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.
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.
Homecoming
Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2024
José Parlá: Homecoming, presented at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and organized by curator Maritza Lacayo, marked the artist's first solo museum 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 the Caribbean and Latin America.
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.
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.
An engram is the physical trace a memory leaves in the brain, a living, ever-shifting pattern that reactivates and reshapes itself each time it is recalled. By this understanding, memory is reconstruction rather than retrieval, and the act of remembering becomes a creative gesture in its own right – the principle that underpins the series.
Engrams
Ben Brown Fine Arts, London, 2026
Cuba
Gordon Parks Foundation, 2024
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.
Polarities at Library Street Collective presented paintings and sculptures created after José Parlá’s recovery from COVID-19, exploring resilience, spirituality, and human connection. Through layered surfaces and gestural script, the exhibition examined the ideological and social polarities between Havana and Detroit—cities shaped by communism and capitalism, whose walls record histories of conflict, activism, neglect, resistance, and transformation.
Polarities
Library Street Collective, 2022
Segmented Realities
High Museum of Art, 2015
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.
