At first encounter, Harmonia Rosales’s “The Creation of God” is striking. It is beautiful and familiar. Like Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” Rosales’s painting portrays the creation of humankind. However, the skin tones, gender and story being depicted by the artist are strikingly different.

In Rosales’s painting, God is a black grandmother who creates a humanity in her image, while beautiful, black angels surround her. The artist depicts Adam through the root of the word, adamah, which is feminine. Adamah expresses the human creature, male and female and made of earth. The earth on which the new human rests is evocative of the global South in its colors and contours, some of which still remain visible on the woman’s flesh.

As the title suggests, the work reimagines the Imago Dei. What kind of image of God is the human person if we dare to imagine God differently? Which humans have been excluded from seeing themselves in the image of God? And what new insights into God and our relationship to God will we gain if we engage with the ways others express their image of God?

What the considerable angst and controversy surrounding Rosales’s new painting disclose is that we need new tools to work with art. The often adversarial relationship between art and religion in modernity need not be, and one of the first people to extend an open and appreciative hand to artists was Pope John Paul II, who penned a pastoral letter simply titled “To Artists”in 1999. In it he insists that “with loving regard, the divine Artist passes on to the human artist a spark of his own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in his creative power.” Rosales’s painting forces us to ask a double-sided question: How are we to view God’s act of creation? And, how do we view this particular artist’s act of creation in this one painting? Art and faith are both about relationships dealing with our heart, which make both very complicated.

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Note the year of production: 2017. Note the location: Chicago. Art that has longevity arises out of the experiences of communities, out of their history, their joys and sorrows. How do you see this concrete historical setting revealing itself in this work? What can you see about the life and faith of Chicago in 2017 now that you could not see before?

Without collapsing the work to the artist’s intentions or biography, knowing her facilitates a fuller encounter with the work. Here it is important to notice the difference each artist’s unique experience makes to their interpretation of the Genesis stories. What is revealed as Michelangelo interprets Genesis as a European Renaissance man and Harmonia Rosales as a black Latina in the United States of the 21st century?

This devotional is excerpted from the following article, published in America Magazine: The Jesuit Review. https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/06/06/afro-latina-artist-reimagines-michelangelos-creation-adam