PRESS
THE CURRENT: HARMONIA ROSALES RECASTS THE RENAISSANCE WITH WEST AFRICAN TALES FROM THE SAME PERIOD - DEBRA HERRICK
April 18, 2023
In a stunning exhibition that centered Black experiences, the Art, Design & Architecture Museum (AD&A) at UC Santa Barbara in 2022 presented a new exhibition with largely new works by artist Harmonia Rosales, who employs the pictorial tropes of Renaissance painting to reimagine tales from the West African religion Yorùbá. The show inspired a touring exhibition from Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (MBMA) that will soon visit Spelman College, an Historically Black College, and recently, a catalog...Read More
April 10, 2023
Now on exhibit at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the large 2017 painting "The Birth of Oshun" depicts a beguiling Black woman perched atop a large scalloped shell that appears to have risen from the sea. She is flanked by what appear to be similarly otherworldly men and women, floating among peacock feathers and flower-patterned fabric...Read More
REVIEW: BROOKS EXHIBIT IS ‘A JOURNEY OF EXPLORATION OF HUMAN COMMONALITY’ - ŽAK OZMO
March 31, 2023
An exhibition of detailed and luminously colored paintings in the Renaissance style that has “taken the art world by storm” is now on display at the Brooks...Read More
VOGUE SCANDINAVIA: THIS EXCLUSIVE SHORT FILM WILL CHALLENGE YOUR PERCEPTION OF BEAUTY
March 21, 2023
Exclusive to Vogue Scandinavia, created by artist Harmonia Rosales and director Jonas Bang, Birth of Oshun elaborates on the question that is core to Rosales' works: 'Why have we accepted Eurocentric perceptions of beauty and historical narratives for so long?'...Watch Here
VOGUE SCANDINAVIA: “NOT ALL VENUSES ARE BORN THE SAME”: MEET THE AFRO-CUBAN ARTIST AND DANISH DIRECTOR BEHIND BIRTH OF OSHUN – CLARE MCINERNEY
March 21, 2023
In 2017, Harmonia Rosales, an Afro-Cuban American artist from Chicago, released an artwork that caused waves – across both cultural and racial discourses. Titled ‘The Birth of Oshun’ – with Oshun representing BIPOC – the work was Rosales’ own interpretation of Botticelli’s masterpiece ‘The Birth of Venus’. Oshun is a West African doggess of the Yoruba religion, and something of an equivalent to Greek mythology’s Venus: representing femininity, fertility, beauty and love...Read More
MEMPHIS, THE CITY MAGAZINE: YOUR WEEKLY GUIDE TO THE ARTS – ARTSMEMPHIS
March 19, 2023
The Brooks' latest exhibit, Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative, has received national attention and is a must-see. Afterward, plan to attend the upcoming talk with Dr. Roberto Strongman, who will discuss how Rosales’ work creates a relationship between acculturation and deculturation when combining classical European portraiture with Black mythologies...Read More
MEMPHIS FLYER: HARMONIA ROSALES’ “MASTER NARRATIVE” AT THE BROOKS
– ABIGAIL MORICI
March 15, 2023
At a young age, Harmonia Rosales fell in love with the Renaissance masters who wove tales from Greco-Roman mythology and Christianity in their paintings. “They tell a full story, corner to corner, like a children’s book where you don’t have to really have the text,” she says. “You can almost look at the image and know this is what happened [...]" ...Read More
FORBES: HARMONIA ROSALES’ RENAISSANCE AT MEMPHIS BROOKS MUSEUM OF ART –CHADD SCOTT
March 14, 2023
Vessels. Vessels used to carry. Vessels used to conceal.
Vessels fascinate Harmonia Rosales (b. Chicago, 1984).
Ships brought enslaved Africans to the Americas. The ships were vessels.
