Harmonia Rosales

Growing up, she was fond of many of the classic Italian Renaissance paintings. Her family adhered to gender norms and she was told that would need to have a man to support her. When she grew up, she married her high school sweetheart and conceived a daughter. After realizing that the relationship wouldn’t work out, she got a divorce and left with practically nothing in her possession.

One of her many works is The Birth of Oshun, an oil-on-canvas painting, which reimagines Sandro Botticelli’s work, Birth of Venus, by placing Oshun, the Yoruba goddess of fertility, sensuality, and prosperity, in a sea shell surrounded by black angel’s in contrast to Botticelli’s painting where a white Venus, the goddess of love, beauty, and fertility is in a sea shell surrounded by white angels. In this painting, Oshun has vitiligo that is made of gold patches that have roots in traditional Nigerian Storytelling. The painting is meant to challenge the perceptions of beauty because as she says, “traditionally, we see Venus as this beautiful woman with flowing hair. My hair never flowed, so I’m wondering why this is supposed to be a painting of the most beautiful woman in the world.” This painting works to show the beauty in imperfection, such as the patches of Vitiligo, a skin condition. She also says that she created this work with her daughter in mind in order to show her daughter that black women, and their natural hair, are beautiful.

Another one of Rosales’s works was The Creation of God, a piece of art that went viral in 2017. This painting is an oil-on-canvas painting and it took two months to craft. In this painting, she recreates Michelangelo’s Creazione di Adamo by displaying both God and Adam as Black women.  Some have described The Creation of Adam as having indescribable beauty by showing Jehovah’s finger and the elegant, naked, body of the first man. In contrast, the painting created by Harmonia Rosales shows God as a black woman and creates the illusion of the heavens as a womb that God, a black woman. is birthing Adam out of in order to show strength and empowerment. This piece received much backlash because people found it offensive that God was depicted as a black woman. Critics went as far as to call her work a”disgrace, disgusting and cultural appropriation.” However, Rosales was trying to display that, “We have been taught that God created ‘man’ in his own image. [But] in fact, we have created God in our own image,” which is why she called it The Creation of God. This picture was made to show that only white figures were the staple in classic art while also challenge, and questioning. the reason that this practice is commonly accepted.

Harmonia Rosales (born 1984) is an Afro-Cuban American artist from Chicago.