HARMONIA ROSALES. CHICAGO / LOS ANGELES, b. 1984.
Afro-Cuban and Jamaican, raised in a household that practised Santería, Rosales grew up inside a Yoruba spiritual tradition that the Atlantic slave trade had tried to erase. She began painting the gods after a simple realisation in the museum: the Renaissance walls held no women who looked like her or her daughters. So she built them from research into the suppressed Yoruba faith, and from her own Ori.
Harmonia Rosales paints in the language of the European Old Masters — the same oil, the same light, the same grand compositions, and uses it to tell a story the Old Masters left out. Her canvases place Black women and the Yoruba deities, the orishas, exactly where Western art history refused to put them: at the centre, as gods, as the origin of everything. As she wrote of her own work: "the work exists in my Ori… every mind is a world."
Rosales isn't decorating the canon with Black faces. She's arguing that a suppressed West African cosmology belongs at the origin of the story the West tells about itself — and proving it in the West's own visual language. For a Nigerian and diaspora readership, that argument isn't abstract: these are your gods, on the ceiling, in oil, at the centre. That's the whole point of this magazine, made paint.
IMAGE SOURCES
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@honeiee on Instagram — the source post and current work
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CNN — Master Narrative · My Modern Met interview · Forbes — Memphis Brooks show