Observer caught up with the artist in his studio to learn more about how his work is both an act of resilience and a search for roots.
This season, Pérez Art Museum Miami is honoring Cuba-born, Miami-raised artist José Parlá with a sweeping exhibition of new works that delve into migration, Caribbean identity and Miami's unique role in that narrative. On massive murals, Parlá orchestrates an intricate constellation of signs born from a dance-like, intuitive mark-making process to create a vivid tapestry of imaginary and allegorical maps that chart the movement of people -- a layered, almost archaeological rendering of diasporic trails. Aptly titled "Homecoming," the show is both a celebration and a heartfelt tribute to Parlá's roots and the city that shaped him.
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The exhibition talks about the Caribbean region and the impact of history within, Parlá explained during a visit to his studio just days before the works were shipped out. "Migration is such a big conversation, not only in the world but specifically in Miami and Latin America," he told Observer. His studio offered a preview of large canvases brimming with dynamic, interconnected signs. These pieces fuse the artist's deeply personal experiences with the collective stories and cultural dynamics of an entire community, creating a kaleidoscopic microcosm that pulsates with life and history.
Parlá was preparing to ship not only these fruits of a months-long creative and deeply personal journey to Miami but also almost his entire studio. His work table, tools and even his Cuba-inspired record collection were headed to PAMM, where, for the first few weeks of the exhibition, visitors will encounter a living, breathing work in progress. Parlá is essentially transplanting his studio into the gallery space. "It's inviting the public into an art studio because they always ask to come," he explained. "It's an invitation to go and see what's inside behind the scenes." (It's a nod to an earlier part of his life when he was painting murals and people walking by would stop to watch or ask questions.)
Among the standout pieces in the show is HOMECOMING Before Time, The First Migrations (2024), a seemingly abstract map of Latin America that visualizes "heritage trails" of migration. These pathways reflect the journeys of individuals leaving their homes and countries, an idea central to Parlá's work. He also incorporates collage elements into this series, embedding materials collected in Miami. "This series continues to be part of the dialog I have with the city," Parlá explained. "These posters are from various trips to Miami. It is the advertising you see on the walls, and they're falling apart most of the time. I pick up the remnants of the posters of what's happening in the city. I think it's a form of identity of a place." This process of weaving the city's physical remnants into his art creates what Parlá refers to as a "psychogeography," mapping not just space but spirit and memory.
Another monumental work, The American Mindscape (2024), is a sprawling, kaleidoscopic mural conceived during Parlá's recovery from Covid. At its core is a serendipitous find -- a weathered poster referencing "the American landscape." For Parlá, this phrase exposes a deep tension as it attempts to lump the United States, Central America and South America under a single umbrella. Conversely, "the United States, by using 'America' as an all-encompassing name, erases the rest of the countries that are also American countries," Parlá observed.
Parlá recalls beginning this body of work on July 11, 2021, just after being released from the hospital -- he'd been in a coma brought on by severe COVID. That day, however, his thoughts were far from himself; they were with Cuba, where young artists, children and ordinary citizens had taken to the streets in what became the largest protest in the nation's history. "But it also sparked the biggest exodus from the Island," he said. "In the last three years, almost two million people have left Cuba." This duality of personal vulnerability and collective upheaval is etched deeply into his work.
Parlá describes the post-hospitalization period as a spiritual odyssey. Retreating from the brink of death, he embarked on what he calls a profound journey through the personal and collective unconscious -- a kind of universal reckoning that transcended the physical boundaries of his existence. It was a journey that reawakened the essence of what it means to be human, drawing on memories, emotions and connections to people and places across the globe. "All this work has been done for the last two and a half years; I started them and worked on them while I was still healing," Parlá said. "When you're that close to dying, you're back in your own body. The body itself is the home to the spiritual."
His latest works are characterized by what the artist calls "arterial mark-making" -- dense, interwoven signs that evoke veins, the marks on hands and the flow of blood, connecting the visceral with the spiritual. While his Brooklyn Museum atrium installation last year explored the natural mycelium and root systems as metaphors for reconnection, his current works delve further, bridging the dimensions of the terrestrial, urban and transcendent.
