“I don’t want my daughter to be brainwashed like I was … I want her to love her hair, her skin, her lips, her nose, everything.” “I re-saw (the art) with innocent eyes, without all the different manipulations society puts on you about what you should look like,” she added. “I was like, ‘Why don’t you like this?’” Rosales said, referring to a particular portrait. But when Rosales first took her daughter, then age 4 or 5 years old, to a gallery showcasing works from the period, it fell flat. When Rosales had her first child, she recalled being excited to have a “little me,” just as in awe of art museums - and particularly Renaissance art. In the years since, Rosales has seen her work displayed at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art in Brooklyn and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, among other venues. In Rosales' "Creation of God," God is a Black woman.
“There was time (and) love put into Renaissance art, and it shows within the work,” Rosales said, describing it as “the framework of American beauty, perception of beauty, everything.”Īs a self-taught artist, Rosales first became well known after sharing her painting “The Creation of God” (pictured below) on social media in 2017. So she found her inspiration instead in art books, research and museums, where she could closely observe paintings to study techniques - in particular those of Renaissance artists. Growing up in Chicago, Rosales tried her hand at art school but didn’t like the constraints she felt it placed on her creative instincts. She didn’t fit into one racial or ethnic box, and struggled with wanting to change certain physical features society historically hasn’t considered attractive - such as naturally curly and kinky hair, which, for years, she straightened with chemical hair relaxers gifted from her grandmother, or elbows and knees becoming darker than the rest of her body. With her mixed ancestry, which also includes Jamaican roots, Rosales said she “never felt like I was enough of anything” while growing up. “This is recuperating a history that has been actively stabbed out.” “What she’s doing is different than a lot of people working in Black figuration right now,” said Liz Andrews, executive director of the Spelman College Museum of Art, of Rosales’ work. This photographer is on a quest to change that, both in front of and behind the lens “The only way to do that is by reimagining certain famous images.”Īdvertising is missing Black women. “I’m taking the express route of teaching people who they are,” she added. “I want to make it very linear, understandable and digestible, so then we can dive deeper.” I’m trying to educate the masses on a religion that has been hidden for quite some time,” Rosales said. So why center Black people in an artform that ostracized them, rather than creating an entirely new space to convey this “master narrative?” For Rosales, the best way to diversify the medium is to operate from within its parameters. Renaissance art largely excluded Black people, even as it emerged during the early phases of the transatlantic slave trade which ultimately brought 10.7 million African men, women and children to the Americas - some 1.67 million of whom were Yorùbá followers. "'Ori' is the Yorùbá term for 'head' and denotes both the top of the skull and the notion of personal destiny divinely embodied within it," says a museum plaque for Rosales' work of the same name. (A version of the exhibition was first shown last year at the AD&A Museum at the University of California, Santa-Barbara.) A selection of her work in this vein is currently on display in the exhibition “ Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative” at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta. It was from the 15th to 16th century that “art came to be seen as a branch of knowledge,” according to Britannica, “valuable in its own right and capable of providing man with images of God and his creations as well as with insights into man’s position in the universe.”īut Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales is among those seeking to radically change this centering of Western ideologies as standard.
This is because, for centuries, the artistic traditions of the European Renaissance have been the authority of such themes. Consider Michelangelo’s famous “Creation of Adam,” Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” or Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” When you think of Western art’s grand visual narratives of humanity’s inception - and all its triumphs, beauty, tragedies and meaning - they likely look very White.
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