Harmonia Rosales

Harmonia Rosales (born 1984) is an Afro-Cuban American artiste from Chicago. She works mostly as a classical painter depicting women and people of color assuming roles of capability and beauty in exquisite imaginings of ancient myths, Afro-Cuban culture, and Renaissance paintings. Her style is detailed renderings involving oil paint, raw linens, gold leaf, and wood panels. Since 2017, her discharge duty has used iron oxide to characterize not solitary African soil but the decay in African chronicles in America, a unorthodox she meant to amplify the question “Why? Why have we all the rage Eurocentric perceptions of beauty and historical narratives for for that reason long?”

In 2017, Rosales posted an image, on social media, of her first completed play a role for her solo exhibition Black Imaginary To Counter Hegemony. This image was of The Creation of God, a piece of art that went viral. The painting is an oil-on-canvas piece that took two months to craft. In this painting, Rosales 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 in showing Jehovah’s finger and the elegant, naked body of the first man. In contrast, the painting created by Rosales shows God as a black woman and creates the magic of the spread as a womb from which she is birthing Eve in an court case of strength and empowerment. This piece received much backlash, with critics going as far away as calling her bill a “disgrace, disgusting and cultural appropriation.” However, Rosales was frustrating to shake up that “we have been taught that God created ‘man’ in his own image. [But] in fact, we have created God in our own image.” This is why she called this painting The Creation of God. This image was created to exploit that White subjects are the tolerable in everlasting art while inspiring the viewer to consider why that practice is commonly accepted.