From this profound connection between body, earth and cosmos emerges works like Breath of Life, Inhale and Exhale (2024), a meditation on the perpetual rhythm that binds us to our environment through the vital act of breathing. Parlá draws inspiration from this elemental exchange, highlighting the fragile interdependence on which existence hinges. "It's a rhythm," he explained. "I kept looking at the X-rays of lungs, and they look identical to the branches and roots of trees. It's like this kind of visual context connection to nature that's inside of our body."
Although Parlá's art has often been associated with Street Art due to his background, its process aligns more closely with the automatic writings of the Surrealists or the gestural intensity of Abstract Expressionism. His spontaneous accumulation of marks becomes a conduit for channeling vital energy, transferring its flow into a visual language that connects deeply personal narratives with the broader collective experience.
Some of the canvases headed for the PAMM exhibition seem directly tethered to Miami's hues, tones and gradations, deeply informed by his experience growing up there as a Cuban migrant. This connection is particularly vivid in A Life of Memories Racing Through Art Deco Miami Beach Avenues (2024), in which Parlá revives the pastel palette of South Beach's iconic architecture. The colors, evocative of the Art Deco structures of Miami Beach, also echo the shades of maritime cities like Venice and the Caribbean vibrancy of Cuba and Colombia. Miami, as Parlá sees it, is a fascinating crossroads where Mediterranean and Caribbean cultures have mingled throughout history. "It connects to my experience living in Miami Beach when I was young," the artist explained. "This work is about that particular experience growing up there, walking those streets and avenues, going to the beach, going to school. Those experiences are honored in this painting."
What makes Parlá's work even more dense with narratives and emotional charge is how those memories are deeply embedded in the thick accumulation of paint and texture. His canvases feel like repositories for human stories, rich with history. "I always thought painting should have history, not only metaphysically or metaphorically, but on the surface itself," he said. "This way, you can see that other things are deeper inside when you step close to it." The stratified layers of paint evoke both human skin and geological formations, recalling the shifting tectonic plates that have continuously reshaped continents and oceans. Through this textured complexity, Parlá's work evokes a sense of perpetual change and interconnection, and each painting embodies a ritualistic act of reconnection -- with the city, its people and the collective human experience.
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Another standout piece, Return to Miami's Ancestral Circle (2024), delves even further into the city's origins. This circular canvas becomes an abstract nucleus of energy, inspired by the discovery of a 2,000-year-old archaeological site in Brickell in downtown Miami, believed to have been created by the Tequesta tribe, the region's original Indigenous inhabitants. "This is an homage to Miami's First Nations, to the area's oldest inhabitants," Parlá said. "The archaeological site they found is in a perfect circle of cement and stone cylinders that go deep into the ground. So I wanted it to be sort of sunrise coming up." The work serves as a portal -- both a tribute to resilience and an invitation to rediscover ancestral authenticity. "I'm not from an Indigenous tribe myself, but perhaps we are all connected in such a way that you could tap into it... out of respect and love, to connect to the roots."
Looking at these almost overwhelming painterly constellations of traces, marks and signs, I was reminded of something Parlá said during his show at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York: "The anonymity of actions and marks made in a city can amount to an ever-evolving contemporary visual language -- the city as text. A name or message on a wall, homeless people pushing their makeshift homes in a cart, layers of ripped posters, or an old tarp covering a hole, broken subway tiles, erosion on a steel panel in an alleyway filled with trash, all part of our humanity's anonymous vernacular."
Parlá's approach transcends genres because his site-specific murals and canvases aren't staking a claim to the urban environment but recording its vernacular -- capturing the spontaneous, unfiltered expressions embedded in the urbanscape. For Parlá, it's about reflecting the city's need to leave a trace, a mark, to persist against chaos. This connection is deeply intuitive, a visceral bond between the artist and his surroundings. The artery in us connects to the idea of arterial avenues and boulevards -- what is within us is also outside of us. We coexist. We are connected. And each of Parlá's gestures is a search for home. "Because," he concluded, "there is no other place we feel better than at home, right?"
"Homecoming" by José Parlá is on view at Pérez Art Museum Miami through July 6.