African Gods Meet Greek Mythology in Harmonia Rosales’s ‘Entwined’

SoCal-Based Artist Gives Afro-Cuban Orishas the Renaissance Treatment at UC Santa Barbara’s AD&A Museum

By Charles Donelan | April 7, 2022

Portrait of Harmonia Rosales | Credit: Sophia Quach McCabe / Courtesy of the artist and Art, Design & Architecture Museum

Upon entering Harmonia Rosales’s show Entwined, on view now through May 1 at UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum (AD&A), one could easily imagine having stumbled into a gallery devoted to the painting of the 15th-century Italian Renaissance. Bright colors abound, figures appear in poses familiar from the art of classical antiquity, and everywhere, there’s evidence of exquisite artistry and technical skill and a passionate, imaginative engagement with mythology.

Harmonia Rosales, *Oba and Her Ear*, 2021. © Harmonia Rosales.

However, a closer look reveals something profoundly unfamiliar within these works, each of which is so redolent of the art of Michelangelo and Botticelli. These paintings were completed within the past five years, the majority of them as recently as 2021. The many figures that populate them come not from ancient Greece and Rome, or even from Christian iconography, but rather from the mythological/religious pantheon of the orishas, West African deities derived from the Yoruba culture and propagated through the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade into a remarkable diasporic array of circumstances throughout the Caribbean, Brazil, and North and South America.

The artist, Harmonia Rosales, who now lives in Southern California, grew up in Chicago, where she was raised in a family with deep roots in the orisha mythology. Her father immigrated from Havana, Cuba, and her mother was a Jewish Jamaican who grew up in Los Angeles. From her family, Rosales learned the African names of orisha gods — Obatala, Shango, Oshun, Yemaya, and Jeggua, among others — and the oral traditions, the pataki, as they are called. It is “where I come from,” she said. They are the spirits that guided, in particular, her paternal grandmother, and it is these animating principles and compelling narratives that inform her art and worldview. It leads her to say: “It is who I am.”