Creator/Creation: Conversation with Harmonia Rosales

Harmonia Rosales is a Chicago-born, Afro-Cuban American artist and author whose work centers the visibility and empowerment of Black women in Western art. Growing up visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, Rosales was captivated by Renaissance painting, but years later, her daughter’s simple observation that “they don’t look like me” exposed the exclusion at the heart of that tradition. That moment sparked Rosales’s artistic journey: reimagining Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces with Black protagonists and centering West African spirituality. Through imagery and prose, Rosales challenges Eurocentric ideals of beauty, power, and divinity, to reshape both art history and cultural consciousness. Rosales's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and last year she authored the book Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic published by W. W. Norton.

Larisa joined the Department of Manuscripts in 2016. She earned her PhD in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. Her research areas include late medieval and Renaissance French illuminated manuscripts and paintings, multimedia 15th-century visual culture, early printing, materiality, royal patronage of the arts, and modern medievalisms. Her recent exhibition projects include Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World (2019), Blurring the Line: Manuscripts in the Age of Print (2019), Transcending Time: The Medieval Book of Hours (2021), Painted Prophecy: The Hebrew Bible through Christian Eyes (2022), and The Fantasy of the Middle Ages (2022).

Beth received her PhD from Cornell University and began her career at the Getty Museum's Department of Manuscripts in 1996. During her tenure, she has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including the 2010 exhibition Imagining the Past in France, 1250–1500, and the 2019 exhibition Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World. She specializes in the study of manuscript illumination in northern Europe from the Gothic period through the Renaissance. She has published on French vernacular manuscripts, especially history and romance, as well as the role of Flemish devotional and secular illumination at the Burgundian court. Her recent research centers on the depiction of animals in bestiaries and other illuminated manuscripts.