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. His works poetically challenge concepts related to language, politics, and our definitions of places and spaces. 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.

Born to Cuban parents in Miami, Florida, Parlá currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He studied painting at the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) in Savannah, Georgia; the New World School of the Arts in Miami, Florida; and Miami Dade College in Miami, Florida.

Parlá’s practice is a layered, time based methodology that fuses writing and abstract expressionism. He builds palimpsest like paintings and installations through cycles of addition, subtraction and erasure. Calligraphic marks surface and recede while pasted fragments of posters and billboards embed into textured, wall like canvases. These works form a new kind of landscape, psycho-geographic terrains where language becomes topography and layers read as social and geological history.

Language in Parlá’s work is simultaneously present and unreadable: asemic gestures suggest narrative without fixed meaning, creating space for collective memory and private recollection. Treating paint as text and surface as archive, he interrogates language, identity and history.

Recent solo exhibitions of Parlá’s work have been held at institutions such as POLA Museum Annex, Tokyo (2025); Pérez Art Museum Miami (2024); Gordon Parks Foundation (2024), Pleasantville, NY The Bronx Museum, New York (2020); Gana Art Center, Seoul (2022); Istanbul’74, Istanbul (2019); the Hong Kong Contemporary Art (HOCA) Foundation, Hong Kong (2019); Neuberger Museum of Art, New York (2018); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2017); Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York (2017); and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2015), among others.

Parlá’s public art projects include several permanent large-scale commissions, such as the Far Rockaway Writer’s Library, a collaboration between Snøhetta and Parlá in New York (2023);  University of Texas, Austin (2018); ONE World Trade Center, New York (2015); a collaboration with Snøhetta at Hunt Library, North Carolina State University, Raleigh (2013); Barclays Center, New York (2012); Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), New York (2012); and Concord City Place, Toronto (2010).

Select group exhibitions and biennials featuring Parlá’s work include “Realismo Magico”, Brooklyn Academy of Music (2025), Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls" at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2022); "Reflections" at Gana Art, Seoul (2019); "Glasstress" at Fondazione Berengo Art Space, Venice (2019); "Beyond the Streets," New York (2019); "Yasiin bey: Negus" at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2019); "Victors for Art" at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (2017); "Post No Bills: Public Walls as Studio and Source" at Neuberger Museum of Art, New York (2016); "Seeing, Saying: Images and Words" at Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, North Carolina (2016); and "Wrinkles of the City: Havana Cuba: JR & José Parlá" at the Havana Biennial, Havana (2012).

Parlá's work is part of several public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami; The British Museum, London; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; El Espacio, Miami; POLA Museum of Art, Japan; The Gordon Parks Foundation, Pleasantville, NY; the Neuberger Museum of Art, New York; and The National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana.

He serves on the board of the National YoungArts Foundation.

Parlá has received numerous awards, such as the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the Alumni Achievement Award (2024), the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2023), the Hirshhorn Museum Artist x Artist honor (2023), the National Young Arts Foundation Award (2022), the Americans for the Arts National Art Award (2022), the Americans for the Arts Public Art Network Award (2019), induction into the Miami Dade College Alumni Hall of Fame (2016), the Brooklyn Arts Council honor (2014), the ICA London Grand Prize (2013), and recognition at the Heartland Film Festival for Best Documentary Short and Best U.S. Premiere for "Wrinkles of the City, Havana" (2013).

Parlá has been featured in numerous publications and media outlets worldwide, including The New York Times, CBS News Sunday Morning, Artforum, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest, The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, Observer, Dazed, Galerie, BOMB Magazine, Whitewall, Juxtapoz, CULTURED, EL PAÍS, Vogue, Financial Times, and more.