José Parlá

Havana Cuba SculptureJosé Parlá (born 1973 in Miami, Florida) is a Cuban-American contemporary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Parlá creates paintings and multidisciplinary works inspired by his interest in memory, identity, migration, and the passage of time through the visual language of accumulated urban surfaces.

Parlá’s approach to mark-making is both physical and textural, integrating bodily gestures into a painterly stream of consciousness that features areas of addition, erasure, and layering, questioning the status quo of visual culture. In 2013 he painted the mural Nature of Language at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University, the mural Diary of Brooklyn at the Barclays Center, and a 90-foot mural ONE: Union of the Senses in the lobby of One World Trade Center. He later completed Amistad América (2018) at the University of Texas at Austin, a large-scale mural commissioned for Robert B. Rowling Hall as part of the university’s Landmarks public art program.

Parlá constructs his paintings improvisationally by layering materials. He said, "I’m really interested in the way our lives are built up out of memory and history, and how we reflect that in our surroundings." He has exhibited worldwide and collaborated with artists from various countries. In 2012, he worked with French artist JR on a piece titled "Wrinkles of the City: Havana", which in the same year was selected to be in the 11th Havana Biennial. As part of the collaboration, Parlá and JR co-directed a documentary by the same title and they were awarded the Grand Prize from Heartland Film Festival for the Best Documentary Short and Best U.S. Premiere Documentary Short in 2013.

Early life José Parlá was born in Miami to Cuban immigrant parents. At just 10, he began painting art on walls in Miami, often signing his work with his nickname "Ease". As a teenager, he became active in Miami's graffiti scene and frequently collaborated with his brother, Rey Parlá. He later studied at Miami Dade Community College and New World School of the Arts.

He moved to the Bronx after his father died to established himself as an artist in New York,

Career Parlá's heavily layered paintings can often resemble distressed city walls. Writer Greg Tate wrote: "What José Parlá's paintings force us to realize, as good historical paintings always do, is that given enough time and entropy even the hurtling locomotive motion of the streets can be arrested, contemplated, symbolically apprehended, studied, replicated. The temptation to call Parlá a 'post-graffiti’ painter is great but I'd prefer we recognize him as a historical landscape painter even though his historical landscape is made of concrete, wood and wallboard and his 'histories' derive from personal memories and from events buried and embedded in the gorgeous erosions and ruination time and weather will deposit on your average urban walls." Parlá finds old posters from city streets, which he incorporates into his paintings to give a greater sense of place and create the impression of layers of posters papered over each other for generations. He paints over these with thick splashes of colour and abstract calligraphy, weaving lines connecting the works together, similarly to Cy Twombly's paintings from the 1950s. Each work attempts to describe the place where he is working. Exhibitions such as José Parlá: Segmented Realities (2015, High Museum of Art, Atlanta ) recreate these walls in three dimensions.

Large scale murals

Parlá's first large-scale mural was for a Toronto housing development called City Place in 2010. In 2012, he painted a 70-foot long lobby mural titled Diary of Brooklyn for the Barclays Center, Parlá worked on the two painting simultaneously, going back and forth between the two nearby buildings and working late. In 2015 Parlá painted ONE: Union of the Senses which is displayed in the lobby of One World Trade Center, curated by Asher Edelman and Edelman Arts, appointed by the building developer. The painting measures 15 ft by 90 ft, and has been described as the largest painting in New York City.

In 2023, Parlá completed a public commission for the Far Rockaway Writer's Library in Queens, New York, a collaboration with the architecture firm Snøhetta.

Career summary In 2011, Parlá was commissioned to paint two gigantic and highly detailed murals for the Parade1 building at Concord CityPlace in Toronto, Canada. The paintings titled The Names that Live But Sometimes Fade While Time Flies and The Bridge although abstract in nature- are filled with stories of different artists, which Parlá pays homage through calligraphic marks and gestures. Also in 2012, Parlá completed his first large scale commissioned artwork titled Gesture Performing Dance, Dance Performing Gesture.

In 2012, Parlá collaborated with French artist JR on a huge mural installation in Havana. The project was undertaken for the Havana Biennale, for which JR and Parlá photographed and recorded 25 senior citizens who had lived through the Cuban revolution.

In 2014, Parlá was commissioned to paint a piece for the One World Trade Centre in New York City. Visitors to the lobby of One World Trade Centre is greeted by Parlá's colorful 90 ft mural titled ONE: Union of the Senses which stands as a symbol of diversity. "The lively, jewel-toned mural will greet an estimated 20,000 visitors a day.

In 2014, Parlá exhibited two paintings at the High Museum. One painting which is 40 feet long titled "Night and Day in London Town" poetically evokes time passing over the course of a day in London and incorporates Parlá's calligraphic mark-making. The second painting, titled Hackney Canal, Rio Don Diego 2008 is a large painting inspired by Wifredo Lam's masterpiece "La Jungla," 1943 (collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York).

In 2015, Parlá showcased his sculptural pieces titled Segmented Realities at the 12th Havana Biennial.

