How do you begin making a world? It’s a query Los Angeles-based artist Harmonia Rosales needed to ask herself whereas crafting Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic (2025), a wonderfully fantastical ebook. The gathering gathers 41 intertwined tales of African gods and goddesses, nature and energy, and the evolution of human beings alongside the primordial improvement of the Earth. In Rosales’ telling, this epic story combines the legendary with historic, placing identified previous occasions within the context of the Orishas’ world. Peppered all through are Rosales’s 30 full-page, full-color illustrations that additional enliven the legends and figures.
An bold vessel for Afro pantheology and diasporic spirituality, Chronicles of Ori is a potent extension of Rosales’s signature fashion portraying regal, mythological tales. Her work repurpose Baroque and Renaissance strategies to exalt brown-skinned our bodies as their focus, with wealthy colours leaping from her canvases. The inspiration of Rosales’s artistry lies within the coronary heart of those tales, which instilled in her a mission to attract connections throughout the African diaspora by means of her work, as in “Unbound” (2025), the just lately unveiled public sculpture at King’s Chapel in Boston, and Grasp Narrative, her 2023 exhibition on the Memphis Brooks Museum of Artwork.
Harmonia Rosales, “Unbound” (2025) at King’s Chapel in Boston (picture courtesy MASS Design Group)
The ebook takes its identify from the Yoruba idea of “ori,” a future decided by the gods, and advanced from tales advised to younger Rosales by her father and grandmother, the tethers to her Afro-Cuban roots. As a first-generation American on her father’s facet and second-generation on her mom’s, Rosales takes up the mantle to inform tales of ancestral sacrifice in an effort to seed future prosperity; Chronicles of Ori is the newest venture in her oeuvre to are inclined to the duty.
She spoke with Hyperallergic over the cellphone to debate the method of writing and illustrating Chronicles of Ori, compiling tales for the venture, and why it’s essential to her. This dialog has been edited for size and readability.
Hyperallergic: How lengthy was the method of making Chronicles of Ori, from inception to launch?
Harmonia Rosales: The thought began a number of years again. I’d say the thought course of most likely started about 5 years in the past. However the entirety of it — the which means behind it, all of the tales and the way I gathered them — just about began at first of my artwork profession. In order that’s 10 years in the past.
H: In your introduction, you point out that it was formed by tales out of your father and paternal grandmother. Did a particular story resonate with you as a baby?
HR: Those that lingered for me have been the tales about Oya and Shango. Oya is the goddess of wind, and Shango is thunder and lightning. Collectively, they create thunderstorms. Once we moved to Champaign from Chicago, we lived on this massive, outdated McMansion that was all the time in disrepair. There was a hatch on the prime of the roof, and we might climb up there once we noticed a storm coming and sit there watching the clouds collect. In these moments, I felt like Oya and Shango have been alive proper above us, preventing it out within the sky. It made these deities tangible to me. It linked me to nature, to one thing larger. It formed my understanding of what it means to be part of this dwelling mythology, or this dwelling custom.
Harmonia Rosales, “Eve and the Orishas” (2023), oil and 24K gold leaf on wooden panel (picture courtesy Harmonia Rosales)
H: A lot of the African diaspora is centered in oral custom. The West doesn’t actually honor that which isn’t written down. If it’s untraceable, it’s inauthentic. What do you consider your position or your impression, nonetheless massive or small, on the popularity of African pasts?
HR: I see it as historic restore. You’re proper, Western narratives usually dismiss oral traditions as a result of they’re “unreliable.” They suppose it’s like the phone recreation, but that is how we preserved our reality for hundreds of years. In Yoruba cosmology, historical past lives in artwork itself, within the physique and the drum. One thing Western tradition likes to say isn’t that essential. In actuality, it’s very highly effective. So it’s useful to erase that energy. I’m attempting to reclaim what was stripped from the grasp narrative. I’m attempting to indicate that, by means of our ancestors, these are recorded histories. That’s why I did lots of analysis and tied it inside these tales, which wasn’t that arduous, truly. They have been like little puzzle items I used to be placing collectively.
