I came to San Marino feeling tapped out.

From the messy United Airlines almost ruining my trip, misplacing my suitcase, and making me feel exhausted, Chile. The kind of tired Black women know too well, the kind that builds in the body across years of holding rooms together, of being the most invested person in spaces that have not learned to pour back on us, of carrying weight that the world looks past us to notice. I came carrying some of those weights just running on fumes. And I came because my lovely sister Maye invited me for sisterly time and listen….. it was divine timing.

Maye has always been soothing to my heart. Long before this trip, she was the person in my life whose laughter and joyfulness could quiet my nervous system without saying a word. So, when she invited me to join her in San Marino to see her friend Ndidi Emefiele’s first major solo exhibition open at Palazzo SUMS, I started packing my suitcases before I booked my flight. Whew, baby, my yes was on speed dial. I said yes because I knew, in the way Black women know some unspoken languages, that I needed to be in the same room as Ndidi’s work.

I did not expect the visuals that awaits me at San Marino.

For three days I had the gift of being with Ndidi. The artist herself. And I found myself trying to move beyond her exceptional creative intellect, prodigious, masterful ability to revolutionize her paintbrush, not the international recognition that has placed her work in collections from Lagos to London to Miami and beyond. What I am reaching for is her poise.

Ndidi’s giftedness and her ability to carry our stories with her painting brushes oozes out of her calm and tenacity. I have been surrounded by brilliant and creative people my whole life, and some of that brilliance often arrives with edges. Ndidi’s brilliance carries an air of grace, poise, wisdom, all rooted and grounded in stillness and light, just like the baobab tree.

She stores her palette inside herself, the compact disks, the mesh, the silver ink, the paper collage, the whole material vocabulary of who she is. She carries her pigments through the dry season and only releases them when the light is right. She has learned to keep her own well. She is the woman who does not run empty because she has never been in the habit of pouring herself out to prove she is worth being in the room.

Her presence is as eloquent as water, and her paintings carry that same fluidity onto the canvas, moving exactly as much as they need to and no more. She carries a sophistication that does not perform itself, a wisdom that does not announce itself, and above all a humility and grace that made me realize, somewhere in the middle of the second day, that I might have been holding my own shoulders a bit too high.

Joy Bath

Joy Bath, from 2022, was one of the first canvases that stopped me. She is 220 by 200 centimeters of women in water, at the scale museums have historically reserved for coronations and battles. Ndidi hangs the ritual of a shared bath at that size, and by doing so, she declares intimacy the record worth keeping.

Pool Side Kebab

Pool Side Kebab, from that same year, keeps the women together at the water. Food is present. Bodies are at ease. Nobody is performing. Nobody is being watched. They are simply eating and swimming and being with each other.

Watching Maye and Ndidi together, I began to understand what their friendship has grown into over the years. It is the kind of friendship that only two women of substance can cultivate, the quiet, steady, unhurried, real bond.

A Crown in Iome

A Crown in Iome, from 2023, is three meters wide. She is a scene as much as a portrait. A woman sits in the chair, mid-adornment, getting her hair done in the way Black women have always been most held, most known, most tended to.

The compact disks reflect the room back at you, so as you stand there the light of your own face joins the composition. You are inside the painting whether you wanted to be or not. That was the moment I felt something shift in me, because Maye and I were suddenly part of Ndidi’s world.

I want to say something about the times we are in, because the times are why this matters.

Black women are being asked, right now, in this season of the world, to carry more than we have ever been asked to carry. The institutions around us have learned to extract our labor while declining to honor its source.

In this moment, Black women need more of Ndidi’s storytelling, her paints, her brushes, the figures she places at the center of canvases that do not ask permission to be looked at.

I came to San Marino, the oldest republic in the world, a small country that has stood on its mountain for seventeen hundred years, refusing to be absorbed, exhausted. I came to see Ndidi Emefiele’s Inarrestabile.

The art was saying, “We are already here.” These women are not asking to be seen. They have decided to be present. Ndidi’s paintings embody the same refusal to be absorbed that the country has practiced for seventeen centuries.

And this knowing left me restored, revived, energized. Given back to myself.

I felt restored by walking up the mountain in my stilettos. Revived by a woman whose presence is the holding, whose calm is the medicine, whose grace is its own form of architecture.

To the Black women reading this who are tired the way I was, go find Ndidi’s work. Stand in front of it. Let what she has painted into the canvas reach you.

Ndidi is one of them. Maye is one of them. So are you. So am I.

The work continues. The art continues. The healing continues. None of us are stoppable.

Posted by Juliet Amor