Artist Spotlight

Good To Know proudly launches a series of artist talks and studio insights. This week we feature an interview with visual artist José Parlá by writer Nicole Martinez and a virtual preview to his solo exhibition at The Bronx Museum of Arts. April, 28th 2020.

José Parlá: For the Culture

In Conversation with writer Nicole Martinez

José Parlá remembers the spray painted aluminum doors of the New York City subway with fondness. When he visited in 1985, he was particularly drawn to how layers of loose, elaborate text were written over one another, each marking slightly fading as the doors would swing open and closed.

"New York was in total decay, and I would categorize it as a place that was all about survival. It really gives you a background of what we experienced, how raw and abandoned things were. I thought they looked like cave paintings, all battered and bruised." 

That was the New York that inspired Parlá in his youth, though the artist wouldn't move to the city until much later in his life. Back then, Parlá had just moved back to Miami after spending the last decade or so living in Puerto Rico. Parlá had been born in Miami in the early 1970s, just after his family had fled Cuba. Finding himself once again in Miami in the 1980s, Parla was quickly confronted with the notion that the American Dream was a farce.

“What we had thought was U.S. culture was more of a myth, and the American dream stuff was all shattered when we saw the divisions,” he says. “I grew up in [an area of Miami] where it was predominantly black and Cuban, and there were racial and economic divisions, and we were coming into a new country and culture and being called refugees and being bullied through the school system. Eventually, the thing that saved a lot of kids like me was this unison we found in hip hop culture.”

Exposure to New York’s underground hip hop culture fueled Parlá ’s early experimentation with writing, a practice that would become a meaningful part of his work in the years to come. He found familiarity in the underground culture he was exposed to, imagining how the gritty streetscapes of Miami in the 1980s matched the attitude of New York’s, and maybe even Havana, a city that back then existed only in his imagination. 

“I started thinking about memory, and what was important to me was to capture all of it, not just the color but also the deterioration of the work and of the surface itself,” says Parlá .

Parlá’s paintings, sculptures and mixed-media works became a living archive of place, tracing the eastern coastline of the Americas and drawing from his experiences as a New Yorker, Miamian, and Cuban. “My work really resembles the region and the stories and the effect it’s had on our trajectory as immigrants,” he says. Like the cave paintings and street writing that inspired his earliest work, Parlá’s abstractions left a record of a fleeting moment in history, one that defined our humanity and our creativity.  

His recent exhibition, It’s Yours, at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, is a journey into the artist’s personal history with New York, and a reflection on the notion of who the city truly belongs to. Encompassing a series of new works, along with sketchbooks and photographs that reveal Parlá’s creative process, the show has been extended through January 2021 in light of the museum’s temporary closure due to COVID-19.

Here, I caught up with Parlá to learn more about his history, his process and the show. 

NM: How do you ensure your work transcends the cliche of street art?

JP: I don’t like the term street art, and I don’t use it to describe my work. People think the discussion of high and low art is something new. Philosophically, though, the questions are much deeper than that. If we think about Picasso and Braque, when they invented cubism they brought in elements of collage, using newspapers and posters on walls. That’s how long ago the distinction between high and low art came into play. If you think about urban realists in New York in the 1910s, they were painting problems of the streets of New York, urban blight and poverty, these all predate the idea of ‘street art.’ I think it’s a lazy way to refer to art. I never accepted the term . Historically I’ve been really aware that there’s always been this David and Goliath idea in art and humanity. If we think about what makes something lower, we must ask who thinks they’re higher? What is hierarchy? That’s why I make my work first about painting and sculpture, and ask those questions without having to ask them.

NM: Tell me about your process. Are you sketching or drawing inspiration from particular places, and how does that come through in your abstractions?

JP: Besides painting and drawing I’ve always had a love for photographs and experimenting with all things. I’m always carrying a camera and taking pictures every day. I think it’s really influenced how I look at compositions because I’m looking through the viewfinder of how I’m capturing an image. The way I approach painting always relates back to my lens. In photographs, I’m also able to experiment so much with colors everyday. The colors in the photography eventually become my records. I also use found materials - some days I go around collecting posters or other ephemera off the walls. I photograph and collect in different cities, and I’m making paintings based on those cities. 

NM: What were you trying to explore with your show at the Bronx Museum, It’s Yours?

JP: The Bronx has always had this stigma; in fact in places like Paris when they want to say something is dangerous they call it Le Bronx. But really the Bronx is filled with good families and good people, with a strong attitude and deep history connecting us all. The Bronx is where I moved when I first came to New York, and I wanted to have a show about how the Bronx is now reflected in cities throughout the world. I wanted to pay homage to all that immigrant struggle. And conceptually since my work has always been about walls and deterioration, those walls always exist in neighborhoods around the world like the Bronx. 

It’s an idea of ownership, as well. If we live in a country that has a post colonial identity where indigenous peoples were wiped away, why can I not write on this wall in this city when the city itself is a huge mark on a land that was stolen? That question of property has always been part of my work.

Bronx Museum of the Arts Exhibition

José Parlá: It's Yours 

On view: February 26, 2020- August 16th 2020

Preview the show here: https://vimeo.com/395727518

About Nicole Martinez:

Nicole Martinez is an independent arts journalist based in Miami, FL. Nicole’s writing has appeared in ARTnews, Cultured, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, Wallpaper* and more.

https://nicolemartinez.contently.com/