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Harmonia Rosales’ Renaissance At Memphis Brooks Museum Of Art

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Vessels. Vessels used to carry. Vessels used to conceal.

Vessels fascinate Harmonia Rosales (b. Chicago, 1984).

Ships brought enslaved Africans to the Americas. The ships were vessels.

The enslaved carried their religion along, quickly learning to hide it in order to protect themselves. They disguised their gods in the personage of Catholic saints. The saints were the vessels.

“With the Yorùbá religion, (people from the Africa diaspora) were not allowed to practice it. We were punished, we were killed, the priests and priestesses were hung, and we were forced to practice the Christian religion,” Rosales told Forbes.com. “Being taken away from not only our land, our home, our culture, everything that we know, in order to grasp some form of our identity, we hid our deities in theses saints, in saints that we found similar. For example, Yemaya, who's the mother to all, she's the ocean goddess, she's the Virgin Mary. They wear blue. What we did throughout the Atlantic slave trade, we brought these gods and preserved them through our survival.”

The Yorùbá are a west African ethnic group inhabiting portions of today’s Nigeria, Benin and Togo. Rosales was introduced to Lukumí, the oral religion of the Yoruba, in childhood from her father’s side of the family.

“It was always there,” the Afro-Cuban painter said. “You take things for granted because you grew up with it. I didn't know how special it actually was.”

That realization would come with the birth of her first child, a daughter, 13 years ago.

She started to dig. She asked her father for more stories. She researched Lukumí to pass it along to the next generation.

As a byproduct, Rosales landed upon a breathtakingly fresh reinterpretation of an art form which experienced its apex 500 years ago. The results can be seen in the artist's first major touring exhibition, “Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative,” at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through June 4, 2023.

Harmonia Rosales’ Renaissance

“It’s in museums, so this is what we see, me growing up, this is all I saw and it was beautiful,” Rosales remembers of her introduction to Southern Renaissance painting. “Perhaps it's my multicultural background that allowed me to just accept these images as they are.”

What they are is magnificent. What they aren’t is diverse.

A barrier Rosales’ daughter couldn’t get past.

“It didn't quite hit me until I had my own child and I was trying to engage her in things that I was interested in–art–and take her to the museum and, ‘Oh my god, I can't wait for you to see this!’ and she wasn't interested; it fell flat,” Rosales remembers. “I asked her–I literally asked her–‘Why don’t you like this? Isn’t it beautiful?’ She said, ‘Mommy, she doesn't look like me.”

Harmonia Rosales is very light skinned unlike her daughter.

“She didn't see anything that she could relate to,” Rosales said. “It was just painting after painting after painting after painting. I (thought), I want to change this. So, when I began to tell her these (Yorùbá) stories and began to paint these stories, I did it not only for her, but for all the little girls, for everyone.”

“Master Narrative” represents a culmination of Rosales’ work from the past seven years exploring the lives of the Yorùbá deities—orishas—their creation of Earth and humankind, and the lives of the biblical Eve and Adam as they live through and ultimately triumph over the Atlantic slave trade with the help of the gods. Artworks in the exhibition–which include over twenty canvases and the artist's first foray into sculpture–rewrite the canon, or the master narrative, of art history from the perspective of an Afro-Cuban American woman in the twenty-first century.

Her canvases seamlessly weave tales and characters derived from Yorùbá religion, Greek mythology, and Christianity with the canonical works and artistic techniques of the European Renaissance.

She was told doing so would be career suicide.

“I love this. This is what I am drawn to, and everybody was telling me, especially the art world, ‘Don't do this, this is not going to sell, nobody buys this stuff anymore,’” Rosales remembers. “It's interesting that these works of art that are said to be the most beautiful works of art, the most priceless works of art, they say is out of fashion, but I have to do what I love or else I feel like I can't paint, I feel like my talent’s not there.”

Master Narrative

Centering the “Master Narrative” exhibition is a sculptural work by the same name, the artist’s version of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling stretched across the hull of an overturned slave ship hovering above viewers.

Rosales’ unique mashup puts a biting, satirical spin on the Sistine Chapel and slave ships, both of which have been overdone to the point of near trope by contemporary artists. An artistic mic drop of conceit and execution.

“My initial thought was it's smaller than I thought, but actually more beautiful than any image can capture,” Rosales said of seeing the actual Sistine Chapel ceiling in person.

She designed her spin on the masterpiece, working with a fabricator to complete it. Covering the panels are fabric prints of her real paintings produced since the mid to late twenty-teens.

Dramatically, Black figures replace the white figures occupying Michelangelo’s fresco, Rosales painting them with an especially dark cast to the skin tone.

“When Lukumí migrated to Cuba and other places, you had a lot of colorism in play. The deities turned light skinned. Oshun, who was supposed to be beautiful, is light skinned. She's like mixed (racially) and she has long hair, they look quite immaculate. I want them more relatable,” Rosales said of the actors in her dramatic paintings. “I want them to look like they come from where the religion comes from. Yes, they are dark, but there are many colors within that skin tone. You'll have a blue highlight, you'll have a red highlight, there's other colors rather than just a dark flatness. I want the skin to illuminate off the panels as bright and beautiful as you see the Renaissance images.”

Bright. Beautiful. Black.

“Master Narrative” is the Brooks Museum’s latest effort to promote more of that within its walls. In 2021, the institution secured its first-ever endowed position, the Blackmon Perry Curatorial Fellowship in African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora, in an effort to grow both fields at the institution. The first work purchased with this fund was by Rosales, setting the path to collaborating on the exhibition.

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