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. Presented in two chapters, Homecoming first invited visitors to witness Parlá's performative, dance-like painting process as he created a monumental site-specific mural. The second iteration transformed the gallery into the artist's working studio, immersing audiences in his creative environment through paint-covered tables, a Cuban-inspired record collection, and decades of archival materials that traced the personal and cultural experiences shaping his practice.
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. Installed in the Museum’s monumental Beaux-Arts Court, 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.
Home Away from Home Pola Museum Annex 2025 Kotaro Nukaga
Home Away from Home presented Parlá's work through the lens of a landscape shaped by memory, movement, and human connection rather than a single idea of home. Drawing on his long relationship with Japan since 1999, the exhibition at POLA Museum Annex and Kotaro Nukaga featured paintings, including a new large-scale work inspired by Tokyo, alongside Bizen ceramics and collaborations with Japanese artists and designers. Together, the works reflected how travel, urban experience, history, memory, and collaboration continue to shape his practice.
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.
Engrams Ben Brown Fine Arts, London, 2026
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.
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 Library Street Collective 2022
Polarities at Library Street Collective presented new paintings and sculptures created in the wake of José Parlá’s recovery from COVID-19, exploring resilience, spirituality, and the interconnected nature of human experience. Through layered surfaces and gestural script, the exhibition examined the historical and ideological polarities between Havana and Detroit—cities shaped by the opposing forces of communism and capitalism. Their walls, marked by neglect, political conflict, activism, resistance, construction, and decay, became living archives of collective memory, revealing how social and economic extremes can fracture communities while leaving enduring traces of hope, perseverance, and transformation.
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.
