Recreating the Beginning

When LA-based artist Harmonia Rosales visited the Getty Museum’s Manuscripts Study Room last summer, she admired how the intricate medieval paintings told a story—in this case, the biblical account of how the world was created.

Inspired by certain aspects of the illustrations, like deep blues to depict a celestial sky or gold leaf to heighten details, Rosales applied these techniques to relate a different creation narrative, one based on West African Yoruba mythology.

“For every one story, there are a hundred different versions,” explains Rosales, discussing the new Getty Center exhibition Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages, which invites viewers to reflect on their own version of the creation tale: who you are and how you think the world came to be. The exhibition, co-curated by Senior Curator of Manuscripts Elizabeth Morrison and Associate Curator of Manuscripts Larisa Grollemond, features medieval manuscripts that depict Christian beliefs about the creation story, alongside select representations from Jewish and Islamic traditions.

To broaden and enrich the theme, Morrison and Grollemond invited Rosales to add four of her recent paintings. On view are Creation (2025), made in response to the exhibition’s theme; Portrait of Eve (2021); and the diptych Strangler Fig: Adam (2022) and Strangler Fig: Eve (2022).

“I thought that involving Harmonia’s work would be a really great way to bring in stories that people weren’t as familiar with, and to help them reflect on the fact that there is no one creation story,” notes Morrison. For Rosales, the invitation to respond to a theme so essential to her practice was received as an opportunity to widen the art historical lens. “It shows that the Western canon isn’t fixed,” she says, “and that it can expand to reflect the definition of what it really means to be human, encompassing all different types of stories.”

Becoming an artist

Rosales’s artistic path began around a decade ago, when she took her young daughter to the Art Institute of Chicago. “I was moved when my daughter turned to me and said she didn’t recognize herself in any of the art,” Rosales recalls. “It was like a light bulb—such a simple statement.” Rosales began to reflect on how she had stopped asking those questions about what she saw or didn’t see in museum spaces. “I thought, alright, I’ll paint a world where you belong.”

Much of Rosales’s artistic interests can be attributed to the formative influences of her mother and paternal grandmother. Born and raised in Chicago, Rosales recalls how she too was introduced to art as a young girl, accompanying her mother first to work at a publishing house and then occasionally to a museum afterwards. Rosales would often stay as well with her Afro-Cuban grandmother, whom she describes as a “second mom.” It was with her that she first heard stories of Yoruba mythology—her grandmother’s rendition, told in Spanish—tales that were not taught at school.

Originating in West Africa, Yoruba can be understood as a mythos that honors nature. “From the land we live on to the water we drink,” explains Rosales. It is a worldview represented by divine figures known as orishas. In its most traditional form, Yoruba is an oral storytelling mythology. As Morrison observes, this is a key point of distinction from faiths such as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, which are considered religions of the book and can be encountered primarily through the act of reading or being read aloud.

Rosales’s paintings are visual articulations of the stories first told to her by her grandmother. Rosales describes her art practice as a form of unmasking—“peeling back the layers of imagery that have whitewashed these gods.” “There is history beyond enslavement,” she says. “There is a different cosmology that was powerful, that was taken, reshaped, exposed, and punished.” She recently published her first book, Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic (2025), an illustrated, Afrofuturist retelling of Yoruba stories accompanied by reproductions of her paintings that visualize the narratives.

Developing her technique

A self-taught artist and writer, Rosales emphasizes how much her practice is concerned with research. “I’d say about 70 percent research and only 30 percent actually painting,” she laughs. This spans from close pictorial observation of other artists’ paintings, drawings, and sculpture to learning new techniques and furthering her understanding of Western and African mythologies.

Particularly informed by the intensity and virtuosic style of medieval, Renaissance and Baroque paintings, Rosales completes only a handful of works a year, citing the length of time it takes to paint in such a way. She hopes her aesthetic “creates a bridge of familiarity” for Western audiences, drawing the gaze in, only to provide an alternative perspective by “placing Black figures in positions they were never seen in.”

