José Parlá

(American, born 1973)

José Parlá is a contemporary American painter, best known for his monumental calligraphic abstractions. His colorful and amalgamative work conflates ideas of art and architecture, blurring the lines between identity, environment, graffiti, and language. "I’m really interested in the way our lives are built up out of memory and history,” he once explained in Architecture Digest, “and how we reflect that in our surroundings.” Born in Miami, FL in 1973, he has gone on to widespread critical acclaim, garnering commissions for large-scale architectural installations such as the Barclays Center in New York, and, more recently, a sprawling 90-foot mural in the lobby of One World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. As a major contributor to contemporary street and graffiti art, several of Parlá’s murals can be found in the streets of Havana, Cuba. He has exhibited extensively, including a solo show at the Atlanta-based High Museum of Art in 2014 and at Mary Boone Gallery in New York in 2015. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.