Harmonia Rosales: Rebellion through classical art

“The Creation of God,” oil on linen. (Harmonia Rosales)

“Birth of Oshun,” oil on linen. (Harmonia Rosales)

This post is about Harmonia Rosales, an artist I learned of a few years ago when I saw one of her paintings in a news article. Rosales is an Afro-Cuban American painter based in Chicago. She creates art with the goal of empowering Black women. As her website says, Rosales’ “main artistic concern has been focused on black female empowerment in western culture. Her paintings depict and honor the African diaspora.”

The first painting I saw of hers is called “Birth of Oshun.” It’s a recreation of Botticelli’s famous “The Birth of Venus” painting. In the place of the white, golden-haired Venus, Rosales’ work pictures a black woman with shorter hair, dark skin, and vitiligo, with the lighter patches of skin appearing to be golden.

Her creative process was inspired by a desire for social change and acceptance for minority women. Her previous relationship to the larger art field showed her mostly white beauty ideals. She calls her work artivism, which is a combination of art and activism. She has a blog of her own, and in the post "Why I Paint What I Paint," she writes, "I vowed to always include my culture and identity in my work, specifically the part of me that is the least represented in society."

Her relationship to individuals, like her daughter, motivated her to create her own ideals of beauty in art. She mentioned that she wanted her daughter to see parts of herself in art, like her curly hair. The collection of Rosales’ art that I’m focusing on is called B.I.T.C.H.: Black Imaginary To Counter Hegemony. It uses the Santaria religion’s Oshiras in place of goddesses or western figures (like Venus, the Virgin Mary, or god).

I think Rosales practices divergent thinking, because "in divergent thinking tasks, people begin with an ill-defined or open-ended problem" (Gardner). The open-ended problem here is a lack of diversity in classical art. She must re-imagine classical art to fix that problem.

In her post "An Artist's Worst Enemy: Procrastination," she writes that she struggles with finishing the paintings. The post begins with a quote by Bill Watterson: "You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. What mood is that? Last-minute panic." She says that she embraces the procrastination when it comes and focuses on other things. It sounds like she doesn't deal with the "Faustian Bargain" that Gardner describes. She seems to have a healthy life-creativity balance. The big-C creatives don't seem to share this balance.

Some public reception has been negative, especially from religious “traditionalists.” Rosales told the Los Angeles Times, “people said, ‘God should not be a black or Muslim or anything like that,’ and that tells me that what I’m doing is not only what needs to be done, but I need to keep going.” So, her relationship to critics also spurs her creativity.

I think that Rosales’ work is middle-C creativity, because she’s working in a new genre of art, in which she repaints legendary pieces of European art with characters who represent what much of the United States looks like now. People have been recreating old paintings for a bit, so that part isn’t new. But this is a very unique method of rebellion against western ideals and beauty standards.