Harmonia Rosales is an artist and author whose work explores how origin stories and cultural memory shape the human relationship to the environment. Drawing from African diasporic histories, West African philosophies, and the visual language of Renaissance and Baroque painting, she creates mythic narratives that examine how societies construct meaning, identity, and belonging.
At the center of her work is a guiding thesis: how might our relationship to nature change if we understood it not as a resource, backdrop, or abstraction, but as a supreme living being? What role does storytelling play in shaping that understanding? And what happens when viewers are invited to physically bear witness to nature personified through a painting, sculpture, installation, or written word?
Raised within a multicultural Afro-Cuban family, Rosales draws inspiration from the philosophies, traditions, and oral histories carried throughout the African diaspora. Her work frequently engages concepts such as Ori, the Yoruba understanding of destiny and inner consciousness, as well as ancestral memory, transformation, and humanity’s relationship to nature. Rivers, oceans, forests, storms, and the earth itself emerge throughout her work not as passive settings, but as living forces that shape human experience.
Employing the compositional rigor and symbolism of historical Old Master painting, Rosales reimagines familiar visual traditions through new narratives that center interconnectedness rather than hierarchy. Her figures often inhabit luminous, dreamlike worlds where history, mythology, and contemporary life converge. Rich surfaces of gold leaf, rust, and layered textures create visual environments that speak simultaneously to beauty, endurance, loss, and renewal.
Rather than offering fixed answers, Rosales’s work invites reflection on the stories humanity chooses to preserve, the memories it forgets, and the values that guide its future. Through these narratives, she seeks to foster a deeper relationship with self, with community, with ancestral knowledge, and with the living world that sustains us.
At its core, her practice is an exploration of what it means to become who we are meant to be.
Artist Talks
Episode No. 744: “Beginnings”
Modern Art Notes Podcast
Feb 5, 2026Watch HereEpisode No. 744 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Blas Isasi and curators Larissa Grollemond and Elizabeth Morrison, and artist Harmonia Rosales. Grollemond and Morrison are the curators of “Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages” at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The exhibition, which is on view through April 19, looks at how creation stories have been advanced in manuscript painting. The exhibition also includes works by Harmonia Rosales, whose work often engages Christian creation stories, how they were presented in the middle ages, and how they might be offered today.
Making a Monument: A Conversation with Harmonia Rosales
The Monumental Project
Dec 12, 2025Watch HereAs often as we discuss monuments that have stood for decades or centuries, we rarely find the opportunity to discuss a monument just recently erected. In our final episode of 2025, we're excited to share a conversation with Harmonia Rosales, the artist of a new monument in Boston, Massachusetts entitled, "Unbound." Harmonia shares with us her artistic vision for the monument, how the project came to be, and what her overall ethos is as an artist that works with sculpture, paintings, and more.
Chronicles of Ori: The Book Tour
Multiple Locations
Oct 14, 2025Watch HereThis book tour is more than a celebration; it is a movement. It brings together art and storytelling to shift cultural perception and ignite global dialogue. Through this work, Harmonia Rosales ensures that the Orishas are not only remembered—but revered, celebrated, and woven into the fabric of pop culture for generations to come.
Harmonia Rosales: Reclaiming the Narrative
New York University, The Center for Black Visual Culture
Apr 2, 2025Watch HereArtist Harmonia Rosales interrogates the ways believers and dreamers re-imagine myth-making offering a unique lens on West African mythology. By weaving ancient tales of the Orisha pantheon with her ancestral knowledge, Rosales’ paintings insert the African deities she grew up with into narratives that span the birth of the universe to the modern world of colonialism and resistance. Through her painted works, Rosales brings an overlooked world and tradition into the grander creative canon. Dr. Akissi Britton, anthropologist specializing in African diasporic religions; Black feminisms; and diaspora/Black Atlantic theory will join Rosales for a post-lecture conversation about her practice and the role of visual culture in the reclamation of historically erased narratives.
