José 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. Critics have interpreted these techniques as engaging with questions of language, politics and the meaning of place and public space.
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. Parlá is publicly known for his permanent installations of large-scale paintings. 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. In 1992, the brothers helped establish The Inkheads, a Miami-based graffiti collective known for its collaborative approach to artmaking and documentation.
Parlá received a scholarship to Savannah College of Art & Design when he was 16, after a high school teacher noticed his talent. 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, initially supporting himself by designing album covers and T-shirts for hip-hop artists including Gang Starr.
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, and a lobby painting titled Gesture Performing Dance, Dance Performing Gesture, for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Fisher Theater. Parlá worked on the two painting simultaneously, going back and forth between the two nearby buildings and working late.
In 2013, he painted the mural The Nature of Language for the newly constructed James B. Hunt Jr. Library at the North Carolina State University. 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.
In 2012, Parlá was commissioned to create a site specific-piece for the inside of the EmblemHealth Dean entrance at the Barclays Centre. The piece titled, Diary of Brooklyn is inspired by the book Brooklyn Is by James Agee and is visible from the street, creating an interaction with the public. Also in 2012, Parlá completed his first large scale commissioned artwork titled Gesture Performing Dance, Dance Performing Gesture. According to Parlá, this 37 feet long by 7 feet tall mural located at The Brooklyn Academy Of Music serves as a "reminder that we are not passive bystanders; we are active participants in a world that our senses produce for us, from moment to moment."
In 2012, Parlá collaborated with his brother, Rey Parlá, on U.T.O.P.I.A., an exhibition presented at Colette in Paris.The project combined José Parlá’s paintings with Rey Parlá’s film and photographic work, reflecting a creative partnership that had originated in their youth in Miami. The exhibition documented the brothers’ shared interest in urban culture, memory, and visual storytelling, and coincided with a period in which José Parlá was completing several major public commissions.
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 2013, Parlá completed a piece titled Nature of Language at the North Carolina State University's Hunt Library designed by Snøhetta in Raleigh. The artist describes the piece here, "Although illegible at first sight, the juxtaposed characters, gestures, hieroglyphs, and words become readable through feeling, as it is my hope that the work evokes the language of your own inner voice of your own history. I found inspiration in the essence of words and their combined power, however abstract within a landscape of gestural forms and characters that serve as carriers of meaning. Within this meta-landscape, a viewer is welcomed to read into or feel the Nature of this universal language putting grammatical forms on hold."
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. I think that the role of the art is to create life within a building, said Mr. Edelman, It's not just about white marble walls, it's about spirit and life." Parlá has said that "It was very important to me that this painting would reflect a massive respect to the situation and event and the families, and a massive respect for the site."
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.