Black Feminist Artmaking: A Conversation with Harmonia Rosales

Featuring Professor Liseli Fitzpatrick

Influcenced by her multicultral Afro-Cuban background, Harmonia Rosales's primary artistic concern focuses on Black female empowerment through a diasporic lens. Her work seamlessly entwines the oral narratives and deities of West African Yorùbá religion, Greco-Roman mythology, and Christianity with the artistic techniques of the Renaissance masters. For Rosales, reimagining hegemonic narratives preserves the memory of her ancestral lineage and functions to champion resilience and question Eurocentric notions of beauty. While her subjects serve as conduits for the internal struggles of a disempowered society, Rosales encourages her onlookers to possess more sympathy, empathy, and empowerment. 

Rosales's current series, Transformations: The Rise and Fall of the Orishas, delves further into the ancient stories of the Yorùbá. Rosales's latest cycle of paintings is an epic tale about the origins of the Orishas, whose identities and stories have been masked by Christianity for over 500 years. Inspired by Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses (8 A.D.), Transformations chronicles the Yorùbá religion, from creation to the death of Eve. In Rosales's iconography, Eve embodies not only the first woman, but also the mother of all African peoples forcibly removed from their homeland during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Yorùbá culture and religion date back 5,000 years to West Nigeria. Through the transportation of Yorùbá people in the slave trade, the traditions migrated overseas and their stories (patakís) have been passed down orally through generations over time. These works are Rosales' way of creating a visual narration for stories that primarily live in one's ancestral memory.

Rosales will be in conversation by Professor Liseli Fitzpatrick, Lecturer in the Department of Africana Studies.. 

This event is open to all members of the Wellesley College community.

Lunch will be provided. Kindly RSVP here.