In 2018, Parlá completed Amistad América, a monumental site-specific mural commissioned for Robert B. Rowling Hall at the University of Texas at Austin. Measuring approximately 4,000 square feet, the work was created for the university’s Landmarks public art program and is installed in the building’s central atrium. Inspired by the natural and cultural landscapes of Texas and the Americas, the mural incorporates Parlá’s characteristic layered surfaces, calligraphic forms, and references to migration, geography, and cultural exchange. Amistad América was notable as the first painting acquired by Landmarks and was, at the time of its completion, the largest mural of Parlá’s career.

In 2020, Parlá presented It's Yours at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, his first solo museum exhibition in New York City. Curated by Manon Slome, the exhibition featured a series of large-scale paintings reflecting Parlá's personal connection to the Bronx and the borough's influence on his artistic practice. While drawing on the Bronx's role in the development of hip-hop culture, the works addressed themes including redlining, gentrification, displacement, and structural racism, encouraging viewers to consider questions of ownership and change in New York City's neighborhoods. The exhibition's title was derived from the 1984 single "It's Yours" by Bronx rapper T La Rock, which Parlá cited as a tribute to the community and cultural forces that shaped his work.

In 2021, Parlá contracted a severe case of COVID-19 and was hospitalized, spending several months in a medically induced coma during which he suffered a stroke and brain hemorrhaging. Following an extended period of rehabilitation, he gradually returned to painting, using art-making as part of his physical and cognitive recovery. The experience profoundly influenced his subsequent work, inspiring a number of exhibitions and series that explored memory, perception, consciousness, and mortality. In interviews, Parlá described experiencing vivid dreams and hallucinations during his coma, which later informed his Phosphene series (2023), named after the visual phenomenon of seeing patterns of light with closed eyes. He has stated that the works were shaped by his recovery process and by reflections on survival, healing, and the fragility of life.

In 2022, Parlá presented Ciclos: Blooms of Mold as part of Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition featured installations by Maya Hayuk, Parlá, Kennedy Yanko, and Leon Polk Smith, all artists associated with Brooklyn. Created for the museum's Beaux-Arts Court, Parlá's contribution consisted of large-scale environmental paintings that engaged with the architectural space and explored themes of surface, materiality, and abstraction.

In 2023, Parlá was awarded a Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship in Art. The fellowship culminated in the exhibition José Parlá: Cuba, presented at the Gordon Parks Foundation Gallery in 2024. The exhibition featured paintings and photographs created in dialogue with a series of photographs taken by Gordon Parks in Cuba in 1958 while on assignment for Life magazine. Drawing on his Cuban heritage and personal connections to Havana, Miami, and New York, Parlá explored themes of memory, identity, history, and the social and political transformations of Cuba. The works responded to the visual language of Parks's photographs, particularly their use of color, texture, and documentation of Cuban life on the eve of the Cuban Revolution.

In 2024, Parlá presented José Parlá: Homecoming at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), which is his first solo museum exhibition in his hometown of Miami. The exhibition featured new paintings, photographs, and a large-scale installation that included a reconstruction of the artist's Brooklyn studio within the museum galleries, offering insight into his creative process and personal archive.

In 2025, the short documentary Marking the Way Home, directed by Lázaro Llanes, produced by the Pérez Art Museum Miami(PAMM) and co- produced by Rey Parlá, premiered in conjunction with Parlá's exhibition José Parlá: Homecoming. The film follows Parlá’s artistic journey, his Cuban heritage, and his return to Miami for his first major museum exhibition in his hometown. It also documents his recovery following a severe case of COVID-19 in 2021, during which he spent four months in a medically induced coma and suffered a stroke and brain bleeding. The documentary includes a screening and Q&A component and features contributions from artists and cultural figures including KAWS, Hank Willis Thomas, Lee Quiñones, Anne Pasternak, and Sarah Arison. It explores themes of resilience, memory, identity, and artistic practice, situating Parlá’s work within both personal and broader cultural narratives.

In 2025, Parlá presented Home Away from Home, a solo exhibition held concurrently at Pola Museum Annex Ginza and Kotaro Nukaga in Tokyo, on view from June 20 to August 9, 2025. The exhibitions featured new paintings inspired by Parlá's experiences in Japan since 1999, including work made during a residency at a Bizen pottery kiln.

In 2025, Skira published José Parlá: Contemporary Palimpsests, a monograph surveying four decades of the artist's work through paintings, murals, sketchbooks, and archival materials. Edited by Rey Parlá, the volume includes essays by Jonathan Rider and Iván de la Nuez and examines recurring themes in Parlá's practice.

In 2026, Parlá was appointed Alan Kanzer Artist-in-Residence at Columbia University's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. During the residency, he collaborated with neuroscientists studying perception, learning, memory, and the brain, furthering his longstanding interest in the relationship between art and neuroscience. Research developed through the residency informed ENGRAMS, a series and broader interdisciplinary project whose title refers to the physical traces of memory in the brain. Later that year, Parlá presented José Parlá: ENGRAMS at Ben Brown Fine Arts in London. Drawing on memories of Havana, Hakone, and New York, the exhibition explored memory as an active process of reconstruction, with works created from recollection rather than direct observation. The exhibition formed part of an ongoing investigation developed through his residency at Columbia and examined the intersections of memory, place, gesture, and imagination.

