Projects
Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2025
The Pérez Art Museum presented José Parlá: Homecoming, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in his hometown. Featuring an elaborate, two-part exhibition that allowed visitors to observe Parlá’s dance-like technique in real time as he painted a site-specific mural for the first iteration of the exhibition. The second iteration opened the museum gallery transformed and converted into Parlá’s studio, a room full of paint-covered tables, a lively Cuban-inspired record collection, and decades of Parla’s archival memorabilia.
Curator: Maritza Lacayo
Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2025
Homecoming: Before Time, The First Migrations reflects the Caribbean, and gulf region as a geography shaped by movement, memory, and exchange. Through layered marks and shifting forms, José Parlá evokes ancestral migrations and Latin American diasporic journeys across seas and generations. Home becomes not a fixed place, but a living memory carried through language, rhythm, and belonging.
Far Rockaway Writer's Library, Queens, New York, 2024
Where language and knowledge come together. A collaboration with Snøhetta and José Parlá.
The new Far Rockaway Library in Queens is designed as a collaboration between Snøhetta and Brooklyn-based contemporary artist José Parlá to reflect Far Rockaway’s diversity and dynamism. Serving as a community gathering place and resource for knowledge, the library symbolizes resilience and provides a platform for shaping Far Rockaway’s future.
New York City Department of Design and Construction
Queens Public Library
Writer's Library, far Rockaway Library, 2024
Snøhetta & José Parlá
Writers commit thoughts and ideas into action, translating knowledge to bring people together. From its open facade, the Library was a collaboration with Parlá to translate Far Rockaway’s rich cityscape and collective energy. Both Parlá’s work and the name of the library are born from New York City's writing culture, an artistic movement young artists created art on the walls and subway trains of the city during the sixties and early seventies. The library’s façade features custom panels designed by Parlá that visually reflect the city’s vibrant cultural history. In turn, it draws on the many languages that are spoken in Far Rockaway and movement along the street.
New York City Department of Design and Construction
Queens Public Library
Far Rockaway Library, 2024
The new Far Rockaway Library clad in colorful fritted glass inspired by sunrise over Long Island’s coast, the library balances transparency and translucency. Its tall corner entrance and inverted pyramidal atrium welcome visitors, bring in natural light, and help orient the neighborhood within the building.
New York City Department of Design and Construction
Queens Public Library
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, textured surfaces, and Parlá’s signature calligraphic marks.
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.
Curator: André H. Bober
Landmarks
One World Trade Center, New York City
ONE: Union of the Senses, 2014
is a mural by José Parlá on display in the lobby of One World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York City. Commissioned in 2014, the painting was completed and installed in 2015. Measuring 90 feet wide, the painting is believed to be the largest painting in New York City.
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
Segmented Realities, 2015
Segmented Realities presents a group of ten sculptural paintings by José Parlá that suggest cultural fragments salvaged from urban sites that have experienced social and cultural upheaval and transformation. As do segments of the Berlin wall, Parlá’s sculptures bear witness to waves of history that seem to be inscribed on their surfaces, told in an expressive and poetic language of the street. These works act as palimpsests, surfaces bearing layers of marks, on which ensuing generations might imagine their own manifestos and declarations of selfhood.
Curator: Michael Rooks
High Museum of Art, 2015
The sculptural Paintings from Parlá’s Segmented Realities series (2015) are freestanding, double-sided structures designed to resemble freestanding, decayed fragments of excavated city walls. Originally debuted at the High Museum of Art and later installed outdoors at The Standard, High Line, these works serve as heavy, physical "memory documents" that preserve the ephemeral nature of changing cityscapes.
North Carolina State University, 2013
Nature of Language (2013) is a written painting inspired by walks through Raleigh and encounters with its historical and cultural landscapes. Combining words, gestures, names, and hieroglyphic forms, it creates an abstract visual language—part diary, part poetic landscape. Rooted in calligraphic traditions, the work explores language as a reflection of our present and a bridge between people.
Acrylic, ink, and Gamvar on wood
Snøhetta Architecture for Hunt Library, NC State University
16 × 16 feet
Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2020
José Parlá: It’s Yours was the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in New York City. Organized by Manon Slome, it explored the Bronx’s influence on Parlá’s painting and perspective on urban life.
Through layered paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and site-specific works, the exhibition addressed hip-hop, redlining, gentrification, displacement, and structural racism, evoking the city’s walls, memories, and traces of urban life.