H: Inform me extra about that sourcing course of and why you determined to make this a linear story, versus a group of standalone tales, as they have been advised to you.
HR: I checked out all the opposite writers who’ve written variations of those tales, and questioned why theirs hadn’t been mainstreamed. I learn Ovid’s Metamorphoses after which the Yoruba mythologies. Right here’s the distinction: There’s no linear connection within the Yoruba mythologies. So, identical to Ovid compiled all of the Greek tales and wove them into the historical past of Caesar, I created a linear overarching narrative with which means and gave it a historic anchor.
I needed to reimagine a number of the mythologies to attach them as a result of the Orishas have distinct personalities, generally meld over time, and need to be aligned with what we learn about Earth’s historical past.
Harmonia Rosales, “Olokun” (2023), oil, 24k gold leaf, and iron oxide on wooden panel (picture courtesy Harmonia Rosales)
H: And your sourcing course of? How did you mix the discovered Orishas with historic reality?
HR: I used to be Indigenous mythology from across the globe. I made a decision to write down how the Greeks wrote, as if Yorubaland have been the entire world. As an example, there’s a story of Oduduwa, the founding father of the Ifa kingdom [in present-day Nigeria]. It doesn’t matter what model you learn, it says he got here from the east. I adopted that to East Africa, however then some tales stated he got here from even additional east. So I appeared for criticized or Black figures which are generally referenced for only a sentence or paragraph in Western spiritual texts — and appeared to the dominion of Mesopotamia. There’s a character named Nimrod who’s an evil determine within the Bible as a result of he believes in a number of gods. So I renamed him Lamuradu and made him Oduduwa’s father. Lamuradu was executed, so Oduduwa was an exiled prince who migrated to Africa, to Yorubaland with its mixture of cultures and migratory folks. As a result of why not? Let’s use inventive license to indicate connections between folks, but in addition presence earlier than it was documented.
H: The phrase “reverence” comes up for me quite a bit after I take a look at your work, however what does it imply to you?
HR: It means remembering. It’s about taking a second to recollect all of the issues which have gotten you up to now. That’s your ancestors, that’s your historical past, that’s the land, that’s the bushes, every part. Once I take into consideration portray, despite the fact that I’m portray on my own, I’m actually not. I’m drawing from every part that has raised me, that I’ve skilled, that I’ve seen: my household, legacy, historical past, roots. It’s all-encompassing, and reverence is appreciating and acknowledging that. It’s reflection, remembrance, appreciation.
Harmonia Rosales together with her work “Ori” within the everlasting American assortment on the Brooklyn Museum in 2024 (photograph Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)
H: How did your position as an artist shift whereas placing collectively and presenting a ebook versus an exhibition?
HR: I believe quite a bit about that quote from Toni Morrison: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” That’s how I take into consideration every part. There isn’t a portray? Okay, I’m going to color it as a result of that’s what I need my youngsters to see. The writing course of was so fascinating to me. I needed to describe every part, however then I additionally needed to incorporate the layers of which means, symbolism, and metaphors. How do I write in layers, like I paint in layers? It’s two various things, however all I needed to do was write what I had been portray all alongside. Once I realized that, it was simpler.
In relation to presenting this work, I see these tales as one thing I can provide to individuals who could not be capable of afford my work. I can provide them entry to my world. Then they will also be part of it by telling their youngsters their tales and develop into part of this larger mission of connecting the diaspora.
H: You devoted this ebook to your grandmother. Are there any tales or characters within the ebook that remind you of her essentially the most?
HR: Nothing particular. I’m doing this for her. She handed away simply after my first exhibition in 2017, so she wasn’t in a position to expertise all this. I’m principally passing down her legacy, what she gave me as inheritance. My grandmother, despite the fact that she was seen outwardly as this housewife who didn’t converse a lot English and solely had a fifth-grade training, knew what was essential. She held on to her conventional practices and the ability they held. These have been essentially the most precious issues she needed to go down. So that is me honoring her. My entire mission is for her, for my kids, for myself. It’s for others who really feel the identical method, who really feel this displacement and really feel like they’re not being seen or heard or revered. For all of the immigrants. And I’m feeling fulfilled as I’m shifting ahead.
