus is there in front of me, beaming broadly, full of life. “I’m beyond grateful,” she says. “I still can’t believe that this is happening while I’m alive and witnessing it. For a woman artist to have a retrospective in her lifetime is unusual, for a Black woman, almost unheard of. And at the National Galleries of Scotland. I wake up and pinch myself.”

Around us, her work fills room after room on Modern One’s ground floor. Large-scale and ambitious from the first, her paintings explore women’s lives, the body, trauma and healing, faith and identity. “I am seeing works I had totally forgotten,” she says. “I am seeing them anew, and thinking, oh! did I do that? Here, I am given the privilege and possibility of detaching from the emotions I had when I was creating and can see them as art. Perhaps I am seeing them for the first time.” Then we sit down and she tells me the story. Nicodemus was born in 1954 in Marangu, Tanzania, in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro. She left the country at the age of 19 to live in Sweden where she studied Social Anthropology. It was during an extended visit back to Tanzania in 1980 that she began to paint and decided that art would be the focus of the rest of her life.

And it was. At the age of 28, she began a major project, 'Women in the World', where she listened to the life experiences of women in Denmark, Tanzania and India and responded with paintings and poems. Living in France, Germany, then Belgium, with her art historian husband Kristian Romare, she continued to make work. When there was no studio in which to paint, she made textiles hangings and sculptural assemblages; there are enough of these for a second equivalent show.

When the couple moved to Edinburgh in 2008, Nicodemus was working on a PhD for Middlesex University on Modern African Art and Black Cultural Trauma. Ironically, she was recognised more as an art historian than an artist. “It became very clear that Everlyn is a writer, but nobody ever asked what kind of art she is producing,” she says. “My writings were taken seriously, but my art - nobody bothered.” Meanwhile, her life’s work, meticulously stored and catalogued by Romare, occupied seven crates in a storage unit in Granton.
Then, in 2015, Nicodemus lost her husband to cancer, followed the next year by her closest friend and strongest remaining supporter, the art historian Jean Fisher. Alone and struggling to pay the bills, she retrained as a care assistant and found work in an Edinburgh care home.

“I was almost giving up. But even then I was still working, this elemental arte povera, using whatever I could afford, works on paper, collage, things like that. I promised Jean when we were standing beside my husband’s coffin. She said, ‘Promise Kristian and promise me, you are not going to stop’. And I never have. I think about that every day.” She pauses. “It’s just that now I’m celebrating this, and they’re not here.” Unknown to her, as lockdown drew to a close, London gallerist Richard Saltoun was reading about her work in a book on women artists by Belgian curator Catherine de Zegher. “He decided, ‘I want to find this artist, I’m going to Tanzania’, and then he found that Tanzania was just four hours train away on the train!” she laughs. Saltoun dispatched his gallery manager to visit Nicodemus in her one-bedroom flat.

“She took pictures of what I was creating and what was under my bed, and sent them to Richard, and he replied and said ‘I’m buying that, and that, and that, and I’m giving her a contract immediately, and a show as quickly as possible’. And this is another miracle - a little woman in a one bedroom flat, making work on the kitchen table. Now I could afford to buy materials, I could stop working at the care home, I was earning something from my own creations.”

Curators from National Galleries of Scotland were invited to join Saltoun’s team when the storage containers were opened. Nicodemus laughs softly. “I think they imagined it would be one little container, and they see one, two, three, four, five... several hundred works.”

In the months that followed, Saltoun presented her work at the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, she became the first Black woman to have a painted self portrait acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, and she won the Freelands Award, which has supported the NGS show. She was also invited to take part in a residency at Princeton Theological Seminary where she began the series of new paintings, 'Lazarus Jacaranda', which closes the show.

“So my life, in a very short period, has changed to something unheard of, something I could never even dream about,” she says. “I’m going back and thinking how important feminism has been. I am the lucky one who is harvesting the fruits of their fight. Without their fight, I don’t think I would have had this show.”

At 70, having experienced racism and misogyny, suffered a breakdown which she now understands to be linked to PTSD, and more recently come through treatment for cancer, she could be diminished or embittered. Instead, she welcomes this renaissance with expansive grace.

Stephanie Straine, senior curator of modern and contemporary art at NGS who curated the show, says: “Her story follows the cliche of female artists not getting the recognition they deserve until later in their career, but we don’t want to focus on that, we want to celebrate a life’s work and the healing power of art. Everlyn never let her circumstances reduce the ambition of her work. That’s an important part of why the work is so exciting.”

Everlyn Nicodemus, Lazarus Jacaranda no. 4 (Martha), 2023. Copyright the Artist, Courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, Rome, New York

Major series such as 'Silent Strength' and 'The Wedding' (which alone comprises 80 large paintings) deal with themes of oppression, resilience, recovery. The 'Lazarus Jacaranda' work is resplendent with the colours of a Tanzanian sunset, the women in the paintings relaxed and assured, reclining amid tropical flowers.

Her strength of spirit, she says, comes from her grandmother Makuna, who raised her until she was eight in a household of women where boys and girls were treated equally. It gave her the confidence to be outspoken, from challenging her her Sunday School teachers about the scientific basis of the Ressurection, to asking the director of the National Museum in Dar Es Salaam to give her an exhibition (which, incredibly, he did), to calling out her tutors in Stockholm for othering Black people.

“It’s just a critical way of thinking. This inability to be a yes-sayer. I think women like me, we always get into trouble because we dare to think. We refuse to accept the fact that we are second-class citizens, even if that is the way the systems treat us. And to become an artist is also a challenge. You are saying, ‘I am a woman, and I can create’.

“I think this drive has always been with me, to never give up, to try my best. I think it is a drive which is in most artists. This desire to create is probably as strong as what makes us say we want to become parents, or what makes us love unconditionally. Perhaps art is the energy that makes humanity bearable, because when you look at what we humans do to each other, we are horrible, but also we are very beautiful, if we choose.”

The Everlyn Nicodemus retrospective is at the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One until 25th May 2025