Monday, October 20, 2025, 5:15pm to 6:30pm
Milstein Hall, Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium
Join artist and author Harmonia Rosales for a conversation on the power of storytelling and why reimagining mythologies matters today. Her lecture will highlight her debut book, Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic, a contemporary retelling of West African mythology rooted in Yoruba oral traditions and the world of the Orishas. Rosales weaves together ancestral narratives with modern storytelling to create one of the first linear narrative mythologies of the Black Atlantic diaspora. After her talk, she will sit down for a conversation with Verity Platt (Classics and History of Art), Ana Howie (History of Art), and Visiting Critic Matt Bollinger (Department of Art).
Harmonia Rosales is a Chicago-born, Afro-Cuban American artist and author whose work centers on the visibility and empowerment of Black women in Western art. Growing up visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, Rosales was captivated by Renaissance painting — but years later, her daughter's simple observation that "they don't look like me" exposed the exclusion at the heart of that tradition.
That moment sparked Rosales’s artistic journey: reimagining Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces with Black protagonists and centering West African spirituality. Since 2017, her work has visualized the Orishas, the deities of the Yoruba tradition, and explored the survival of their stories across the Middle Passage. With bold, uncompromising imagery and prose, Rosales challenges Eurocentric ideals of beauty, power, and divinity, reshaping both art history and cultural consciousness.
Rosales has previously been the subject of exhibitions at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN; the Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; the Wright Museum, Detroit, MI, among others. Her work is held by numerous public and private collections across the United States, including the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History, Washington, D.C.; Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA, and others.
Her debut novel is Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic (W.W. Norton & Company, 2025).
Sponsored by the A&S Humanities Scholars Program (HSP), co-organized by the Department of Art (AAP) and co-sponsored by the Department of History of Art.
Image credit: Harmonia Rosales, Eve & The Orishas, 2023 [Courtesy of Harmonia Rosales].
https://events.cornell.edu/event/artist-lecture-harmonia-rosales
