The GMM Recognition Brick Walkway

Poetic Action is inspired by the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum and its relation to the way in which two women’s passions and actions intersected at a particular moment in history. These two women, Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro da Silva/Anita Garibaldi and Elizabeth Barrett Browning never met, they possessed highly different resources within them to employ for a shared cause, the Risorgimento - that unfolded in a place where neither of them grew up.

 

While living in Florence, the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) famously wrote a poem glorifying the Italian liberation movement of the mid-nineteenth century, the Risorgimento. In response to her poem—written over the course of three years—artist Anna Lise Jensen focuses on the poet’s own emotions: enthusiasm, disillusion, and solace through hope. Jensen’s work, titled Shadow Play, consists of a series of prints to function as a commentary on aspects of Browning’s life experience, such as living as a foreigner in Florence, her political activism, domestic tyranny, and experiencing motherhood at forty-three.

 

In a different vein, artist Alyssa Casey is responding to the life of Brazilian revolutionary Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro da Silva (1821-1849), also known as Anita Garibaldi. Her husband was General Giuseppe Garibaldi. From Rio Grande, on the Southern coast of Brazil, where Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro da Silva fought for many years alongside Garibaldi, she went to Italy, where she joined General Giuseppe Garibaldi to continue their battles to free people from a foreign power. She eventually died in Italy, after a failed battle in Rome, six months pregnant with their fourth child, Ana Maria was not yet 28 years old.

 

She is remembered and referred to by the diminutive “Anita” and her political actions and adventurous life are often obliterated by her role alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi. 

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Alyssa was inspired by a chance encounter with graffiti next to the front door of a house in Montemerano, Tuscany; of "Mazzini" (for the Italian politician, journalist, and activist for Italy's unification, Giuseppe Mazzini 1805-1872). Mazzini's driving principle of thought to action, combined with Garibaldi's laconic telegram of "Obbedisco" ("I obey"), moved Alyssa to create single words on cloth, assuming Anita's voice and describing her recorded actions.  

 

These expressions are posted next to four doorways of the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum, home to Garibaldi after he was exiled from Italy and where he grieved Anita's death. Walking under the cloths, it as though the viewer was privileged to a clandestine epistolary effort to communicate with her partner Giuseppe.