Creative Conversations: Ben Quash with Harmonia Rosales
National Gallery, The Visual Commentary on Scripture
Mar 3, 2025Watch HereThis film continues our series of ‘Creative Conversations’. In these conversations, living artists working in a variety of different artistic media discuss how the Bible and its legacies of visual and theological interpretation operate as a vital resource for their own creativity. In this episode, Ben Quash interviews the visual artist Harmonia Rosales, whose roots in Yoruba religious culture, in its journey from West Africa to Cuba and beyond, have inspired her deep engagement with biblical stories and artistic traditions as conversation partners for her work.
What's The Point? With Harmonia Rosales
What's The Point Podcast
Dec 5, 2024Watch HereShantell Martin kicks off Season 2 of #WhatsthePoint with the incredible Harmonia Rosales.
Dive into an inspiring conversation about the critical role research plays in Harmonia's artistic process and her visionary outlook on the future of her art. Together, they explore her journey from early encounters with fine art to the powerful influence of her ancestry and the invaluable lessons she's learned throughout her career.
Falkenburg Lecture: Artist Harmonia Rosales in conversation with Stephanie Sparling Williams
Mount Holyoke College Museum of Fine Art
Sep 19, 2024Watch HereJoin us for a conversation between artist Harmonia Rosales and Dr. Stephanie Sparling Willams, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. This event celebrates the artist and her work, including the painting The Harvest, on view at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.
Harmonia Rosales: Reclaiming Lost Histories
New York Studio School
Nov 7, 2023Watch HereArtist Harmonia Rosales describes the longevity of her work by employing decolonial practices to her paintings. She unmasks the stories of Yoruba deities (Orishas) and puts them at the center of her storytelling. By reclaiming these lost narratives, she brings power to them.
A Conversation with Harmonia Rosales
Cerebral Women Podcast
Aug 31, 2023Watch HereThis episode features Harmonia Rosales. Born in Chicago, Illinois, she is an Afro-Cuban American artist currently based in Los Angeles, California. Her exquisite canvases navigate, and question received narratives from ancient myths, Biblical stories, classical antiquity, and AfroCuban culture, while challenging Eurocentric perceptions of beauty.
Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative
Spelman Museum of Fine Art
Aug 18, 2023Watch HereThe Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative exhibition opened with an artists talk between Harmonia Rosales and Spelman Professor Emeritus, Arturo Lindsay. In this conversation about art and the African diaspora, they discuss art-making, identity, and the influence of the orishas.
THE BLACK BAROQUE PROJECT Visiting Artist Interviews: Harmonia Rosales
University of Chicago
May 1, 2023Watch HereA Black Baroque conversation between Los Angeles based artist Harmonia Rosales and art historian Sophia Q. McCabe. The two discuss how Rosales's work engages with and subverts Baroque art to tell new stories of belonging through her reimaginations of 17th-century paintings that visualize the stories of the orishas, the survival of the Yoruba religion through the African diaspora, and Black female beauty and Black empowerment.
Harmonia Rosales: MASTER NARRATIVE
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art
Mar 10, 2023A conversation between Los Angeles-based artist Harmonia Rosales and exhibition curator Dr. Patricia Daigle, MBMA Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. This event is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative.
Modernizing Mary: Contemporary artists reinterpret an icon
The Getty Center
Dec 10, 2022Watch HereThe depiction of the Virgin Mary in visual art is a tradition stretching back almost 2,000 years. Her popularity over the centuries is well represented by many artworks in the Getty Museum, but Mary also continues to inspire contemporary artists. In this conversation, participants draw out the enduring appeal of this figure who serves as both an icon of compassionate devotion and cultural celebration, or an emblem of religious tradition and oppression to critique. Exploring why contemporary artists remain attracted to the many symbolisms of the Virgin Mary helps us understand how a visual theme that originated in the Middle Ages still has resonance today.
In Conversation: Deborah Roberts & Harmonia Rosales
UTA Artist Space
Nov 26, 2022Watch HereHarmonia Rosales and Deborah Roberts discuss challenging the notion of ideal beauty from a marginalized perspective.
In Conversation: Harmonia Rosales & Robin Coste Lewis
UTA Artist Space
Oct 28, 2022Watch HereIn preparation for Harmonia Rosales’ GARDEN OF EVE exhibit, the artist and poet Robin Coste Lewis discuss artistic practices and reframing hegemonic narrative.