The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) announced the next event of the Scholl Lecture Series, featuring “the premier cultural creatives of our time, with a conversation between self-taught Afro-Cuban American painter and author Harmonia Rosales and former professional football wide receiver and art collector Desmond Howard.” [Free with museum admission. Admission is $18 for adults and free for members. Space is limited, and seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.] This conversation takes place on Sunday November 23, 2025, at 2:00pm.
Rosales will share her journey from artist to author and discuss her new book, “Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic,” which features never before seen work by the artist.” After the talk, stick around for a book signing with the author.
About Harmonia Rosales: Since the genesis of her career, Harmonia Rosales’s main artistic concern has focused on Black female empowerment in Western culture, depicting and honoring the African diaspora.
As a young girl, the impeccable skill and composition of the Renaissance masters fascinated her but the depiction of white hierarchy and the idealization of subordinate women, often falling under Eurocentric notions of beauty, dissuaded her passion. Thus, her message is not to create an ideal or simply to copy, but rather to create a sense of harmony between the struggling dichotomies. The artist is informed by the ebb and flow of contemporary society where she seeks to reimagine new forms of aesthetic beauty, snuggled somewhere between pure love and ideological counter-hegemony.
About Desmond Howard: Desmond Howard is a former professional football wide receiver who played in the NFL for 11 seasons. Howard won the Heisman Trophy in 1991 and was named the Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl XXXI with the Green Bay Packers and now works for ESPN as a college football analyst. He is a collector of modern and contemporary art by Black artists, and has stated “When I’m not watching football, I’m looking at art.”
About “Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic”: In “Chronicles of Ori,” her debut book, Harmonia Rosales retells the African myths she has long treasured, crafting an enthralling epic that spans the birth of the universe to the modern world of colonialism and resistance. She writes of the powerful, temperamental deities called the Orishas; of the founding of Yorubaland by the shrewd leader Oduduwa; of the young heroine Eve, born in a time of violence and despair, who would help her people regain their past splendor; and of shimmering serpents and monstrous shadows who stalk the lands of mortals. At the center of these linked tales is the bond, sometimes fraying, between the Orishas and the humans who worship them. It was the Orishas who made humans, and who gave them their most precious resource: their Oris, or destinies. Vividly brought to life by Rosales’s artwork, “Chronicles of Ori” will enlighten and delight readers for years to come.
For more information, see https://www.pamm.org/en/events/event/scholl-lecture-series-harmonia-rosales-with-special-guest-desmond-howard/78
Also see our previous posts https://repeatingislands.com/2025/10/30/harmonia-rosales-remixes-the-african-diasporic-pantheon/ and https://repeatingislands.com/2025/10/30/new-book-chronicles-of-ori-an-african-epic/