Alongside reading Leonardo da Vinci’s diaries to understand linear perspective, the resources of the Internet are another reliable tool. “If I need to learn a medieval technique, I’ll search for it and teach myself,” Rosales explains. For example, she watched YouTube videos to learn water gilding—a medieval technique that applies gold leaf over a base of red bole, a puttylike substance that can be smoothed for a mirror-like finish or shaped to create texture. The result can be seen in Creation, in the scales of the golden snake and the halolike ori of the orisha.

A close look at two paintings

Rosales discusses two of her works on view, decoding their rich symbolism.

“It’s not one day, two days, the next day, it’s everything all happening at once,” she says of Creation, an oil-on-panel painting. The linear nature of the Christian creation narrative is portrayed in pages like The Creation of the World from the Stammheim Missal (below), which served as the visual inspiration for her painting. But for Rosales, informed by Yoruba mythology, creation is an all-encompassing moment.

The figure at the top of the golden snake represents Odua, a primordial energy within the universe, poised to attract and transform the wandering force of Olodumare, shown under the snake. Although these energies are genderless in the Yoruba tradition, Rosales assigned female and male characteristics to echo nature’s formula for re-creation. Their union—a cataclysmic embrace between Odua and Olodumare—creates Earth, known as Onile, in a gesture that parallels much later scientific concepts like the big bang. Affectionally known as Mama Onile, and likened to Mother Nature, she occupies the center of the canvas, touching every corner of the life cycle—from birth to death—while straddling the ocean, from which Odua brought forth land. This interplay between the mythic and scientific offers a contemporary retelling of Yoruba cosmology, a narrative Rosales hopes will resonate with audiences.

Throughout Rosales’s work, there is a particular emphasis on honoring Black women, as in her Portrait of Eve (top of page). “People will think about Adam and Eve,” she says, but to her, Eve encompasses a legacy as the “mother of the diaspora.”

Shown in profile, eyes closed, Eve displays a meditative, self-assured composure. Framing her figure is a circle known as an ori. This circle represents an individual’s destiny, which in this case encompasses a series of smaller pictorial plates that show scenes from the journey of the African diaspora. In the top corners are branches of strangler figs, which Rosales describes as symbols of manipulation and control. Eve is a healing figure who “absorbs the chains of enslavement”—the suffering of the diaspora’s ancestral community—and removes this burden from daily life.

Symbols of eternity

A symbolic motif traditionally employed to represent the cosmos and God’s perfection, the circle was also used as a narrative device in medieval art. With reference to the manuscripts in the exhibition, specifically the 13th-century image that opens the Abbey Bible (below), Morrison considers why roundels, circles containing pictorial scenes, were commonly utilized for depicting creation stories: “There was an impetus in medieval illumination to make steps very clear and sequential. So I think this idea of roundels came to artists because it represented those steps well.”

Rosales also uses circular shapes as a narrative and framing device. Portrait of Eve includes seven roundels, and for Creation, concentric circles compose the scene: the disk around the outstretched figure of Mama Onile, the golden serpent, and the orishas’ embrace. In both instances, Rosales employs circles to convey the all-inclusive moment, rather than a linear narrative.

The prominent snake shown eating its own tail is an emblem from ancient mythology known as the Ouroboros. Rosales notes, “The Ouroboros represents cycles—creation after creation and transformation.” Morrison confirms that this view was also held by medieval illuminators: “Circles represent regeneration, renewal, and unendingness—the idea of infinity.”

By encountering different designs and interpretations across the manuscripts and Rosales’s paintings, the exhibition invites viewers to “think about their own personal story of creation and what they believe,” Morrison expresses. Agrees Rosales, “I hope they understand that there are many stories of creation that exist.”

See Rosales’s artwork in Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages, on view at the Getty Center through April 19, 2026.