Harmonia Rosales: Reclaiming the Narrative

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NYU Office of Global Programs, Office of Global Inclusion, The Center for Global Spiritual Life, The Center for Black Visual Culture, The Center for Multicultural Education and Programs, and The Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora welcome artist Harmonia Rosales. 

Artist 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.

Harmonia Rosales

Harmonia Rosales 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 Afro-Cuban culture, while challenging Eurocentric perceptions of beauty. Inspired by the techniques found in Renaissance paintings, Rosales uses oil and gold to decolonize the canon and focus on the empowerment of Black women through a diasporic lens. Rosales’ artworks are informed by the ebb and flow of contemporary society where she seeks to reimagine new forms of aesthetic beauty, snuggled somewhere between pure love and ideological counter-hegemony.

Dr. Akissi Britton

Dr. Akissi Britton, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers-New Brunswick earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) with certificates in Women’s Studies and Africana Studies. Her research interests, broadly defined, are on the intersections of race, gender, and African diasporic religions, specifically Orisa/Lucumí tradition; Black feminisms; diaspora/Black Atlantic theory; gentrification and neoliberal urban development; and the importance of the digital in the study of diasporic communities.

Date:  April 2nd, 2025

Time:  6:00pm to 7:30pm

Location: Espacio de Culturas
53 Washington Square S, New York, NY 10012