E2S2 Presents Harmonia Rosales In Conversation with Bisa Butler

Join us for an exclusive Chronicles of Ori book signing and Harmonia Rosales in Conversation with Bisa Butler at Howard University. Don't miss out on this unique opportunity to connect with the artist and take home a piece of her incredible work!

Doors open | 5:30 PM

Book Signing | 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM

Artist Talk | 6:30 PM

Books will be available for purchase on site.

About Chronicles of Ori

Chronicles of Ori is a groundbreaking literary work by renowned artist Harmonia Rosales. Its an epic mythology from the Black Atlantic where African, Caribbean, and American histories converge. A retelling of Yoruba mythology that redress the silences of the archive to bring the African gods back into the world. This powerful narrative explores themes of identity, heritage, and spiritual awakening.

About Harmonia Rosales

Harmonia Rosales (b. 1984, Chicago, IL) is an 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. Since 2017, her work has visualized the Orishas, the deities of the Yoruba tradition, and explored the survival of their stories across the Middle Passage. With bold, uncompromising imagery and prose, Rosales challenges Eurocentric ideals of beauty, power, and divinity, reshaping both art history and cultural consciousness.

Rosales has previously been the subject of exhibitions at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN; the Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; the Wright Museum, Detroit MI, among others. Her work is held by numerous public and private collections across the United States, including the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History, Washington D.C.; Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA, and others.

About Bisa Butler

Through her dynamic, celebratory quilted portraits of people of African descent, Bisa Butler (b. 1973, Orange, NJ) investigates the purposes and potential of portraiture within the Black historical narrative. Butler's influences range widely from personal family scrapbooks to American folk traditions and AfriCOBRA philosophies. Although her finished works are made entirely of textiles, Butler approaches the medium from a painterly perspective. Sourcing imagery mainly from photographs, she uses layered fabrics and quilting to create unique compositions, psychological depth, and detailed textures that she found missing from her paintings. By returning to textiles, Butler has reconnected with her family's history since it was her grandmother and mother who taught her to sew.

Bisa Butler lives in South Orange, New Jersey and has a studio in Jersey City. Butler earned her BFA in painting at Howard University, Washington, D.C. in 1995 and holds a MAT in teaching art from Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her work has been exhibited widely, both domestically and internationally. Bisa was named an honorary doctorate or letters from Bloomfield College and recently received the inaugural Faith in the Arts Award.

In 2020, Butler had her first institutional solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco; and the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta. The World Is Yours, Butler!s first solo exhibition with Jeffrey Deitch, in 2023 in New York, was enthusiastically received and attracted thousands of visitors. In 2024, Bisa received the Inaugural Faith in the Arts Award , which specifically recognizes artists who carry on the artistic legacy of Faith Ringgold from the Broadway Housing Community.

About The Center for an Equitable Economy and Sustainable Society:

The Center for an Equitable Economy and Sustainable Society (e 2 s 2 ) is a multidisciplinary research center established to address racial and economic inequities. e 2 s 2 is expressly concerned with the role that social difference plays in shaping who has access to capital and how people are governed. By insisting that political and economic transformation be viewed through the lens of sustainability, the center maintains an abiding interest in how social practices and institutions strengthen or diminish climate health. e 2 s 2 gains momentum from broader interest at Howard University in pioneering methods for gathering and analyzing data relevant to asset inequality, criminal justice reform, climate, and health in policy and in imaginative responses to pressing social problems.

The Center is also part of a consortium formed for the reimagination of capitalism, a multi-institutional effort jointly funded by the Hewlett Packard Foundation and the Omidyar Group (see Howard Launches Multidisciplinary Research Center, Joins $40M Effort to Reimagine Capitalism). Dr. Michael Ralph, Chair and Cameron Schrier Professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University, is the Founding Director of e 2 s 2 . He leads the Center alongside e 2 s 2 Co-Director, Dr. Jevay Grooms, who is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Board Member of the National Economic Association (founded in 1969 as the Caucus of Black Economists) and FAIR Health. e 2 s 2 has several research initiatives and partnerships in the Howard University community and beyond.