INTRODUCTION
In his lifetime, painter and multidisciplinary artist José Parlá has called many places home. Born in 1973 to Cuban parents living in Miami and moving back and forth with his family between there and Puerto Rico, then living in Savannah, Atlanta, and finally Brooklyn, where he has resided for the past two decades, Parlá has also developed strong ties with arts communities in Japan, Europe, and his homeland of Cuba. In conversation with abstract expressionism and with the visual artforms that developed alongside hip-hop culture, these relationships inform Parlá’s vibrant, kinetic artworks, in which the layered textures accumulating on the built landscape suggest the diverse individual and communal histories that give a place its identity. Though Parlá’s network spans the globe, in two recent solo exhibitions, developed after a harrowing brush with mortality, Parlá explores the many meanings of home. In a major show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Homecoming (4 November 2024–6 July 2025), he honors his roots in Miami, Cuba, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Home Away from Home at the Kotaro Nukaga Roppongi gallery and Pola Museum Annex in Tokyo (20 June–9 August 2025) celebrates artistic friendships forged across cultures. “After my near-fatal Covid experience,” he said in a July 2025 email correspondence with The Georgia Review, “I started thinking beyond the literal, considering ‘home’ as my body and spirit, the sanctuary where life resides. I also see home as a concept that extends into memories, relationships, and experiences that transcend geography.”
In Miami José Parlá began developing some of the hallmarks of his style in the 1980s, when he and his older brother Rey Parlá became immersed in the local art scene, captivated by the aerosol art adorning city walls and the hip-hop and breakdancing culture that was developing. José painted and Rey took photos; together they made short films. With other young artists, they came to know Miami’s neighborhoods intimately as they scoped out walls to paint at night and jockeyed for prominent spaces. José’s artist name was “Ease.” Sometimes business owners would give them permission to paint, and they would bring their ladders during the day and create while a crowd gathered to watch.
Artistry was in José and Rey’s DNA; they grew up with stories of family members from Cuba, Margarita and Alicia Parlá, who were both celebrated dancers, one a ballerina and the other a rumba dancer. Their father, José Agustín, studied film in Cuba in the 1950s and dreamed of becoming a filmmaker. “The (so-called) Cuban revolution shifted his path,” José Parlá says, “yet his love of storytelling deeply influenced us.” Their mother, Dalia, is an artist too, who could often be found drawing, weaving, doing calligraphy, or writing poetry. As children, José and Rey loved to draw together and to playact the stories they imagined; one of José’s earliest memories is of dressing up with Rey and carrying suitcases into their father’s home office in Puerto Rico, where they would pretend to make business calls. They remain collaborators to this day.
As in many U.S. cities, young Miami artists were influenced by subway art and hip-hop cultures born in Philadelphia and New York City in the 1970s. In Miami, the dazzling murals and pieces that became ubiquitous throughout the city also reflected the convergence of the multiple diasporic communities who made their home there. Much of this artwork was created outside of the established network of galleries and museums, and while it’s a source of pride for the city today—Miami’s Museum of Graffiti is a popular destination—in the 1980s it was stigmatized by some as vandalism or denigrated as less accomplished than more familiar forms. Because of those connotations, Parlá dislikes the term “graffiti.” When Parlá was in high school, he entered a painting that featured lettering and other tropes associated with aerosol art into the Scholastic Art Awards competition, a provocative choice at the time. His entry won him a full scholarship to the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he continued his education as a painter. After graduation, he spent several years in Atlanta, with a studio in the Virginia Highlands neighborhood, before moving to New York City.
Parlá’s large-scale paintings often recreate the texture of long-surviving walls in cities, especially in neighborhoods ignored by the moneyed elite, where generations of human and environmental interactions have built up a patina of layered paint, grit, torn fliers and posters, watermarks, and other evidence of life. Parlá uses acrylic latex, enamel and oil paints, ink, glue, collage elements, and plaster to achieve this homage. “I think of my paintings as contemporary palimpsests,” Parlá says. “Each layer adds depth and history, creating a visual narrative that invites viewers to explore the surface and imagine the stories embedded within it.” Many of these works feature intricate, calligraphic writing in the lineage of what is known as hand-style in artist circles, descending from the “Wildstyle” lettering movement in Miami and other cities he visited, as well as canonical painters like Cy Twombly.
Parlá paints with rhythmic, graceful movements, often to music. He grew up dancing to rumba, mambo, and salsa, then discovered hip-hop and breaking in Miami. “Both dance and painting became ways for me to channel energy, rhythm, and attitude into my work,” he says. “When I paint, I move with a fluidity that reflects dance, and this physicality infuses my paintings with dynamism.” Before the opening of the Pérez Art Museum exhibition, which was set up to evoke an artist’s studio, visitors were invited to watch Parlá paint during an “Open Studio” performance in which he completed an enormous diptych titled Homecoming (Before Time, the First Migrations), climbing on ladders to embellish the abstracted map that spans from Yucatán to Florida, with Cuba at its center, and moving across the floor as he painted looping white calligraphy onto the deep blue-green of the sea. Parlá worked on this piece for about three years in his studio, meditating on the political constructions enshrined in traditional cartography and the origins and migrations over millennia that underlie our present reality.
