1931–2019
Martha Nasibù
Martha Nasibù was born in Addis Ababa in 1931 and as a small child found herself in Italy. She studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Art Students League of New York, and her first exhibition took place in Ethiopia in 1945. She was a founding member of the Ethiopian Artists Club, later lived in Perpignan, and in 2005 published a memoir about the years of the Italian invasion.
Biography
The first exhibition of Martha Nasibù’s work was organized by the Ethiopian Ministry of Education and Fine Arts in 1945. She was thirteen or fourteen at the time.
She was born in Addis Ababa on 28 October 1931, the daughter of Nasibu Zeamanuel; the surname is also spelled Nassibou. In 1936, during the Italian invasion, the girl was taken to Italy. What is known of the house where she was born comes from her recollections: a palace in the middle of Addis Ababa, a park of five hectares with plants brought from different countries, and about eighty servants, cooks and gardeners. These figures are hard to check against documents, and I would treat them as family tradition. She received her artistic education in France and the United States. In Paris she studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, then in New York she took classes at the Art Students League, a school where painting and drawing are studied without a rigid academic programme. The years of her studies are uncertain, so they are not given here. Later she became one of the founders of the Ethiopian Artists Club; the exact date of its founding is unknown. Her work entered the collection of the National Museum of Ethiopia. She then settled in France, in Perpignan, and lived there for the rest of her life.
In 2005 her book “Memorie di una principessa etiope” (“Memoirs of an Ethiopian Princess”) was published. It describes the invasion of Ethiopia by fascist Italy in the 1930s, which began in 1935 without a declaration of war and swept the country from north to south. Her paintings and the book turn to one subject: the fate of Ethiopia and of her family in those years.
Martha Nasibù died on 23 March 2019.
Profile notes