Kristian Romare (Swedish, 1926–2015). Everlyn Nicodemus in her studio in Skive, Denmark, 1984. Personal archive of the artist. Digitization courtesy of the National Galleries of Scotland
In-depth essay written by Erica DiBenedetto about Everlyn Nicodemus's life and work published in post - notes on art in a global context, MoMA's online resource archive.
Read an excerpt below and the full article here.
The artist’s comments capture aspects of critiques that had emerged among anthropologists and other scholars in the 1980s about the discipline’s operating assumptions and its origins in the enterprise of colonialism.
In brief, these assessments concern anthropology’s historical framework, in which cultures, and by extension peoples, are looked upon as hermetically contained entities that can be studied by supposedly outside, neutral observers and then interpreted for external audiences—often still located in the centers of Western empire. When Nicodemus says she turned herself into a “subject,” she does not mean the position of the anthropologist in relation to the ethnographic “other” as the field’s older conventions might have it; rather, she makes herself the center of the work, exploring her own vulnerabilities.
An early example, After the Birth (1980) depicts a female figure curled on her side, a hand resting on—or covering—her face. A sleeping baby, the artist’s infant daughter, lies in front of her. A short poem accompanying the picture reveals the anxieties of a first-time mother both enthralled and overcome by her new responsibility.
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