Harmonia Rosales Creates Eloquent Portraits of Black Individuals in the Classical European Style.

Chicago-born artist Harmonia Rosales paints powerful portraits of black figures in the Renaissance style to highlight black female empowerment in Western culture, while exploring memories, ancestral, self-love, and classical European art.

Black female empowerment in Western culture has been Harmonia Rosales’ primary artistic concern ever since she began creating art. Her artwork honors and celebrates the African diaspora. The artist seeks to reimagine new forms of aesthetic beauty, nestled somewhere between pure love and ideological counter-hegemony, while remaining completely open to the ups and downs of contemporary society. She was captivated by the renaissance masters’ flawless skill and composition as a young girl, but she was unable to connect with them because they primarily portrayed a white male hierarchy and the idealized subordinate woman who was submerged in a Eurocentric conception of beauty. Her message is to create a sense of harmony, a yin to the yang, rather than an ideal or to simply copy.