Artist Harmonia Rosales Expands the Story of Creation at The Getty Center in Los Angeles

“Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages” at The Getty Center brings together medieval illuminated manuscripts and contemporary reflections on Genesis—but it is artist Harmonia Rosales’s presence that reframes the conversation. On view through April 19, the exhibition examines how Biblical narratives of Creation were visualized and transmitted in the Middle Ages, now expanded through Rosales’s paintings, shown in direct dialogue with works from the Getty’s collection.

For Harmonia Rosales, whose practice centers the divine presence of Black women and draws deeply from Yoruba cosmology, the moment feels larger than personal recognition. “What are a people without their origins?” she asks. In placing her gilded, meticulously composed paintings beside medieval manuscripts—objects long associated with Eurocentric beauty and spiritual authority—Harmonia Rosales widens the canon itself. A highlight of the presentation is a new work created in response to the Getty’s Stammheim Missal, engaging the circular cosmologies and symbolic language of medieval illumination while restoring African diasporic lineage to the story of beginnings.

The result is not simply a juxtaposition across centuries, but a recalibration of origin, authorship, and spiritual inheritance.

Harmonia Rosales at The Getty Center

WHITEWALL: Your work is being shown in “Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages” at The Getty Center. What did it mean to see your paintings enter into dialogue with medieval illuminated manuscripts—objects so historically distant yet spiritually charged?

HARMONIA ROSALES: Honestly, it felt encouraging, not just personally, but for the larger mission behind my work. To see my paintings in conversation with medieval illuminated manuscripts signals that there’s space opening up to expand the African diaspora’s fragmented history beyond the margins. It tells me that people are listening, that institutions are listening. Because what are a people without their origins? And what happens when those origins are finally placed back into the canon?

WW: The exhibition places your work alongside narratives of Biblical creation. How did you approach the idea of “beginnings” through the lens of Yoruba cosmology, and where do you see alignment or friction between these worldviews?

HR: I approached “beginnings” by first decentering humanity and restoring a sense of humility in our place within the cosmos, amongst nature. Both Biblical and Yoruba cosmologies acknowledge a higher power, but where they begin to diverge is in orientation: Yoruba thought is deeply relational, especially to nature, land, water, and elemental forces. The friction lies in that shift from a worldview that often centers human dominion and judgment to one that understands humanity as part of an interconnected, living system.

“There’s space opening up to expand the African diaspora’s fragmented history beyond the margins.”

Harmonia Rosales

WW: You created a new work in response to the Stammheim Missal. How did engaging with a specific historical object shape your compositional, symbolic, or material decisions?

HR: Engaging with the Stammhiem Missal immediately put me in awe. Medieval manuscript painting is incredibly detailed despite its small scale, and that level of precision alone is admirable for an artist. What drew me in most, though, was the simplicity of how it visualized the creation of the earth, especially the roundels. Circles, for me, symbolize continuum and cycles, so I leaned into that language compositionally, but not to suggest repetition of the same story. Continuation, to me, birth transformation. That’s why I incorporated the gilded serpent in bas-relief, to emphasize that the earth, like life, moves through cycles that shed, renew, and become something else.

Reclaiming Figures Excluded from Art History

WW: Your paintings often reclaim figures and stories that have been excluded from Western art history. In this institutional context, did that act of reclamation feel different—or newly amplified?

HR: Absolutely, not because I, or any person of color, need institutional validation. But there is something powerful, almost euphoric, about being seen and heard within a historical context that once excluded us. To have my work hanging beside images that once defined Eurocentric beauty was worthy, divine, or ideal, images people of color were never meant to embody, feels like a quiet acknowledgment of that visual hierarchy. It’s widening the frame for our true origin stories to being restored to the narrative.

WW: You’ve spoken about bridging past and present in your practice. When viewers encounter your work beside medieval manuscripts, what kind of temporal experience do you hope they have?

HR: I hope they feel time collapse a bit and understand that moving forward requires us to reconcile what’s behind us. How can any people truly feel at home on a land where their history begins in chains? When our stories in America start with survival and oppression, that’s not an origin…that’s a chapter. Placing my work beside medieval manuscripts is a reminder that our beginnings existed long before the break, and reclaiming them reshapes how we stand in the present.

WW: This moment coincides with several major milestones: a Getty exhibition, your first public monument, and your debut book. How has moving between painting, sculpture, and writing expanded or challenged the way you tell stories?

HR: Moving between painting, sculpture, and writing has shown me that I don’t have to exist in a single lane. Each medium carries emotion differently. Painting can be intimate and symbolic, sculpture can occupy space and demand presence, and writing allows me to build an entire inner world with all it details. But at the core, the artistry is just the conduit, the message is what matters. When the message is clear and you’re truly passionate about it, it overpowers the medium, and that’s what creates change. That message and freedom of exploring mediums, naturally pushes me toward film, which I’m currently developing, because some stories need to move.

A New Kind of Public Art

WW: Unbound, your public memorial at King’s Chapel, addresses history, accountability, and spiritual release. How does working in public space compare to the intimacy of painting within museum walls?

HR: Working on Unbound felt very different from hanging a painting inside museum walls. A painting I create is personal and hanging it in a museum is contemplative. People choose to enter, they’re prepared to engage. But public work involves collaboration and space. It confronts you in the middle of your day, in the very landscape where history actually happened. It doesn’t ask permission… something about that is empowering. I would love to do another.

WW: Across your work—whether canvas, monument, or book—Black women are positioned as divine, central, and powerful. How do you think about responsibility and care when reshaping visual and spiritual lineages that have endured for centuries?

HR: Across everything I create, I will always center the Black woman. We are the original vessel, the body that births life, and for centuries we were denied divinity in visual culture, so restoring that is intentional. But the how matters. I ground everything in research. I anchor the myth, the symbolism, the imagery in documented history and scholarship, because you can debate interpretation, but you can’t deny facts.

That research becomes the foundation that allows me to reshape visual and spiritual lineages with integrity rather than fantasy. And as I raise both my daughter and my son, that responsibility has expanded. It’s not only about restoring the Black woman to the center, but also ensuring my son sees himself reflected in power, depth, and humanity. My children have brought a balance to my practice… it’s no longer just about female empowerment, but about wholeness.