Curator: Manon Slome
12th Havana Biennial, Cuba
As part of the 12th Havana Biennial, Segmented Realities presents ten sculptural paintings by José Parlá. Drawing on fragments of urban sites marked by social and cultural upheaval, the works layer expressive, street-inspired marks that evoke histories, identities, and imagined futures. This segment of the Havana Biennial was part of the Detras del Muro program curated and organized by Juanito Delgado.
Segmented Realities, 2015
Segmented Realities is a series of three sculptures representing Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Miami. Made from steel, fiberglass, and epoxy paint, the works explore migration, memory, cultural exchange, and layered identity through fragmented forms and richly textured surfaces. The installation was presented at the Standard High Line in New York as part of Body, Surface / Action, Space, organized by Bryce Wolkowitz and Mary Boone.
Mary Boone Gallery, New York
Surface Body / Action Space, 2015
Surface Body / Action Space explored material, gesture, memory, and place through paintings and sculptures. The works examined identity between Cuba and the United States as shaped by movement and lived experience rather than fixed geography.
The Surface Body works reflected on walls, urban structures, and political boundaries, while Action Space used energetic gestures and expansive color fields to evoke freedom and possibility. Together, the works blurred political and psychological borders through the tension between density and openness, restraint and movement.
Yuka Tsuruno Gallery, Tokyo Japan, 2013
Haru Ichiban / First Wind of Spring / Through the Tokyo Alleyways—Her Voice Sings (2013) reflects José Parlá’s longstanding relationship with Japan. Created for Prose, the painting explores poetic, gestural mark-making, translating the atmosphere of Tokyo’s alleyways into layered movement, rhythm, and color.
8 x 45 feet mixed media on canvas
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2012
Commissioned by Brooklyn Academy of Music for a permanent installation for the building, Gesture Performing Dance, Dance Performing Gesture was created on-site by José Parlá. Spanning an 11-by-2-meter canvas, the work reflects his signature spontaneous, performative style and is currently on view at BAM Fisher.
Oil, acrylic, enamel and plaster on wood
7 x 37 feet
Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York 2013
Diary of Brooklyn is a site-specific mural by José Parlá, commissioned by Barclays Center. Drawing on the borough’s layered history and vibrant culture, the work brings together gestural marks, calligraphy, and abstract forms to create a dynamic visual portrait of Brooklyn.
Diary of Brooklyn, 2015
Acrylic and oil paint on wood
10 feet x 70 feet
Wrinkles of the City Havana, Cuba, 2012 JR and José Parlá
In May 2012, JR and José Parlá collaborate on their iteration of The Wrinkles of the City: a huge mural installation in Havana, undertaken for the Havana Biennale, for which JR and Parlá photographed and recorded 25 senior citizens who had lived through the Cuban revolution, creating portraits which Parlá, who is of Cuban descent, interlaced with palimpsestic calligraphic writings and paintings.
Wrinkles of the City Havana, Cuba
The Wrinkles of the City: Havana, Cuba was also collaborative film by JR and José Parlá that documented Havana as a city shaped by memory, resilience, and the passage of time. Through JR's large-scale photographic interventions and Parlá's calligraphic paintings created directly on the city's weathered walls, the project explored the layered histories embedded within Havana's architecture and its people. The film revealed the city as a living archive, where portraiture, abstraction, and urban surfaces converged to reflect the enduring relationship between place, identity, and collective memory.
Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York City, 2011
Walls, Diaries, Paintings presented fifteen new paintings inspired by José Parlá’s travels from Istanbul and Havana to Tokyo and New York. Drawing on the colors, textures, and layered surfaces of urban environments, Parlá transformed fragments of walls, streets, and architecture into richly personal meditations on memory, history, and the constant transformation of city life.
Concord Project, 2011 Toronto
Commissioned for Toronto’s Concord CityPlace, The Bridge was one of two monumental murals featuring José Parlá’s layered abstraction, calligraphic gestures, and handwritten inscriptions. The works explored memory, history, and community, honoring cultural figures whose influence endures across time.
Concord Project, 2011 Toronto
The Names that Live But Sometimes Fade While Time Flies, 2011
Commissioned for Toronto’s Concord CityPlace, this monumental mural featured José Parlá’s layered abstraction, calligraphic gestures, and handwritten inscriptions. Alongside The Bridge, it honored artists and cultural figures while exploring memory, history, community, and enduring influence.