In 2017, the artist Harmonia Rosales posted a picture of one of her paintings on Instagram. It was a reproduction of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, except all the figures were Black. “I was just posting my progress,” she tells me over coffee. “What I didn’t expect was the reaction.” The image went viral and drew a range of responses. One comment read, “The bastardization of European culture has got to stop.” Another fan tattooed the image onto his body.
Rosales unveiled her first solo show later that year, at the Simard Bilodeau Contemporary gallery, in Los Angeles. There, she presented reimaginings of works by da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Botticelli—including The Birth of Venus, which she renamed Birth of Oshun, after a goddess from the Yoruba religion of West Africa.
Over the last eight years, Rosales, 41, has shown her African deities across the country—at Detroit’s Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Atlanta’s Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.
This week, she is publishing her first book, Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic, which retells and illustrates ancient African myths. She wants to push people past the confines of their Eurocentric views, she says: “You want to see diversity? It’s not enough to change Superman to be Black. We have to build on the foundation—go back to the beginning.”
Rosales grew up in Champaign, Illinois. Her father, a university professor, is Afro-Cuban, while her mother, a children’s-book author, is Jamaican and Jewish. Though both parents attended Catholic schools growing up, her father also engaged with Santeria, a religion rooted in the Yoruba tradition. He kept an altar in their family home, filling it with colored beads, each symbolizing a different orisha, or god.
Rosales pored over these tales, their imagery fueling her dream of becoming an artist, but her parents encouraged her to study something more practical. In 2002, she enrolled at the University of Illinois in Chicago as an English major, living at home under her father’s three rules: get an education, get married, have children. “The husband takes care of you. That’s how it was,” she says. By 2006, she’d become a wife and moved to West Virginia for her husband’s job, completing her college degree at Glenville State University. “I got married to leave home,” she adds.
But in 2013, six months after the birth of her second child, a son, the marriage soured. At 31, she found herself back in Champaign with her two kids, sleeping in her childhood bedroom. “I couldn’t find a job,” she told the online magazine Mayday in 2021. “I couldn’t even get a receptionist job.”
Rosales began taking painting commissions, both to make ends meet and to reconnect with art. A trip with her daughter to the Renaissance wing at the Art Institute of Chicago cemented her resolve. “I said one painting was beautiful, but my daughter said it didn’t look like her,” she says. “I realized I couldn’t walk her through the museum and show her anything that looked like her.”
Rosales taught herself Renaissance techniques from the Internet, creating her own interpretations and posting them online. After her viral 2017 debut, she committed to producing a canvas a month.
Galleries started to call. Then museums. In 2022, she finished a 40-foot version of the Sistine Chapel for a show at UTA Artist Space in Beverly Hills—a project that took five years to complete.
Over time, Rosales’s artistic approach has shifted. While researching Black deities to weave into her Renaissance replicas, she began to see how constellations of kingdoms and leaders shaped these mythologies, and how rarely those word-of-mouth stories had been put to paper. So she moved from canvas to page, taking it upon herself to ensure the myths would endure for generations to come. “I want professors to analyze it,” she says about Chronicles of Ori. “Because myths are steeped in history, after all.”
Elena Clavarino is the Senior Editor at AIR MAIL
