Artist Harmonia Rosales in conversation with Stephanie Sparling Williams

Join us for a conversation between artist Harmonia Rosales and Dr. Stephanie Sparling Willams, Curator of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art. This event celebrates Harmonia Rosales’s painting The Harvest currently on view at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.

Followed by a reception in the Hinchcliff Reception Hall.

This program is made possible by the Patricia and Edward Falkenberg Lecture Fund, and is co-sponsored with the Art History and Art Studio departments and the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Harmonia Rosales’s art focuses on Black female empowerment through a diasporic lens. Influenced by her multicultural Afro-Cuban background, Rosales’s work seamlessly entwines the oral narratives and deities of West African Yorùbá religion, Greco-Roman mythology, and Christianity with the artistic techniques of the Renaissance masters. For Rosales, reimagining historical narratives from the western perspective preserves the memory of her ancestral lineage, championing resilience and questioning Eurocentric notions of beauty. While her subjects serve as conduits for the internal struggles of a disempowered society, Rosales encourages her onlookers to possess more sympathy, empathy, and empowerment.

Stephanie Sparling Williams is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Her curatorial practice is predicated on interdisciplinary research, writing, and teaching on American art, and foregrounds Black feminist space-making. Her scholarly work is invested in the space of the museum, with a focus on African American art and culture, and the work of U.S.-based artists of color.