Harmonia Rosales is an artist and author whose work explores the ways origin stories and cultural memory continue to shape contemporary ways of seeing. Drawing from African diasporic histories, West African philosophies, and the visual authority of Old Master painting, she creates narratives that examine collective understandings of beauty, divinity, and power to reconfigure the hierarchies embedded within those traditions.
Black figures become protagonists, deities, and central subjects, occupying positions of power and monumentality. Established symbols and myths are recast, while the natural world is no longer treated simply as landscape, backdrop, or resource.
Raised within a multicultural Afro-Cuban family, Rosales grew up with histories, traditions, and forms of storytelling carried across the African diaspora. These influences remain central to both her visual and literary work. Her practice draws particularly from ancestral memory, transformation, and the relationship between humanity and the natural world.
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In her paintings, these ideas take form through a vivid material language. Gold leaf, rust, and layered textures speak simultaneously to beauty, endurance, loss, and renewal. Historical, mythological, and contemporary references converge to evoke a feeling at once familiar and newly imagined.
Rosales has been the subject of exhibitions at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles,CA; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee; the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia; and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, Michigan, among others. In September 2025, Rosales unveiled her first permanent sculpture, Unbound, a commission for King’s Chapel in Boston, Massachusetts. Her work is held in public and private collections throughout the world including the Perez Art Museum Miami, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and the Spelman Museum of Fine Art.
Her debut novel, CHRONICLES OF ORI: An African Epic, was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2025.
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PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Peréz Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL | Smithsonian National Museum of African American History, Washington D.C. | Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN | Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA | Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI | AD&A Museum, Santa Barbara, CA | Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, MI | Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA
CONTACT
info@harmoniarosales.art
Los Angeles, California