The Gordon Parks Foundation is pleased to present José Parlá: Cuba, the exhibition culminating Parlá’s 2023 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship.
Through the language of abstraction, José Parlá interprets the multiplicity of experiences in cities that have served as crossroads in his life, from the most distant geographies to those he identifies as home: Miami, New York, and Havana. Parlá takes his inspiration from the surfaces of buildings and streets, which he considers “an accumulation of information, markers of time much like the lines on the hands and faces of the people who inhabit them.”
The exhibition features paintings and photographs by Parlá created in dialogue with a series of photographs that Gordon Parks took in Cuba while on assignment for Life magazine in 1958. Published in May of that year, just under eight months before Fidel Castro seized power, “A Cuban Way with Styles” highlighted fashion by Cuban-born designers who were gaining popularity in the United States. The article featured non-local, white models, posed in once lavish palaces in Trinidad, some 200 miles from Havana. Parlá was drawn especially to Parks’s palette and his sense of texture and composition, which masterfully echoed the reality and contradictions of Cuba’s historic streets and neighborhoods at the time. Parlá’s new body of work not only testifies to a crumbling ideological system and the oppression it has brought, but also dives deeper into what can be understood solely through experience—the broken promise of what Cuba might have become.
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For more than twenty-five years Jose Parlá has used the language of abstraction as he developed a style of painting to interpret the multiplicity of experiences in cities that have served as crossroads in his life, from the most distant geographies to those he identifies as home. Parlá is known for his large-scale paintings and his community engagement. Among his works are ONE: Union of the Senses in the lobby of One World Trade Center, Manhattan; Diary of Brooklyn, Barclays Center, Brooklyn; the Writer’s Library (collaboration with Snøhetta), Queens; Nature of Language, James B. Hunt Jr. Library, North Carolina State University; and Amistad América, University of Texas at Austin. Parla has had solo exhibitions at, among other venues, Bronx Museum, New York; Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.; Neuberger Museum of Art, Harrison, New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; and the 2019 Istanbul Biennial. His work is in a number of leading international collections including Pérez Art Museum Miami; The British Museum, London; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; POLA Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan; The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York; El Espacio, Miami; and The National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba. Parlá lives and works in New York.
