José Parlá

Overview

Photograph by Jeff Goldberg/ESTO

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José Parlá (b. 1973) creates paintings and multidisciplinary works rooted in hybrid forms of abstract language. Born in Miami to Cuban immigrant parents and raised in Puerto Rico, Parlá grew up between the political and cultural currents of the Caribbean and the southern United States. He has described his upbringing as taking place in a "Cuban autonomous zone." Returning to Miami in the early 1980s, he absorbed the city’s burgeoning hip hop culture, which later energized his visual language.

He studied painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design and continued at New World School of the Arts and Miami Dade College. Parlá’s practice is a layered, time-based methodology that fuses writing and abstract expressionism. He builds palimpsest-like paintings and installations through cycles of addition, subtraction and erasure.

Calligraphic marks surface and recede while pasted fragments of posters and billboards embed into textured, wall-like canvases. These works form a new kind of landscape: psycho-geographic terrains where language becomes topography and layers read as social and geological history. Language in Parlá’s work is simultaneously present and unreadable: asemic gestures suggest narrative without fixed meaning, creating space for collective memory and private recollection. Treating paint as text and surface as archive, he interrogates language, identity and history.

Parlá studied at Miami Dade Community College, Miami; New World School of the Arts, Miami; and the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia. His permanent public commissions include a collaboration with Snøhetta designing the Far Rockaway Library, Queens, NY; the University of Texas at Austin; One World Trade Center, where his monumental mural ONE: Union of the Senses in New York City; Barclays Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; North Carolina State University’s Hunt Library, Raleigh; and Concord CityPlace, Toronto. Institutional solo exhibitions have been presented by Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami (2024); Gordon Parks Foundation, New York (2024) The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2022); Gana Art Center, Seoul (2022); Istanbul’74, Istanbul (2019); the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Foundation (2019); the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York (2018); the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2017); the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York (2017); the Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas (2016); and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2015), among others. Parlá’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM); the British Museum, London; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; Brooklyn Museum, NY; the POLA Museum of Art, Hakone; the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York; El Espacio, Miami; and the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana.