José Parlá Cuban American, b. 1973

José Parlá is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, large-scale mural projects, photography, video and sculpture. Born in Miami in 1973, his work is deeply informed by the textures, rhythms and palimpsests of urban environments, shaped by his upbringing in South Miami, his life in New York and his Cuban heritage. Emerging from the underground art scene of Miami in the early 1980s, Parlá was influenced by the formative years of Hip Hop culture, grounding his practice in movement, mark-making and the stratified surfaces of city walls. Working with materials including oil and acrylic paint, cement and found ephemera, Parlá constructs dense, materially complex compositions that explore memory, language and the passage of time. His distinctive gestural line draws on calligraphy and street writing, while engaging with the legacies of Abstract Expressionism. 

 

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 projects for the New York City Department of Design and Construction at the Queens Public Library; the University of Texas at Austin; One World Trade Center, where his monumental mural ONE: Union of the Senses remains the largest of its kind 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 the Gordon Parks Foundation, New York (2024); Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami (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; 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.