Exhibitions In 2014, Parlá exhibited his first museum solo show by the title of Segmented Realities at the High Museum of Art Atlanta from December 2014 – May 2015, followed by the 2015 group exhibition Imagining New Worlds at the High Museum of Art Atlanta alongside Cuban surrealist painter Wifredo Lam and Atlanta based contemporary artist Fahamu Pecou.

In the fall of 2015, Parlá held a concurrent solo exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery and Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery titled Surface Body/ Action Space. This exhibition showcased new paintings and sculptures never before seen. Parlá's work is in the permanent collections of HOMECOMING ( Before Time, the First Migration) at Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; POLA Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan; The Burger Collection in Hong Kong; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; El Espacio, Miami, Florida

In 2024, the Pérez Art Museum Miami organized José Parlá: Homecoming, the artist's first solo exhibition in his South Florida hometown presenting a site-specific mural and a series of never shown large-scale paintings.The exhibition seeks to replicate Parlá's studio space with Cuban music albums, objects, furniture, paint, and myriad of other daily materials.

Solo Shows

2006 Koehler Gallery, Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington; The Mystic Writing Pad 2007 Elms Lesters Painting Rooms, London; Adaptation/ Translation 2008 Cristina Grajales, NYC; Layered Days 2009 Ooi Botos Gallery, Hong Kong, China; Reading Through Seeing 2009 V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; The New Yorkers 2011 Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, NYC; Walls, Diaries and Paintings 2011 OHWOW Gallery (now Morán Morán), Los Angeles; Character Gestures 2012 Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, New York; Gesture Performing Dance, Dance Performing Gesture 2013 Yuka Tsuruno Gallery, Tokyo; Prose 2014 Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, NYC; In Medias Res 2015 High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Segmented Realities 2015 Mary Boone Gallery, NYC; Surface Body 2016 Yuka Tsuruno Gallery, Tokyo; Small Golden Suns 2016 Michael-Goss Foundation, Dallas; Instincts 2016 YoungArts, Miami; Roots 2017 Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy; Mirrors 2017 Brooklyn Academy of Music; ONE: Union of the Senses 2017 SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; Roots 2018 Neuberger Museum of Art Neu Space 42 No Space / Non Place 2019 Istanbul74, Istanbul (16th Istanbul Biennial parallel project); Isthmus 2019 Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong; Textures of Memory 2019 HOCA Foundation, Hong Kong; Textures of Memory 2019 Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, NYC; Anonymous Vernacular 2020 Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York City; It's Yours 2020 Yuka Tsuruno Gallery, Tokyo; The Awakening 2020 Gana Art Center, Seoul, Korea; Entropies 2022 Gana Art Center, Seoul; Breathing 2022 Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI; Polarities 2023 Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong(March–April); Phosphene 2023 Ben Brown Fine Arts, London(October–November);Phosphene 2024 Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2024 The Gordon Parks Foundation, New York, NY; José Parlá: CUBA 2026 Ben Brown Fine Arts, London; José Parlá:ENGRAMS 2007 Elms Lesters Painting Rooms, London; Pirate Utopias – Futura and José Parlá 2008 Kai Kai Ki Ki Gallery, Tokyo; Hi & Lo. 2009 OHWOW Gallery, Miami;It Ain’t Fair 2009 Deitch Projects, NYC, Stages 2009 Galerie Perrotin, Paris; Stages 2009 Kidd Yellin Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; The Kings County Biennial 2010 Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York City; The New Grand Tour 2015 High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Imagining New Worlds, Wifredo Lam, José Parlá, Fahamu Pecou. 2017 Victors for Art, U-M Museum of Art, University of Michigan, Michigan, MI 2018 Kennedy Center, Washington DC; Artes de Cuba: From the Island to the World 2019 Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Yasiin bey: Negus 2019 25 Kent Ave, Williamsburg, New York, NY; Beyond the Streets 2019 Fondazione Berengo Art Space, Venice; Glasstress 2019 2019 Gana Art Seoul, Seoul; Reflections 2020 Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong; Ben Brown Fine Arts: Celebrating 10 Years in Hong Kong 2021 Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York, NY; The Future We Choose 2022 '74 Gallery, Bodrum, Turkey; Between Humankind and Nature, 2022 Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls 2023 Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century

Awards, panels and residencies

2006 Koehler Gallery, Whitworth College Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, Spokane, Washington 2013 Grand Prize Documentary Short Heartland Film Festival for Wrinkles of the City, Havana Cuba co-directed with JR 2014 Snøhetta - 479 Baltic Street Studio residency 2016 Miami Dade College, Miami, Alumni Hall of Fame Award Inductee 2019 Americans for the Arts' Public Art Network Year in Review Award 2022 Americans for the Arts National Art Award 2022 National YoungArts Foundation Award 2023 Hirshhorn Museum Artist x Artist honoree (with Hank Willis Thomas) 2025 The Bizen Pottery Kiln residency 2026 Alan Kanzer Artist-in-Residence at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute