Biography
Harmonia Rosales is a Chicago-born, Afro-Cuban American artist and author whose work centers the visibility and empowerment of Black women in Western art. Growing up visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, Rosales was captivated by Renaissance painting—but years later, her daughter’s simple observation that “they don’t look like me” exposed the exclusion at the heart of that tradition.
That moment sparked Rosales’s artistic journey: reimagining Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces with Black protagonists and centering West African spirituality. Since 2017, her work has visualized the Orishas, the deities of the Yoruba tradition, and explored the survival of their stories across the Middle Passage. With bold, uncompromising imagery and prose, Rosales challenges Eurocentric ideals of beauty, power, and divinity, reshaping both art history and cultural consciousness.
Rosales has previously been the subject of exhibitions at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN; the Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; the Wright Museum, Detroit, MI, among others. In September 2025, Rosales unveiled her first public sculpture Unbound (2025), a commission for King’s Chapel in Boston, MA. Her work is held by numerous public and private collections across the United States, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History, Washington, D.C.; Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA, and others.
Her debut novel, Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic, was published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. in 2025. In the fall of 2025, Rosales embarked on a book tour, with events at national and international institutions such as The National Gallery, London; the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; Howard University, Washington, D.C.; and The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Charlotte, NC.
In January 2026, The Getty in Los Angeles presented Rosales’s paintings as part of the exhibition Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages.