In her painting The Creation of God, Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales revisits Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam fresco. The title of Rosales’s painting highlights its intentionally disruptive entry into conversation with Michelangelo’s iconic work and subsequent works that it has inspired. The Creation of God evokes The Creation of Adam by employing a similar composition, but it casts Black women in the central roles.

The Creation of Adam follows conventions of its time and place in depicting God as a white male. The image’s subsequent ubiquity through its constant reproduction and dissemination has functioned to cement the ‘authority’ of its representation of God. This authority can seem as weighty as that of the biblical text itself, and readers may now have difficulty imagining God in other ways. 

The title of Rosales’s work points to this dynamic: Michelangelo’s work not only depicts the creation of the first human, but also helps to nurture a particular understanding of God, and, correspondingly, of human value and worth. By disrupting the expectations engendered by the earlier fresco, The Creation of God calls attention to the work’s status as an interpretive choice rather than as simply the way things are.

The figures in The Creation of God have short, natural Black hair. Like Adam in Michelangelo’s painting, the human in The Creation of God is without body hair but otherwise in a natural state. Considered within its contemporary context, such a depiction takes on ideological resonance. ‘Beauty culture’ often mandates that Black women discipline their bodies through shapewear and alter their hair so that it more closely resembles the hair of white women. While The Creation of Adam suggests that the divine image belongs most thoroughly to white men, this painting finds divine beauty in Black women apart from their conformity to Eurocentric norms.

References

Elizabeth, De. 2017. ‘Artist Harmonia Rosales Re-Imagines “The Creation of Adam” with Black Women, 17 May 2017’, www.teenvogue.com, [accessed 20 April 2022]

Mercado, Elsa S. 2018. ‘A Conversation with Artist Harmonia Rosales’, Afro-Hispanic Review 37.2: 152–60, 189