The Rolls-Royce North American art program commission in collaboration with The Savannah College of Art & Design, presents Brooklyn-based, Cuban American artist, and YoungArts Master Teacher José Parlá for its inaugural exhibition.

Partnering with The National YoungArts Foundation in Miami, the exhibition brings the renowned and internationally known Miami native artist, back home to Miami Beach, where Parlá spent his formative years in the underground art scene of the 1980s and early 90s, where the milieu was an important influence on his early work.

The exhibition, entitled: Roots, includes a site-specific immersive installation for Jewel Box - an exhibition space on the YoungArts campus. The square space of this historic building, and the former headquarters of a Cuban Rum family empire, will be completely transformed with carefully considered built walls that will conceal and reveal the existing stained glass panels creating a poetic dialogue between the paintings, sculpture and select bursts of color as natural light shines through the stained glass panels.

The work in this exhibition receives its nourishment in connection to the past and present through those roots and into the branches of Parlá’s family background, his education, life experience, and the serendipity involved in this project. It is equally rooted in the past and in the present.

“My grandfather, pilot Agustin Parlá once said to my father; ‘Son, find your place in History’ and my father said the same to me,” says Parlá. “And my old friend Don Busweiler once said, ‘Without Roots the Tree won’t Grow.’ This has always stuck with me and remained present in the process of my work over the years.”

Parlá’s place in his own family history layered against the backdrop of Cuba’s past form the basis for the works in the show. Three of the large scale paintings in the exhibition, Patria, Hatuey and 24 de Febrero are named after ships from the Cuban Navy that would lend their support in the Audacious Flights of Domingo Rosillo and Agustin Parlá in 1912.

Parlá’s grandfather, one of the first Cuban aviators to make the flight from Key West to Havana was heralded by a reporter covering the historical event by writing, “... filled with limitless patriotism and a tenacious resolution, he embarked on the trial flight. As the town had followed it from start to finish, they finally learned that the aviator had moved steadily along the ideal course, the one that led to Cuba.” The City Council of Havana awarded the second prize to Parlá, although, in truth, it was Cuba who won, as was affirmed: “its name is registered in the history of aviation and will be placed among the advanced countries due to their persistence to advance aviation up to the maximum limit.”

On a more personal approach to painting the works, Eureka to Flagler, Whiteplains to DeKalb, and Ashland to Baltic, Parlá uses the street names of places where he lived, painted in the streets, and set up studios from Miami to the Bronx, and Brooklyn.

Nuevo Rumbo a 6 by 24 ft. painting in the exhibition is an abstract landscape of the history of Cuba from pre-colonial times to contemporary history. In its composition, the complexity of layers in the left side of the work can be read as the many layers of difficulty of Cuba’s history. These layers are interwoven with Parlá’s own thoughts ranging from the Spanish Colonial invasion of Cuba and the demise of its native people and culture; to the up-rising of slaves and formation of wars that would lead to the Ten Years War; the Cuban Independence War through Fidel Castro’s Revolution. The mid-center of the painting starts to expand into smoother blends, bridging to the current history of President Raul Castro and President Obama negotiating new relations between the United States and Cuba. A possible new open-ended story starts there.

As Greg Tate astutely remarks, “Parlá sees our art-historical notions of abstraction and abstract expressionism as having inextricably and poetically woven themselves in our contemporary understanding of the real, the authentic, the dramatic, the historic, the classic, the modern, the global, the magical, the African, the human.”

Music by STRETCH & BOBBITO

Location: Jewel Box, The National YoungArts Foundation
2100 Biscayne Boulevard, Miami, FL 33137