Parlá’s paintings have energized audiences with their celebration of physicality and the material world. But while his work is full of life, it also acknowledges impermanence. The simultaneous precarity and tenacity of living in a body became all too clear in early 2021, when Parlá fell so ill with Covid-19 that he had to be intubated and eventually put in a medically induced coma. While in that state, Parlá suffered a stroke and brain bleeding, which brought him near to death. After three months of unconsciousness, Parlá struggled to walk or hold the watercolor brush a doctor brought him, due to fatigue and atrophied muscles. Rey or a doctor would help him grip his brush or pen so that he could create miniature paintings as he continued recovering in the hospital. But Parlá’s body and spirit both proved resilient, and a year later, he debuted a powerful new series of large-scale paintings at the Library Street Collective gallery in Detroit as well as his Ciclos: Blooms of Mold series at the Brooklyn Museum. Writing about the Detroit show for the New York Times, critic Max Lakin argued that those works “can be read as a body scan, and their dense networks of lines radiating outward from a central node can appear arterial, conjuring the intricate workings of the respiratory system, or the firing synapses in the brain.”
Homecoming in Miami and Home Away from Home bring the same intensity to interrogating the artist’s personal history. “The paintings in [Homecoming] are like visual memory documents,” Parlá says, “capturing the colors, smells, traditions, and struggles of my regions of origin.” He began traveling to Japan regularly in 1999 and has collaborated with Japanese artists and fashion designers and completed residencies at kiln studios in Bizen and Tokyo. The Home Away from Home exhibition in Tokyo highlights these relationships, with collaboratively produced pieces on display along with eighteen of Parlá’s recent paintings. Parlá sees Home Away from Home as building on the ideas in Homecoming on a global scale, “showing that home isn’t just a place, but a feeling that we carry with us, shaped by relationships and shared histories. It’s about celebrating the bridges we build across cultures, and acknowledging that home is often a complex, layered construct, constantly evolving but rooted in connection.”
Marking the Way Home, a short documentary about José Parlá can be viewed on the Pérez Art Museum Miami website, along with highlights of Parlá’s live painting performance for Homecoming.
In terms of the Parlás’ ancestral home, the family could not return to Cuba for most of José’s lifetime, but in 2000 he was finally able to visit family he had never met in person and has returned many times since. In 2012, he participated in the Havana Biennial, and has remained in close contact with Cuban artists. Around 2015, he found a climate of hope and optimism among young artists there, as government censorship of artistic expression eased and diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba improved. “This period saw increased opportunities for cultural exchange,” Parlá explains, “with artists gaining confidence to share their work openly, and studios began to flourish. It was an exciting time marked by cautious optimism.” But in 2018, after President Miguel Díaz-Canel took office, the Cuban government passed Decree 349, which allowed the regime to shut down any artistic production or performance it deemed subversive. Artworks and materials were confiscated; protesting artists and activists were imprisoned and arts events disrupted. In July 2021, a wider protest movement gathered in mass demonstrations against government repression. These protests were met with violence and mass arrests, drawing international condemnation of the Cuban government and new sanctions from the United States. Parlá says that while many Cuban artists have been pushed underground or pressured to alter their expression, “Artists continue to innovate, often through subtle symbolic means. . . . The resilience of the Cuban art scene is remarkable, though it is continually challenged by the ongoing struggle for free expression.” Many Cuban artists have also settled outside the island, while maintaining bonds with their community back home.
In the past few years José Parlá has had solo exhibitions in Hong Kong, Seoul, Istanbul, Milan, New York, and London. He created a massive ninety-foot mural for the One World Trade Center in New York City as well as public works for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, University of Texas at Austin, and elsewhere. His art is in the collections of the British Museum in London, Brooklyn Museum in New York, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, and other prominent galleries and museums. Today, Parlá is working with his brother Rey to organize his archives and a comprehensive collection of their work. He also has a new monograph forthcoming from Skira, the storied art-book publisher now based in Italy, which will gather work from throughout his career and discuss his process and philosophy.
“My work contains many layers,” says Parlá in summation, “much like life itself. Layers of memories, stories, places—each person and each environment layered with history. I’ve learned to incorporate this sense of depth, inspired by the walls I used to leave my mark on early in my life. Walls, in particular, have a profound significance—they are physical sites of expression, history, and environment. Growing up, I observed how walls in Cuba, Puerto Rico, New York tell stories of struggle but also resilience; they’re often weathered, torn, yet full of life.” He hopes that the contrast of beauty and decay, aspiration and despair, will inspire viewers to find commonalities across difference. “Whether in Cuba, Miami, Tokyo, London, or anywhere in the world,” says Parlá, “I see art as a universal language that transcends borders and differences. My hope is that through my work, I can contribute to fostering understanding and compassion, inspiring others to see the complexities and beauty in each of our layered stories.”
C. J. Bartunek
Images © 2025 José Parlá.