José Parlá is a Cuban American artist based in New York City whose paintings, murals, and site-specific works transform movement, memory, and the visual language of the city into immersive compositions. Drawing on calligraphy, architecture, geography, personal archives, and urban surfaces, Parlá creates deeply personal yet universally resonant works. Across studios, public spaces, museums, and monumental architectural projects worldwide, his practice explores identity, place, and the passage of time through rhythm, texture, and gesture. Explore recent projects below, or discover more paintings, projects, biography, and press through the menu above.
Far Rockaway Writer's Library
Queens, New York, 2024
Where Language and Knowledge Come Together A collaboration between Snøhetta and José Parlá, the new Far Rockaway Library in Queens was designed to reflect the diversity, history, and dynamism of the Far Rockaway community. Conceived as both a gathering place and a center for learning, the library embodies resilience while providing a welcoming space where language, culture, and knowledge converge to inspire future generations.
Brooklyn Abstraction:
Four Artists, Four Walls
Brooklyn Museum, 2022
José Parlá’s Ciclos: Blooms of Mold was presented as part of Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls at the Brooklyn Museum organized by curator Catherine Futter. The large-scale environmental painting transformed the architectural space through richly layered surfaces, gestural mark-making, and luminous color. Drawing on themes of transformation, memory, and the regenerative cycles found in nature, Ciclos: Blooms of Mold explored the poetic relationship between decay and renewal while creating an immersive dialogue with the works of Maya Hayuk, Kennedy Yanko, and Leon Polk Smith.
Homecoming
Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2024
José Parlá: Homecoming, presented at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) marked the artist's first solo institutional exhibition in his hometown of Miami. Conceived as a meditation on the meaning of home, the exhibition explored themes of migration, identity, memory, and belonging while paying homage to the cultural histories of Cuba, the Caribbean and Latin America.
Amistad América
University of Texas at Austin, 2018
Commissioned by the University of Texas at Austin’s Landmarks program, Amistad América is a monumental painting reflecting Austin’s landscape, urban fabric, and layered cultural history through collage, calligraphy and textured surfaces. Located at Guadalupe Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, the work honors the region’s intertwined Indigenous, African, and Latin American histories. Its title evokes friendship, the origins of the name Texas, and the historic La Amistad case, while América highlights shared histories, migration, and cultural exchange across the hemisphere.
Breathing
Gana Art Center, Seoul, 2022
Breathing, curated by Matt Black at Gana Art Center in Seoul, presents a series of paintings rooted in José Parlá’s experience of survival and recovery following COVID-19. Created in the immediate period surrounding his four-month medically induced coma, the works reflect breath, memory, and the fragile threshold between life and consciousness. Through layered marks, gestures, and fragments of writing, Parlá transforms painting into a record of resilience and the instinct to breathe, remember, and return.
One Union of the Senses, 2014 One World Trade Center, New York
One Union of the Senses is a permanent mural installed in the lobby of One World Trade Center. Created with the concept of synesthesia in mind, the work transforms color, gesture, and emotion into a visual expression of unity. It stands as a love letter to New York City and to the resilience, energy, and connection that define it.
Segmented Realities at the High Museum of Art featured ten sculptural paintings inspired by the layered histories of urban walls as witnesses to social, political, and cultural transformation. Conceived as a prologue to Imagining New Worlds, the exhibition explored themes of memory, identity, and resilience through works that functioned as contemporary palimpsests, reflecting José Parlá’s ongoing dialogue with the legacy of Wifredo Lam and the evolving language of the city.
Segmented Realities
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 2015
'Segmented Realities' presented a group of sculptural works by José Parlá, suggesting cultural fragments salvaged from urban sites that have experienced social and cultural upheaval and transformation. As do segments of walls in Havana, New York, London, or the Berlin wall, Parlá’s sculptures bear witness to waves of history that seem to be inscribed on their surfaces, told in an expressive and poetic language invoking the city as its palimpsest.
Segmented Realities,
Standard High Line, New York, 2015
Presented by the Gordon Parks Foundation as the culmination of José Parlá’s 2023 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship, Cuba brought together paintings and photographs inspired by Gordon Parks’s landmark 1958 images of Cuba. Through abstraction, Parlá reflected on memory, history, and the layered surfaces of Havana, exploring the complexities of identity, resilience, and the enduring traces of a nation shaped by both beauty and broken promises.
Cuba
Gordon Parks Foundation, New York, 2024
