ATLANTA (April 26, 2023) — Following its presentation at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the inspired exhibition "Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative" opens at Atlanta’s Spelman College Museum of Fine Art on Friday, August 18.
Cultural reclamation permeates “Master Narrative,” an exhibition of twenty paintings and a large-scale sculptural installation by the Los Angeles-based Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales who seamlessly entwines the tales and characters of the Yorùbá religion, Greco-Roman mythology and Christianity with the canonical works and artistic techniques of European Old Masters.
“We are fortunate to have Harmonia Rosales’ first traveling solo museum exhibition at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. Rosales’ work confronts the concept of a master narrative through imagery that is both beautiful and challenging. Her masterfully-rendered paintings and a large-scale installation will engage AUC students and the general public,” said Spelman College Museum of Art Executive Director Liz Andrews.
The installation in this exhibition is Rosales's first foray into sculpture and depicts her own version of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling stretched across the hull of an overturned slave ship that hovers above the viewer. Through her visual storytelling, Rosales presents the notion of human and cultural survival on her own terms – one that highlights the beauty and strength of Black people, particularly women, while touching upon grand narratives of creation, tragedy, survival and transcendence.
“Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative” is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue, the first monograph for the artist, published by Paul Holberton Press. The exhibition opens to the public on August 18.
A full list of programming will be found at
www.spelman.edu/about-us/museum-of-fine-art.
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About Harmonia Rosales
Harmonia Rosales (b. 1984, Chicago, Illinois) is an Afro-Cuban American artist currently based in Los Angeles, California. Her exquisite canvases navigate and question received narratives from ancient myths, Biblical stories, classical antiquity and Afro-Cuban culture, while challenging Eurocentric perceptions of beauty. Her work has been shown in various group and solo exhibitions including "Femme Touch" (2020) at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, "Miss Education: Reclaiming Our Identity" (2020) at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art in Brooklyn, and most recently "Harmonia Rosales: Entwined" (2022) at the Art, Architecture & Design Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
"Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative" is organized by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara.
To learn more, please visit harmoniarosales.art or @honeiee on social media.
About Spelman College Museum of Fine Art
The Spelman College Museum of Fine Art is the only museum in the nation dedicated to art by and about women of the African diaspora. The museum is located on the campus of Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia on the first floor of the Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby, Ed.D., Academic Center. Initial plans for the Museum were spearheaded by arts faculty who believed that visual art is an essential component of a liberal arts education and that it plays a significant role in encouraging intellectual growth and it has served as a vital resource for the Spelman community and the Atlanta University Center since it opened in 1996. The Spelman Museum is an internationally respected nexus for excellent exhibitions and programs, and has a renewed commitment to growing and exhibiting the permanent collection of art.
To learn more, please visit museum.spelman.edu or @spelmanmuseum on social media.
About Spelman College
Founded in 1881, Spelman College is a leading liberal arts college widely recognized as the global leader in the education of women of African descent. Located in Atlanta, the College’s picturesque campus is home to 2,100 students. Spelman is the country's leading producer of Black women who complete Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The College’s status is confirmed by the U.S. News & World Report, which ranked Spelman No. 51 among all liberal arts colleges, No. 19 for undergraduate teaching, No. 5 for social mobility among liberal arts colleges, and No. 1 for the 16th year among historically Black colleges and universities. The Wall Street Journal has ranked the College No. 3, nationally, in terms of student satisfaction. Recent initiatives include a designation by the Department of Defense as a Center of Excellence for Minority Women in STEM, a Gender and Sexuality Studies Institute, the first endowed queer studies chair at an HBCU, and a program to increase the number of Black women Ph.D.s in economics. New majors have been added, including documentary filmmaking and photography, and collaborations have been established with MIT’s Media Lab, the Broad Institute and the Army Research Lab for artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Outstanding alumnae include Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, Walgreens Boots Alliance CEO Rosalind Brewer, political leader Stacey Abrams, former Acting Surgeon General and Spelman’s first alumna president Audrey Forbes Manley, actress and producer Latanya Richardson Jackson, global bioinformatics geneticist Janina Jeff and authors Pearl Cleage and Tayari Jones.
To learn more, please visit spelman.edu and @spelmancollege on social media.