José Parlá Cuban American, b. 1973

José Parlá, born in Miami in 1973, is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, large-scale murals, photography, video, and sculpture. His work engages with the textures and rhythms of urban environments, shaped by his upbringing in South Miami, his life in New York, and his Cuban heritage. Influenced by the early days of Hip Hop culture, Parlá’s practice is rooted in movement, mark-making, and the layered surfaces of city walls. Using materials such as oil and acrylic paint, cement, and found ephemera, he builds dense, textured compositions that explore memory, language, and the passage of time. His signature gestural line draws on calligraphy and street writing, creating works that are both abstract and narrative. In 2021, after a life-threatening case of COVID-19 and a four-month coma, Parlá returned to the studio with a renewed focus, producing a powerful body of work centred on resilience and recovery. Throughout his career, his practice has reflected on legacy, place, and the traces left behind.

Parlá started painting walls in Miami’s underground art scene of the early 1980s and went on to study at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia; Miami Dade Community College, Miami; and New World School of the Arts, Miami. Parlá’s work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn; Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Istanbul’74, Istanbul; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase; National YoungArts Foundation, Miami; Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson; and the Havana Biennial, Havana. Parlá’s work is in several public collections including the British Museum, London; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; POLA Museum of Art, Hakone; and the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana. Permanent public arts projects include commissions by New York City Department of Design and Construction Queens Public Library, New York; The University of Texas, Austin; One World Trade Center for his monumental mural painting, ONE: Union of the Senses, the largest painting of its kind in New York City, in the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere; Barclays Center, New York; Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; André Balazs’ Chiltern Firehouse, London; North Carolina State University’s Hunt Library by Snøhetta, Raleigh; and the Concord City Place, Toronto.

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