Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative

Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative features twenty paintings by the Los Angeles based artist Harmonia Rosales (b. Chicago, 1984), who seamlessly entwines the tales and characters of the Afro-Cuban Lucumí religion, Greco-Roman mythology, and Christianity with the canonical works and artistic techniques of European Old Masters. Through her vibrant and visceral paintings, she challenges the concept of the master narrative in a way that collapses the passing of millennia and bridges the vastest of oceans. For Rosales, storytelling is a journey of personal discovery and a reclamation of one’s cultural identity as a means of survival. She asks us to consider the universality of creation, tragedy, resilience, and transcendence through a Black diasporic lens.

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. It is curated by Dr. Patricia Daigle, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

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Sponsored by archimania with major exhibition support provided by Darrell and Mikki Cobbins and Rodney and Andrea Herenton. All exhibitions at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art are underwritten by the MBMA Exhibition Fund. Major annual support is provided by Mary Lee Copp Formanek and Maggie and Milton Lovell, with generous annual funding from Gloria and Kenneth Boyland, Deborah and Bob Craddock, Michael and Maria Douglass, Eleanor and William Halliday, Buzzy Hussey and Dr. Hal Brunt, Dr. James Patterson, Dr. Rushton Patterson, and Carl and Valerie Person. This project is supported, in whole or in part, by federal award number SLFRP5534 awarded to the State of Tennessee by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.