Harmonia Rosales (b. 1984, Chicago) is an Afro-Cuban American painter whose work reimagines the canon of Western art through a diasporic and decolonial lens. Raised in the multicultural context of African, Cuban and Jewish heritage, Rosales draws on her roots and her formative encounters with Renaissance masterpieces to question the longstanding absence of Black women in classical visual narrativesHer signature style merges the techniques of Renaissance oil painting — luminous skin tones, gilded highlights, rich drapery, layered composition — with the mythologies of the Yoruba and Afro-Cuban Lucumí traditions, alongside Biblical and Greco-Roman iconography. The result: canvases that reclaim representation and inspire empowerment.Notably, her 2017 painting The Creation of God recasts Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam by portraying both God and Adam as Black women — a powerful commentary on the exclusion of dark-skinned bodies from the visual vocabulary of divinity and heroism.Rosales’s broader body of work elevates figures of African descent — especially Black women — placing them at the center of narratives that have historically sidelined or marginalized them. Her canvases invite viewers to engage in conversations about beauty, power, identity, and the legacies of colonialism.Currently based in Los Angeles, Rosales has exhibited widely in solo and group shows; institutions such as the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art have mounted major exhibitions of her work, and she continues to challenge and expand the definition of what the “master narrative” in art history can be.