The enslaved carried their religion along, quickly learning to hide it in order to protect themselves...Read More
March 6, 2023
On Friday at 6 PM, head to the Brooks Museum of Art for the opening lecture of their latest exhibition—Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative. Hear from the artist herself as she joins in conversation with Dr. Patricia Daigle, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
February 3, 2023
En se réappropriant le passé, les peintres Harmonia Rosales, Tyler Ballon et Titus Kaphar donnent à voir une histoire de l’art plus représentative pour les personnes minorisées...Read More
December 30, 2022
For religious Christians, Christmas is all about Jesus Christ. But his mother Mary was busy, too, giving birth. Over the centuries, Mary became one of the most popular figures of Christendom. Yet she appears in only a handful of pages in the Gospels. Visualizing the Virgin Mary...Read More
COLOSSAL: ARTIST HARMONIA ROSALES REINTERPRETS GENESIS THROUGH A STUNNING SUBVERSION OF THE SISTINE CHAPEL - GRACE EBERT
November 21, 2022
At the heart of Garden of Eve, Harmonia Rosales’ comprehensive exhibition at UTA Artist Space in Beverly Hills, is the power of narrative. The show spans years of Rosales’ career, featuring dozens of portraits in oil and perhaps the grandest work she’s produced thus far: encircled with lights, an upturned ship towers over the gallery, allowing viewers to pass underneath and peer upwards at the frescoed expanse...Read More
COMMERCIAL APPEAL: HOW MEMPHIS BROOKS MUSEUM OF ART PLANS TO TRANSFORM INTO 'EPICENTER OF BLACK ART - JOHN BEIFUSS
April 12, 2022
Funded by a group of anonymous donors, the $5 million Blackmon-Perry fellowship establishes a permanent rotating position for a young curator of color while also providing money for exhibitions and regular purchases of works by contemporary and historic Black artists from around the world…Read More
SANTA BARBARA INDEPENDENT: AFRICAN GODS MEET GREEK MYTHOLOGY IN HARMONIA ROSALES’S ‘ENTWINED’ - CHARLES DONELAN
April 7, 2022
Upon entering Harmonia Rosales’s show Entwined, on view now through May 1 at UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum (AD&A), one could easily imagine having stumbled into a gallery devoted to the painting of the 15th-century Italian Renaissance…Read More
THE OBSERVER: BLACK HISTORY MONTH CELEBRATED WITH ART EXHIBIT AT OMA - GRACE JOHNSON
February 25, 2022
Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales, creates art “focused on black female empowerment in Western culture.” Her work includes depictions of the famous “Madonna and Child” trope, but with Black figures in place of the traditionally white ones from antiquity…Read More
THE CURRENT: FAMILIAR FORMS, UNFAMILIAR TALES - TOM JACOBS
January 19, 2022
There’s something simultaneously familiar and startling about the art of Harmonia Rosales. Sometimes overtly, other times subtly, her paintings allude to Renaissance masterpieces — tableaus of gods and mortals, often drawn from Greek mythology…Read More
SANTA BARBARA INDEPENDENT: UCSB HUMANITIES FOCUSES ON ‘REGENERATION’ IN SERIES OF TALKS - NICHOLAS LIU
January 03, 2022
Next Up: Harmonia Rosales on Her Work and Greek and Yoruba Mythologies…Read More
FAD MAGAZINE: UTA FINE ARTS NOW REPRESENTS HARMONIA ROSALES - MARK WESTALL
December 25, 2021
Rosales joins UTA Fine Arts’ growing list of represented artists after the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’s recent acquisition of her work Oya’s Betrayal (2020)...Read More
THE COLLECTOR: HARMONIA ROSALES: BLACK FEMININE EMPOWERMENT IN PAINTINGS - IDALIS LOVE
March 28, 2021
Harmonia Rosales’ work exemplifies the values of the Black Feminist Movement while simultaneously calling into question Black people’s place in the world. Her work creates a space to discuss blackness and its erasure… Read More
NEW YORK TIMES: HOW THREE ARTIST ARE EXPLORING MYTHOLOGY AND RACE- ENUMA OKORO
September 10, 2020
Whether or not you believe in a literal Garden of Eden, the biblical story in which it appears has fed opinions about the nature of gender relationships, human sin and the consequences of disobedience. “The Odyssey” has lessons about life’s journey, weathering storms, heeding warnings and returning home. Odin, the one-eyed Norse god of war and death, is a symbol of self-sacrifice for wisdom...Read More
ARTS HELP: ICONS: HARMONIA ROSALES-HANNAH CHEW
August 5, 2020
Arts Help is thrilled to announce ICONS in partnership with W1 Curates! This new, exciting, and dynamic series will highlight artists igniting social change and raising global consciousness...Read More
THE LATINX PROJECT: RECLAIMING OUR IDENTITY: Q&A WITH AFRO-CUBAN ARTIST HARMONIA ROSALES- JASMINE HERNANDEZ
July 2, 2020
Harmonia Rosales, an Afro-Cuban American contemporary painter, elevates Black women to extraordinary plateaus in her very grand and sweeping oil paintings....Read More
ART SHE SAYS: HOW HARMONIA ROSALES DEFIES THE HEGEMONY TONE I STROKE AT A TIME- ZARAH ALISHA
June 10, 2020
Rosales reimagines classical and religious paintings typically reserved for white bodies and depicts Black women as how they ought to be recognized — powerful and beautiful...Read More
MOTHERLY: HARMONIA ROSALES ON BEING A SINGLE MOM, A WORKING ARTIST AND FINDING HER PATH IN LIFE - LIZ TENETLY
April 23, 2020
Podcast...Listen
DETROIT NEWS: WRIGHT MUSEUM'S 'QUEEN' STARS STRONG AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN-MICHAEL H. HODGES
April 22, 2020
Among the many pleasures COVID-19 has robbed us of, at least temporarily, is the opportunity to walk through "Queen: Celebrating Black Womanhood," the gorgeous new show at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History....Read More
COLOSSAL: MEMORY AND SELF-LOVE HIGHLIGHT PROFOUND PORTRAITS OF BLACK FIGURES BY HARMONIA ROSALES- GRACE EBERT
January 27, 2020
Chicago-born artist Harmonia Rosales says her striking portraits speak to "the part of me that has been the least represented in our society."... Read More
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